Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work

Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work by Jennifer Roback Morse. Hardback: 300 pages. (Spence Publishing, 2001), Retail $27.95, Amazon.com: $19.84.

Review by Ryan Setliff

As the subtitle reveals, this book’s thesis is relatively straightforward: classical liberalism or libertarianism in its manifestation as a philosophy of individualism and rational autonomy simply does not work when applied to the family. The political Left tacitly endorses a hands-off philosophy at the family level, which emphasizes “freedom of choice” for the individual, while ironically favoring interventionist solutions for broader societal issues. Regrettably, in recent years, the political Right too, makes the lamentable mistake of applying their laissez-faire philosophy to the family, instead of just the marketplace and civil society in general.

Essentially, what author Jennifer Roback Morse attempts to illustrate with her book is that the advancement of libertarian philosophy might be useful and redeeming for broader economic and social freedom, but it cannot be applied to society’s most basic institution—the family. Moreover, the underlying materialism in liberal-libertarian circles has to be rejected in favor of an acknowledgement of a transcendent reality and the supernatural. This religious foundation is requisite in order to sustain the values necessary for the preservation of strong, stable traditional families. The laissez-faire family philosophy gained ascendancy following World War II and reached an ugly fruition in the post-1960s era that was host to the so called Sexual Revolution and the Feminist movement. It was reflected in the works of acclaimed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock whose notoriety emanated from his permissive child-rearing and parenting books. As Norman Vincent Peale affirmed, “the United States was paying the price of two generations that followed the Dr. Spock baby plan of instant gratification of needs.” The narcissistic “Me Generation” of the 1960s has practically despoiled every subsequent generation of their inheritance—both cultural and spiritual.

Morse offers sound chapter-by-chapter evidence of the necessity of traditional families. Likewise, she exposes the pitfalls of cohabitation before marriage, and the folly of institutional daycare. Stay-at-home moms are lauded, and Morse illustrates how the denigration of traditional motherhood by radical feminists is lamentable. The women’s liberation movement is at its core a sham. Surveys show that most married women would rather fulfill their role as nurturer to their children even if it meant working fewer hours or not at all. Many career women—even those with graduate and professional degrees—are opting out of the workforce with a desire to tend to their families.

The traditional family has always rested its foundation on patriarchy, mutual fealty between man and wife, and especially selfless love of parents for posterity. The tight-knit traditional family structure embodies the core values of cooperation, self-sacrifice, and self-constraint. This ethic was buttressed by Christian religious tradition and Biblical teachings. Yet, today regrettably in contemporary society, the masses are driven by the alien values of adult self-fulfillment and material aggrandizement. This comes at the expense of requisite strong family ideals like mutual aid and sacrificial giving. The ethic of self-sacrifice which eschews immediate gratification is indispensable for the maintenance of healthy families and beneficial for society at large.

Even two-parent families that are otherwise considered stable because the parents stay together are nonetheless sullied by the hands-off philosophy of family governance. In America, parents by and large are failing to instill consistent standards of morality to their posterity—or lead by example. As a result, the decadence of the mass-media and popular culture is allowed to grip the minds of most children by their teenage years. Rather than have their moral ideals shaped by family and church, most teenagers are guided by mass-media entertainment—whether it be the onerous influence of network prime-time, HBO, MTV, Nickelodeon or the banal cultural rot on the Internet. Not surprisingly, in the world of absentee parents, many teenagers and young adults fall into alcohol and drug abuse, and sexual promiscuity.

As a general observation, many affluent families negate the necessity of making adequate preparations (whether financial assistance or prudent advisory instruction) for helping their posterity advance themselves and become productive and fruitful upon reaching adulthood, instead consuming themselves in the pursuit of leisure, luxury, material goods and recreation. While education is supposed to begin at home, here too, the laissez-faire family errs, because deference is often given to the state and is ever more neglected. Proverbs 13:22 declares, “A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children…”, but too often immediate gratification supplants deliberativeness, frugality, prudence and saving. And typically scant attention is given to the assistance of posterity in their preparations for becoming economically productive and contributors to society. Provision for children’s higher education is often sacrificed to the acquisition of a vacation home or superfluous material goods. Also, it should be no surprise that this yuppie family philosophy is the same viewpoint that compels children to hit the road at age eighteen—the so called age of universal suffrage. While one might perceive this move as an impetus for maturation, one most confront the bittersweet realization that many of those on the threshold of adulthood are ill-equipped, ill-instructed, and otherwise unprepared for life and its responsibilities. The “birds” might even fly back to the “nest,” and the parents desire to accept them is typically one of reluctance and duress.

Not surprisingly, when such parents are confronted with the long-term consequences of their shallow child-rearing and parenting ethic, they can reflexively insist that they placated and showered their children with material goods throughout their youth; and this reality sadly reveals that material endowment or “spoiling children” are often mistaken for “good parenting.”

All things considered, it should be no surprise that each subsequent generation reared on the incongruous family values of rational autonomy, naturally embraces the narcissism and egoism of the "Me Generation." But this bittersweet reality wrings perilous consequences for society at large. Each successive generation lacks instilled moral capital, is more and more overwhelmed with personal debt, and they are otherwise hindered in their readiness for marriage since they know little of mutual fealty and selfless love. If strong character is to ever truly take form among the heirs of the “Me Generation,” it usually does so only by posterity realizing the folly of their self-absorption and vanity, and rejecting the ill-gotten narcissism of the 1960s.

It is painfully obvious that the laissez-faire family philosophy simply does not work. With its ascent, it should not be surprising that social pathologies are increasingly common, such as the breakdown of the family, alienation and despondency in adulthood, higher crime, and pervasive dependency by the general populace upon the state for entitlements. Incidental to these societal ills, the aggressive growth of government in our day-to-day lives has not coincidentally paralleled the deterioration of the traditional family structure. The prevalence of divorce, and the sizable number of so called single-parent families has likewise produced baneful results for society. Nonetheless, the task for a new generation of families is to break the cycle, and reaffirm the inviolability of the traditional family. This necessitates a reaffirmation of the core Christian values of self-sacrifice and servant leadership within the family structure itself. Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work is a clarion call to recover the core ethic of the traditional family. Since this endeavor begins at home, every new couple has the opportunity to resist the pattern of this age, and instead hold fast to the values of concerned participatory parenting, self-sacrifice, prudence, frugality, and selfless love that stabilizes and nurtures the vitality of the family.

The Achilles’ Heel of capital-L Libertarians is the bittersweet reality that their philosophy when applied to the family is ultimately responsible for its degradation. The crass individualism and atomization of the family into particles inevitably sets the stage for more collectivism, paternalistic statism and Big Government—which is ironically the bane of libertarians. Their much lauded minimalist night-watchmen state is a worthwhile notion, but it obviously requires a citizenry with the capacity for republican self-government and self-control—which are ethics that can only find their foundation in stable homes. If many Libertarians doubt that their core sponsors denigrate the traditional family, then they might consider reading the late Harry Browne’s book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World: A Handbook for Personal Liberty. Therein, Browne holds not only that the coercion of the state against the individual is horrendous, but he also casts derision upon the natural societal stigmatisms of culture, morality, religion, and yes even the family. By his own admission, Browne's happy family life was characterized by his own daughter never talking to him for years. Ideas have consequences as the thinking conservative would say. Nonetheless, the dissolution of the intermediary institutions so vitally requisite to a free civil society is not a recipe for increased freedom, but social upheaval. As Dostoevsky observed, "Absolute freedom leads to absolute tyranny."

It is in the home that children should learn to reject the intemperate me-centeredness innate to youth, and instead embrace the values of harmonious cooperation, the golden rule and self-sacrifice. Too often, reality reveals that many ostensible adults are functionally themselves little more than overgrown children that never adequately embraced the altruism so integral to the health of the family—namely selfless love. As Morse observes, “Love is the force that moderates self-interest and makes it possible for self-interested people to live together without causing each other too much trouble.” Yet the economic man of the “Me generation” finds it difficult to embrace “love” in any meaningful sense. “Love” became a mere sentiment of close affection as opposed to a selfless regard for other family members. As Morse observes, “A society of free people requires more human connections, more generosity, and more love than almost any other kind of society we can imagine. Surely the existence of an inexhaustible supply of love, available to anyone for the asking, is of more than passing importance for a society like ours.”