An over excited Pinkie is initially overjoyed to have the 2 foals to play with. After a month (evidently enough time for a pony to go from being a newborn to toddler), it is made apparent that Pinkie Pie greatly enjoys the benefits of children, their fun and playful demeanour. Unfortunately for the Cakes, she also shirks the less desirable responsibilities required to attend to them and is only interested in playing with the young ponies.
One day, Mr. and Mrs. Cake realise last minute they have a large order to fill and require an emergency baby-sitter. Apprehensive at Pinkie Pies apparent irresponsibility with the baby ponies, the Cakes fruitlessly ask the other mane-6 ponies if they can babysit. Ultimately it's silly Pinkie Pie who the Cakes reluctantly end up asking to be their sitter.
It's soon becomes apparent that playful Pinkie Pie isn't immediately up to the task of babysitting. Initially she struggles hard to tend to the babies' needs, but in the end she is able to live up to the responsibility of caring for the children and learns a valuable lesson.
The friendship lesson of this episode dealt with the importance of recognising ones ability to live up to their responsibility and that caring for children (especially babies) is an enormous responsibility. Even with that very true lesson there STILL was the amazing, capitalistic undertones that makes My Little Pony the best show in the history of the universe.
This episode infers that there is no government enforced maternity laws and no government assistance for new parents in Equestria. While this may sound cruel and heartless to those in western societies where it is considered an inalienable right for one parent to not have to work when their children are born, proponents of such welfare state initiatives often miss the major consequences such government policies have.
The first one is employer discrimination
Government maternity laws force employers not to discriminate against current employees they have. However, the same laws incentives discriminatory hiring practises against prospective new hires who might potentially have children. Losing a staff member for 6 months to a year absolutely creates a burden for an organisation. That represents lost productive output for the employer from their staff, the shortfall for which the employer, somehow, has to make up for.
Thus, it's not inconceivable that for employers looking to recruit new talent that, given the choice between two equally qualified candidates, but knowing one candidate is more likely to have children, provides incentives for the employer NOT to hire the potential candidate that could have children. While this discrimination could be applied to young men, given the nature of childbearing and raising, tends to create especially discriminatory practises against women that cannot be resolved without MORE government intervention and laws in the form of mandatory hiring laws ensuring "equal" hiring standards
The second is mis-allocation of productive capital and creation of greater inequality.
Those same government laws meant to create "equality" create perverse, unintended consequences. By the government holding a gun to the head of employers to behave a certain way, those same employers are forced to adopt practises that are not conducive to sustainable operations.
I was a soldier in the Canadian Forces for 8 years, and I saw the unintended consequences of government "equality" laws first hand. While we were all soldiers, young men (especially white ones) had much higher fitness requirement than older people and women. It didn't matter that the job responsibilities were the same (again, we were all soldiers), a discriminatory standard was set in place that penalised one group of individuals to ensure "equality" with others.
This forced equality meant that too often, individuals who were not qualified to meet certain absolute job requirements are given responsibilities they had no chance of fulfilling. If not, artificial, "make work" responsibilities had to be created that were reflective of their individual competencies regardless of whether or not such responsibilities were needed. Can't carry a machine gun? Well, you can just organise the squadron's talent show. Came in under budget this year? Better buy some new jet fighters we'll never need.
Government organisations can afford to do such things, because they can just raise revenues through debt and taxes (the next point) to fund such pointless make work. Real businesses in the real world can't piss away resources and hope to remain in business. Any business whose balance sheets end up with more expenses and liabilities than profits or assets end up going out of business, since unlike the government, they cannot raise revenue by robbing people.
Perhaps the most insidious unintentended consequence of government welfare programs is that the government is forced to increase it's revenues in order to fund such services. The preferred mechanism for governments to do so, especially in societies where the prevailing mechanism of exchange is fiat currency, is to borrow.
In Canada, it's increasingly apparent that the only way the government can fund it's welfare programs is by going into debt and raising taxes to service that debt. If governments are constrained by a gold standard, there is a major limitation to their ability to go into debt, but I digress. By going into debt and increasing taxes to service that debt, the government forcefully steals more of the productive capacity from the overall society they govern.
In Canada, if you factor in all the various income, sales, energy, utility, and housing taxes (to name a few), it's not inconceivable that over 50% of most individuals income is stolen from them by the government. For most people who work for a living, this means they have to work twice as hard to enjoy the equivalent amount of prosperity they would have enjoyed had the government not stolen it from them in the first place. This is the biggest reason why in Canada it is increasingly more difficult to be a single income family:
To fund the government "welfare" designed to make things like parenting easier, the government ends up taking by force more of the resources parents need to make parenting easier.
Government meddling and thievery aside, parenting is probably the most fun and rewarding experience in life. It is my belief it is also the most important decision one can make, especially for those who, as of 2012, are still working age (less than 65). The problem with the last point, government taking on debt to fund welfare programs, is that governments with no constraint, ALWAYS go more into debt than they are able to reasonably service.
At the same time, the populace who falls victim to government "welfare" often end up incapable of providing for themselves - being dependants (or as I call them, slaves), to the government dole. Governments go bankrupt. It happens all the time, and when they do, they are no longer to provide the welfare they previously provided. It is my belief the welfare "slaves," are the ones who suffer the most when this happens.
Those who are working age today probably will not be entitled to any government welfare in the future . Maternity benefits, employment insurance, health care, pension plans - I am of the belief that the government will be unable to provide any of these services, especially in Canada, as the government is so badly in debt trying to provide the existing welfare services. As tax revenues decrease from the Baby-boomer generation retiring, the governments probably will go bankrupt and at the very least, be forced to adopt deep austerity measures.
When that happens, tighly knit, multi-generational families will be the ones to ensure personal welfare. As is evident from this episode of MLP:FIM, in Equestria, this principle is clearly recognized.
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