Author: Jörg Guido Hülsmann Via Mises Institute
The peculiar consequences that result from government intervention are similar in all areas of economic and social life. Problems such as indifference, evaporating solidarity, irresponsibility, and short-term thinking are more than often caused or exacerbated by—sometimes well-intentioned—government interventions. This holds true for interventions in the financial world and in business, and it is no different with family policy. To make this clear, we first want to make a few comments about the economics of the family and then explain how state intervention tends to destroy families from within.
A Power Plant without Equal
According to the Christian definition [Western] , the family is a community between a man and a woman, before God, with God, and for God. It is a kind of worship. Of course, this is not the only motivation to start a family at all, but worship is what defines the Christian family.
From this covenant of life before God, with God, and for God, a whole series of further consequences follow with logical necessity, e.g., the formal and public alliance of the spouses, lifelong loyalty, openness to many children, rejection of abortion, and Christian commitment outside of one’s own family. Conversely, where there is no reference to God, there is no logical connection between these elements. They then appear as more or less arbitrary conventions.
In a society that loses the love for God, the family also loses its solid form. The Christian family is then gradually replaced by a patchwork of other forms of being together, which are set up according to one’s taste. This is inevitable and cannot be prevented by any human intervention—not even by the state.
But the traditional dominance of the Christian family is not only threatened by widespread apostasy. It is also, and massively, under siege by state intervention. In order to understand these, however, we first have to consider the economic reasons from which families arise and grow. The very first of these reasons is the division of labor.
The theory of division of labor teaches us that the work of specialists who exchange their surpluses is more profitable than nonspecialized work. The shoemaker naturally produces more shoes, the baker more bread than he himself and his family would need. But the point is that their specialization makes more shoes and breads overall than if everyone had devoted part of their time to shoemaking and another part to baking. The most important precondition of this little miracle is that the specialists have different talents. The productivity of the division of labor is based on the inequality of the exchange partners. And that is exactly why the Christian family is so efficient. Men and women are different, and they happily complement each other. They complement each other in their intellectual and physical abilities, in their social skills, in their spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities, and in their mental lives. It is therefore possible for them to grow together in all these dimensions of being human beyond what would be possible for them alone and on their own.
The State and the Family
To answer this question, we first have to consider the nature of the state. According to Max Weber’s well-known definition, the state is a monopoly of legitimate violence. This concept of the state is rooted in the legal concept of the modern state—the state that determines the law at its own discretion. It emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the debates on the natural law conception of objective law, which is beyond human arbitrariness. In the modern conception, the state itself does not only have special rights that correspond to its special obligations. Rather, it is above the law in a strict sense. The state is completely free to decide what is right and wrong.
Once this concept of the law and of the state has gained a foothold, there is a natural tendency toward unlimited state growth. There is no logical brake on this movement, because the powers and tasks of the state are no longer fundamentally limited, but fundamentally open and unlimited. And there is hardly any economic brake on state growth either, because as it grows, so does the income and power of state servants and all other interested parties.
Family policy has become an important area of state growth in recent years. In the past, various state interventions served to protect the family (tax privileges, child benefits, etc.), but today’s politics are almost exclusively harmful to the family.
It should be noted that explicit political harm to families is rather rare. Communists like Friedrich Engels correctly recognized the family as a source of bourgeois morality and therefore fought them. Such fanatics still exist today, but they do not determine what happens.
............ From the perspective of economic theory, this creates a destructive “rationality trap.” From a woman’s economic perspective, the family becomes unnecessary and superfluous as a result of government intervention. But as the family withers, the performance of the economy as a whole is weakened, and ultimately taxes are reduced, without which feminist politics is impossible.
In light of these crazy implications, one may yearn for the classic welfare state. The good old welfare state—let us primarily think of the pay-as-you-go pension and healthcare systems—was in no way aimed at enabling individual self-fulfillment at the expense of the taxpayer. Its goal was not to liberate the individual from all life constraints, but only to provide some protection against major economic emergencies.
.... The welfare state has also had a lasting impact on the relationship between the costs and benefits of family life. It, too, has weakened the community of solidarity between the spouses—and between parents and children—if not quite as quickly, brutally, and cynically as the more recent feminist politics. It didn’t slaughter the family, but it slowly decomposed them. This tendency is particularly evident in the relationship between the generations. The state pension system turns this relationship upside down in economic terms. Families must continue to bear the costs of bringing up children but must share their children’s future tax payments with all other citizens, including the childless. The benefits of children are socialized, while the cost of raising children remains private. If you wanted to reduce families, you couldn’t think of anything better. .... Full Article @ Mises Wire
Decline of the Black Family and Rise of Entitlement
Decimation of the Nuclear Family- Blacks First
Decline of the Nuclear Family and Rise of Entitlement are devastating The Black Community at a much higher rate than Society as a Whole.
The decline of the traditional family in modern society is a social phenomena without historical precedent. As of 2014 only 46% of American children under the age of 18 lived in a home with two married heterosexual parents. In 1980 the number was 61%, In 1960 - 73% [Pew Research Center analysis of recently released American Community Survey (ACS) and Decennial Census data.]
In recent times 71% of African American births are outside of wedlock compared to 29% of Caucasian births and 53% for Hispanics [Asian statistics unavailable]. Read More