An Economics Platform for SoCons

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's pretty difficult to square the welfare state with the objective of promoting "family values" in the traditional sense. In truth, the welfare state promotes alternative family structures and reduces the strength of traditional family structures by granting women more autonomy. One has to look at families as an economic arrangement; they have been throughout human history and they remain economic arrangements. As a result, social programs will necessarily change the shape/structure of households/families. After all, families were the original social safety net and the creation of the social safety nets/insurance schemes of the 20th Century almost certainly played a role in dramatically altering families.

This is my attempt to stay that there's no "going back" to the idealized family/household model of the 1950s. So long as women remain in the labor force and birth control is easily accessible, divorce rates and single motherhood/fragmented families will be a relatively normal fact of life. I think increased welfare provisions could ameliorate the negative social impacts of these facts but it remains to be seen how a subsidy would promote "nuclear" families: in all likelihood, the idea of long-term marriages being a widespread/desirable phenomenon was not the result of preferences but rather the result of constraints.

Basically, I don't think that the welfare state and "social conservatism", as it is commonly understood, are all that compatible. I suppose that there could be incentives built into the system that promote "marriage" but one has to ask whether or not this would be a good thing. It could just as easily promote bad marriages that lead to domestic abuse as it could lead to stable families. Social conservatism really needs to evolve beyond the nuclear family and accept the fact that other family structures are workable/desirable and worth defending.

Edit: by the way, I'm not attempting to bash/condemn social conservatives here. If more conservatives thought long and hard about this topic, they'd almost certainly come to the conclusion that markets erode traditional familial structures as much as left-wing social policy. I'd be willing to support some of these proposals because I see the former by-product of the market as being even more despicable/disgusting as attempts to foster traditional families.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's pretty difficult to square the welfare state with the objective of promoting "family values" in the traditional sense. In truth, the welfare state promotes alternative family structures and reduces the strength of traditional family structures by granting women more autonomy. One has to look at families as an economic arrangement; they have been throughout human history and they remain economic arrangements. As a result, social programs will necessarily change the shape/structure of households/families. After all, families were the original social safety net and the creation of the social safety nets/insurance schemes of the 20th Century almost certainly played a role in dramatically altering families.

I think the way we square that circle is to tweak the incentives in the welfare system to strongly encourage 2-parent households and marriage in order to retain or get additional benefits.  I agree that both markets and the welfare system can have disruptive effects on the nuclear family, so the socon position should be to direct government action toward the preservation of that institution.

That sounds easy but, in practice, it could produce a lot of perverse effects. I suppose, what I'm trying to say, is that there isn't an easy way to utilize public policy to produce particular cultural or social outcomes. I'm sure that the marriage rate would increase if various welfare benefits were attached to marriage but would those marriages be "de jure" and not "de facto"? Would those marriages be healthy or expressions of your notion of "family values"? I don't think so!

Keep in mind that I'm actually sympathetic to "social conservatism" insofar as a few Christians on this forum, who are genuinely concerned about families and do not simply use the term "family values" to refer to gay marriage or abortion, use the term. In a certain sense, I share your concerns but from a different angle that treats "families" as a very broad term that encompasses any sort of tight-knit, intimate, long-term social group. Unfortunately, the same problems are present as far as that concerned: how can social policy build a stronger sense of community or stronger/long-lasting social networks? I'm not sure but it's a difficult challenge.

Policies that I think that "social conservatives" ought to consider and policies that I support:
-paid daycare/tax credits for parents to finance daycare(if you think that mothers should be in the labor market, that is)
-universal, free preschool
-some sort of access to a universal trust that's given to every parent per child; there could be a sovereign wealth fund in the vein of norway and proceeds from this could finance the trust. at "majority" age, the child would receive a second "trust" but the parents would receive the first.
-increased funding of public recreational facilities, which would give families a better means to give their children an enjoyable/healthy upbringing.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Conservatism isn't all that compatible with unfettered markets, anyone who is intellectually serious ought to understand this fact. There's a stark gulf between the demands of "tradition" or "cultural continuity" and market outcomes; there's a contradiction between a system that simply allocates resources according to the preferences of consumers and the demands/objectives of various strands of conservatism, whether theological or simply reactionary. The logic of the market will tell you that liberalized labor flows and liberalized capital flows are highly desirable but this is the cause of "McDonaldization" and has certainly resulted in rapid/dramatic cultural change. As a result, I'm going beyond Cathcon here: I don't think it's possible to be a genuine conservative and a proponent of, say, the Republican Party's pablum on economics.

Of course, I don't think that Republicans are actually conservative or that America is a conservative nation. America is arguably the embodiment of "liberalism". It's a country that can't be described as a nation-state, founded upon religious toleration and widely-distributed property ownership; a country where most people hail from somewhere else relatively recently. It's not exactly a breeding ground for conservative thought of the Burkean sort.