Can Happy Families Be Bought?

We won’t save the American family by putting it on the dole.

What kind of political agenda could help to rebuild a thriving Christian society? What goals would be most relevant to such a politics?

If social conservatives have one deeply cherished goal, it is surely the rebuilding of a pro-family and pro-life culture. This is in one sense exactly the right priority: marriage and family life should indeed be the building blocks of any healthy society. Families instill virtue, perpetuate the faith, and ultimately supply a civilization with an absolutely vital resource: well-formed citizens. We need them. And in the West–indeed, much or most of the world–healthy families are now in dangerously short supply.

Thus, many have welcomed the Trump Administration’s proposed plan to enable families with a stay-at-home parent to apply for a state subsidy, drawn from funds currently allotted to subsidize childcare for working parents below a certain income level. The New Right has long been yearning to throw money at families, and now J.D. Vance has a semi-concrete proposal to champion. Granted, this will likely turn out to be just so much political noise. A way of generating buzz before midterms with a controversial policy that angers the left and pleases social conservatives. Still, it’s out there, many people are excited about it, and that opens a door for discussing one of my own established stances: what I like to call libertarian pronatalism.

This was not my plan for this week. I was thinking of this as “fusionism to fascism” week. But it’s hard to pass up such current news, so I’ll push that to next week and devote today to explaining why dumping money on families may not really be the way to rebuild our culture.

From a culture war standpoint–presumably the priority for the Trump Administration–repurposing childcare subsidies is the obvious play. Right now the state subsidizes working parents by offsetting the cost of their childcare. Many parents would prefer to care for their children at home, but they may not be able to afford this if it involves quitting their jobs. Thus it’s reasonable to ask: why is the state pushing families towards institutions if that’s not even what they want?

I agree that this is unfair and undesirable. If we’re going to redistribute wealth to families–though, as I’ll soon explain, I don’t love that practice–we shouldn’t actively prioritize the work-plus-paid-childcare arrangement. The state shouldn’t be socially engineering any particular work-and-family arrangement; families should figure that out for themselves. Thus, the best redistributive policy would be the most neutral: if family welfare is what we want, let’s not try to dress it up as something else. Just set some income thresholds and cut people checks. They can decide whether to spend the money on childcare, replace lost wages while a parent stays at home, or use it as start-up capital for an at-home business. Whatever works for them.

Here’s what we absolutely should not do: make certain subsidies conditional on non-participation in the labor force. Have we learned nothing from the fiasco of disability subsidies? Actively paying people not to seek employment is infantilizing, intrusive, and a generally terrible idea. There is nothing at all wrong with a family model wherein one parent (usually Dad) provides financially while the other (probably Mom) devotes her time to home and family. But it’s not the best arrangement for every family, nor even, I suspect, the great majority.

A large share of mothers, even if they lean out for a time, will find that there are enormous benefits to building or preserving some earning power as their children grow. And a great many have been finding innovative ways to do that, while still being available to their children. Moms have become some of the great entrepreneurs of our age, reinventing work in myriad ways as they strive to meet their families’ various needs. Paying them not to do that would stymie that innovation, foster cultures of dependency, and increase mothers’ vulnerability while diminishing their capacity to do right by their kids. Effectively, we would be turning mothers into very low-level state employees with a sweeping non-compete clause.

It probably won’t happen. I expect it’s mostly a game of optics. Still, I thought the point was worth making, because it’s easy to get tripped up in debating a policy like this, arguing about which kind of parent is more deserving, whether at-home parents “really work,” and whether New Right influencers truly care about families or are mostly just closet chauvinists. Don’t get distracted by all that. “Should the state be paying people to remain unemployed?” is a much better starting question.

Should the state be paying people to raise kids at all, though? We could strike the “non-earning parent” requirement and just give families money, with fewer strings attached. But even leaving aside for a moment the staggering national debt, should the state, in general, be looking to redistribute more money to families? Is that the right way to build a family-friendly culture?

Many people today effectively assume that it is, noting the rising cost of living and the number of young people who cite financial insecurity as a major deterrent to family life, or to having as many children as they would ideally like. There is also a justice-based argument, because it’s widely understood at this point that elderly entitlements have effectively turned into a massive wealth transfer from parents to non-parents. (Parents bear massively disproportionate costs in raising the workforce whose payroll taxes then support all elderly people through Social Security and Medicare.) Another popular argument suggests that parents, especially caregivers, need and deserve greater honor and recognition. Perhaps that could take the form of a special subsidy?

I agree wholeheartedly that it would be excellent for parents to have more money. Richer parents plausibly are the answer, or at least part of the answer, to the puzzle of the “pro-family society.” If families have money, they can then spend it on family-related things, from baby gear to the Family Funplex. Those things will then become cheaper, more abundant, and more visible, making parenthood more appealing and lowering the barrier of entry. On the other hand, if families are disproportionately impoverished, while DINKs and single professionals are flush with cash, the latter will drive markets, take over city centers, and attain the status that young people see and covet. Family life will become a thing of the margins, the domain of losers and religious zealots.

That’s bad. It emphatically doesn’t follow, though, that cash transfers are the best road to family wealth. Our long history of entitlements and subsidies suggests exactly the opposite: throwing money at people tends to diminish their social status, lower their drive and ingenuity, and mire them in dependency and poverty. It also tends to erode human bonds. When necessity forces us to work cooperatively with our families and communities to meet crucial goals, we tend to do that, forging meaningful human relationships along the way. When the state assumes many of the relevant functions, it weakens human bonds as well.

The “welfare” model is really our primary method of helping people who seem needy. And since families seem to be struggling nowadays, both Republicans and Democrats are at present very attracted to beefed-up redistributive policies that effectively toss families in with other needy, dependent groups that are expected to live off the state. You know: the elderly, the sick, the disabled, families.

Do we… like that association? Do we want to habituate people to think of families as “by nature needy and dependent,” natural wards of the state? Of course, looking at the history of entitlements, we should understand that once that paradigm flips, and we accept that family support is rightfully a state responsibility, we will inevitably find ourselves discussing exactly how much subsidy is needed to secure the appropriate lifestyle. Obviously, it will be assumed that poorer families need more while the rich can finance their own children’s needs, so family lifeespecially will take on a more socialist cast. If you’re attracted to freedom, autonomy, self-direction… don’t have kids. In family policy, the goal will not be family wealth, or even family thriving, but family sustenance, the maintenance of a particular lifestyle deemed adequate for this naturally needy class.

Possibly, that process will be arrested as the staggering national debt smothers this and most other spending priorities, but otherwise family welfare will naturally tend to grow, steadily increasing the intrusiveness of the state in family life, and diminishing the vitality and prestige of parenthood generally.

Is there an alternative? I think so. I elaborate at greater length in this essay, but the basic idea is that families should be treated, not as a needy institution, but as fundamentally productive. A business is the other obvious example. Indeed, families and businesses should be seen as the twin engines of productivity, which between them keep civilization running. Societies do facilitate the growth and thriving of business, through tax breaks and contract law, but also through the creation of what we call a “business friendly climate.” It’s understood, however, that the goal is not to bankroll businesses, but to enable them to build capital themselves and exercise their own initiative. A libertarian pronatalism has similar goals for families. Reduce their tax burden. Expand their options. Respect their autonomy. No doubt there will always be some who do really need some form of welfare, but if we really do want both family wealth and family thriving, our family policy shouldn’t be about putting more and more people on the dole.

The proponents of this shiny new plan insist they are not growing the welfare state, because they are simply repurposing funds currently directed towards paid childcare. It’s a clever talking point, enabling the Administration to dodge the accusation that they’re growing the state, while backing us all into a Mommy War battle that hardly anyone wants.

Don’t play! Focus instead on the following points. The state should not pay people to care for their own kids. It should not pay people to keep out of the workforce. Those measures, once entrenched, surely will grow the state over time. A healthy family policy should aim instead at prosperity, vitality, and growth. Mostly, we get those things by helping people help themselves.