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Conservative fusion, conservative fission

Rusty Reno explores a major fault line in American conservatism, vis-a-vis the Wall Street Journal’s recent fulminations against Rick Santorum’s proposed raising of the child tax credit. Excerpt: Yes, we need incentives to work, incentives to invest and save, and the free market philosophy represented by the Wall Street Journal gets frustrated with liberals who imagine that […]

Rusty Reno explores a major fault line in American conservatism, vis-a-vis the Wall Street Journal’s recent fulminations against Rick Santorum’s proposed raising of the child tax credit. Excerpt:

Yes, we need incentives to work, incentives to invest and save, and the free market philosophy represented by the Wall Street Journal gets frustrated with liberals who imagine that entrepreneurs automatically take risks and create jobs. The frustration is merited. When it comes to productive economic behavior, we need the encouragement of knowing that we can keep most of our earnings. But the same holds for other important human activities. We need incentives to be generous, which is why we have tax deduction for charitable donations.

Having and raising children? By supposing that families “just happen,” the editors of the Wall Street Journal show themselves to be as naïve about social capital as liberals are about financial capital. No, families don’t just happen, as we are discovering in the demographic decline in some countries in Europe, a decline that would characterize American society were our culture not renewed by immigrants who have yet to turn marriage and children into lifestyle choices. When incentives for women to work and disincentives for men to marry constellate with rising costs for the care and education of children, to which are added all sorts of changed social attitudes toward child-bearing and parenting, you’ll get what any good economic theorist would predict, which is fewer children.

But there’s the rub. When the editors of the Wall Street Journal say that a tax credit designed to encourage and support men and women who have children “merely rewards taxpayers who have children over those who don’t,” they are saying, in effect, that there is no important difference between having and not having children, at least no difference that our society should care about. Get people to save, work and invest? Yes, government should definitely have policies to encourage thatbehavior. But marry and have children? No, those are just private decisions that government has no business encouraging. Let the invisible hand of the social free marketplace decide!

It is at this point that I see a fundamental agreement between free market libertarians and postmodern relativists.

Read the whole thing.  Rusty says he doesn’t think the GOP will be able to form a governing consensus if it remains loyal to this free-market fundamentalism. He may be right, but among Republican voters, people have gotten so accustomed to deferring to Eighties-vintage free-market shibboleths that even questioning how well market libertarianism works for families is considered dabbling in class warfare.

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