Those words would be as good an answer as I could give to the question originally addressed to Conan the Barbarian: “What is best in life?”

But they’re actually taken from this passage:

I don’t disagree with this, though I’m sure that Sister Bushman and I have different ideas of what “creative new models” ought to emerge, and I’m also guessing (perhaps wrongly) that her models aren’t all that new or creative.

I’m reminded of a family I met on my mission (Spanish-speaking in the U.S.). The father was a traveling fire alarm salesman. His suits were clearly second-hand, but durable, clean and well-fitting. They lived in an old, tiny (but clean) two-bedroom house on the edge of town. Mom took care of their eight kids at home (one was in college). Two sets of triple bunk beds, plus another bed for the oldest and a crib in the parents’ room. All meals were home cooked; how could they not be? Their kids were jarringly polite and intelligent, and I would not be remotely surprised if every last one of them served a mission. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture; I’m sure they had plenty of heartburn in lean times. But they were as happy as any family I’ve known.

The prosperity of the 50s was an artifact of the post-war rebuild, the Baby Boom, you name it. It was a brief window, but doggone it, it was a good one. Maybe without feminism, we’d still have it, although it’s also possible that without women pushing down wages in the developed world, the export of jobs to the third world would have proceeded even more quickly. Regardless, there’s been an obvious deterioration in the sort of employment that allows a man to support a wife and more than 1.5 kids in the middle to upper-middle class existence that is typical of people we see called to positions of responsibility in the Church.

A cynic would say that we should stop expecting every bishop to be a Romney in miniature. But it’s not that simple. I just had the bishopric reject my choice to fill a scoutmaster calling because the husband simply has to work too many hours to make it feasible. This is an intelligent (though not bookish) returned missionary with kids whose wife is employed full time. They live in a small apartment in a shabby neighborhood. And I do not doubt that they really do need the money.

Then there’s this:

I don’t think we squares can give up without a fight. It’s too important. When moms go to work en masse, the nurseries empty out. And no one will have time to run the Church except the dentists, doctors and bankers.

What is the solution? The brethren already hammer it into the young men (rightly) to take education seriously. Utah already has one of the highest rates of entrepreneurship in the country; no doubt some of that is RMs without fancy degrees who haven’t given up on making a buck.

But I’m thinking it needs to get weird; we need those “creative new models.” Maybe some philoprogenitive Mormons could buy up those broken-down $500 houses in Detroit (hey, there’s a temple there), and perform the mother of all gentrifications. Maybe we need to follow the Brigham Young model, and start some cooperative enterprises outside the gentile economy. A small housing colony built from scratch in a rural area, perhaps.

Maybe (gulp) breaking the taboos against food stamps and Medicaid, etc., is the less-bad alternative to families with more employers than kids.

Or maybe we just need more people willing to pack eight kids into a two-bedroom house on the outskirts of town. As sacrifices go, it beats handcarts by a mile.