JD Vance Is Right About Prioritizing Parents

Plus, Bankruptcy Court is back in session, and the tradeoffs in family life get real…

Below, the Old Right’s intellectual bankruptcy is on display in discussions of regulation and rent seeking, and Ivana Greco publishes a fascinating interview with a couple balancing the demands of work and family. But first…

THREE CHEERS FOR PUTTING PARENTS FIRST

There are only two kinds of human cultures: ones that prioritize the having and raising of children and ones that cannot last. Most Western nations are sliding quickly from the first category to the second, and the United States is no exception. As a result, many of our fiercest and most intractable social conflicts are rooted in contested conceptions of the rights, freedoms, duties, and obligations associated with family formation at each of its stages.

While the issue has been simmering under the surface of our politics in recent years, it broke through in just the past few days as the Harris campaign called attention to a video of Senator JD Vance arguing that childless adults should be taxed at a higher rate than parents raising children. Of course, Vance’s position is the standard, bipartisan one dating back to the introduction of the Child Tax Credit in the 1990s. Harris herself presumably supports it. So it’s significant that both progressives and conservatives have now decided a fight over the priority placed on raising children is one worth having. And as with so many of the fights chosen by progressives in recent years, it’s one motivated by the values of a narrow but powerful segment of their coalition, and one they should and likely will lose.

One problem is that the divide on family tends to break down along class lines, with the highest-income and most highly educated households much more likely to value autonomy and career while other groups remain focused on traditional concerns of family and community. Only those upper-class Americans would prefer to pursue the best career far from home over a good career close to home, and to have both parents work full-time and place young children in daycare. Only they define the American Dream more in terms of “going as far as your talents and hard work take you” than in terms of “earning enough to support a family” or “getting married and raising children.”

But perhaps the bigger problem is that the progressives are simply and dangerously wrong. I made this the topic of this year’s First Things Lecture in Washington D.C., which I delivered back in March. For me, the argument starts with a line that stopped me in my tracks from a wonderful book—A Story of Us, by Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson—that traces the parallel cultural and genetic evolutions that have produced modern humanity. At one point, they write:

Over the course of human evolutionary history, there may have been some independent-minded women who thought things through and decided to avoid the pain and risks of motherhood. These women are not our ancestors. There may also have been families that decided to do away with the rules and customs that encouraged the raising of children. Our ancestors didn’t belong to families like this. Our ancestors were part of families that believed in the importance of children and worked hard to produce the next generation. That’s why we exist.

That’s why we exist. The narrative of personal autonomy that dominates both the progressive Left and libertarian Right regards each individual as inherently free of obligations and constraints beyond equally respecting everyone else’s autonomy. But that’s nonsense. Each of us owes our life to the long line of ancestors stretching back beyond the beginning of recorded history, most of whom made sacrifices we can hardly imagine to bring forth a next generation able in turn to bring forth a next generation. Most immediately, we have from conception through the early years of our lives made extraordinary demands on our own parents, and many others who willingly took responsibility for our upbringing, without which we obviously could not exist or survive, let alone thrive.

We each therefore begin our lives with an incalculable debt. That we did not “choose” the debt is of no moral import—it is inherent to our existence, it is the only choice. And we have only one possible way to repay it, which is to work equally hard to bring about the next generation. This obligation, to be fruitful and multiply, can of course be drawn from religious texts. But drawing upon the traditions and culture of modern America, an equally strong case for the obligation can be made from concepts like “paying your fair share” and “sustainability,” or, in the negative, condemnation of the “free-rider” who consumes without replenishing resources held in common.

As Cicero observed more than 2,000 years ago in On Duties:

There are some also who, either from zeal in attending to their own business or through some, sort of aversion to their fellow-men, claim that they are occupied solely with their own affairs, without seeming to themselves to be doing anyone any injury. But while they steer clear of the one kind of injustice, they fall into the other: they are traitors to social life, for they contribute to it none of their interest, none of their effort, none of their means.

Edmund Burke likewise emphasized that the imposition of inherited obligation has no element of choice. “Burke stresses that men are born into civil society without their own consent,” explains Yuval Levin in The Great Debate. “Their rights in that society are a function not of their agreeing to certain arrangements but of their inheritance from their forefathers, who had worked to defend those rights just as members of this new generation should for themselves and their posterity.”

In turn, recognition of an obligation to the next generation leads inexorably to an insistence upon tradition. One only need recognize—as any parent quickly does—that children are obviously incapable of autonomously developing and pursuing their own morality, values, and virtue, and so are dependent on the community of adults around them. Only a community itself committed to a shared moral vision and set of values can provide a suitable environment for children to mature, and only a community willing to embrace and work from what they have inherited will have those shared commitments. Adults concerned only for themselves may argue that an anything-goes morality of personal autonomy and self-discovery is in their own best interest, but they cannot contend it is what they themselves needed early in their lives, or that it is all they owe those who are young today.

Senator Vance would win this argument decisively on the merits, which can best be done by emphasizing the importance of child-rearing and the obligation of the nation to support it. One interesting feature of the current kerfuffle is how the argument stated in the negative (“adults without children should have their taxes raised,” in the Harris campaign’s characterization) elicits such a different reaction than one stated in the positive (e.g., “we should be doing more to support families with young children”). One can play this game with nearly any issue—would Harris want to defend her electric vehicle subsidies as “higher taxes for people who don’t buy electric vehicles”? Presumably not. The nature of politics and coalition-building is such that people will often support favoring a group other than themselves where they would not support disfavoring themselves, even when these amount to the same thing.

Likewise, the argument would be strengthened considerably by a concrete proposal, so that people can understand what the political position implies. Conservatives have placed a number of ambitious family policies on the table in recent years and Trump has at least gestured positively toward the concept with talk of a “baby bonus.” An actual Trump-Vance proposal in the space would give them and their supporters something to talk about. Conversely, the sort of divisive rhetoric disconnected from policy that has become popular with many on the Right is likely to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on this issue. “Owning the libs” and “knowing what time it is” ceases to be fun and games when the result is to alienate the voters who actually decide elections. As I wrote recently in, “What Time Is It? Time to Govern,”

Gaining productive power requires focusing on people’s problems and explaining how you are going to solve them, not pounding the table for “Christian Nationalism” or a “second American Revolution.” And importantly, it then requires using the power gained to in fact solve the problems—not to pivot quickly to some far-reaching ideological agenda that has nowhere near the support required for its success.

We need to provide a compelling definition of human flourishing as our ends, aligned with people’s priorities. … The American people are looking desperately for leaders who will address this: who will speak at once to the importance of family and child-rearing above all else, and also to the importance of checking the market’s influence. Progressives will not do that. Libertarians will not do that. Only conservatives can.

BANKRUPTCY COURT: BLAME THE REGULATORS

This week’s case features Richard Reinsch, director of publications at the American Institute for Economic Research and my counterpart for our 2019 debate on whether the United States should adopt an industrial policy. Responding to my note highlighting the fifth anniversary of that debate, and the floor speech made by author and investor JD Vance lamenting that market compensation for developing addictive social media algorithms was higher than for curing diseases, Reinsch says:

“And my answer was spot on: the feds make it incredibly expensive to develop those cures. Move them out of the way. And let’s see what happens in this sector.”

The comment is almost beautiful in its fundamentalism, like a haunting prayer echoing through the mountains from a Salzburg abbey. The problem identified is that risk-adjusted market returns to addictive social media algorithms are higher than to disease cures. Do regulators drive up the cost of drug development? Sure. But, of course, the federal government also aggressively subsidizes that development through research funding and public purchasing of the drugs. No one believes drug development would become relatively more attractive and pay neuroscientists higher salaries if only government were got out of the way. It’s just a reflexive platitude: Someone points out that markets are misallocating investment? Say it’s because of regulation.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite recent discussions, with Sam Gregg, who now works at the American Institute for Economic Research as well (as the aptly named Friedrich Hayek chair). We were at Princeton University, debating “The Right and the Future of Capitalism,” when the question arose of monopoly power in Big Tech, and Google’s rent-seeking behavior in particular.

“The lack of innovation coming out of Google is a catastrophe,” I said, “but again it is a natural outcome of markets if we take the attitude that they don’t require any intervention, any shaping, or any constraints.”

Gregg responded: “Get them away from the regulatory agencies and a lot of these problems go away.”

But in the awkward exchange that followed, Gregg could not name any actual law or regulation lobbied for by Google that was enabling its rent-seeking, or even any conceptual feature of the search market attributable to regulatory capture. “This is exactly the fundamentalism I’m referring to,” I explained, “where it’s an abstract premise that if there’s rent extraction, well it must actually be because of too much government regulation. And you say, ‘well OK, what’s the government regulation?’ and it’s like, ‘well, I don’t know, but there must be a lot of it.’”

It's a fun three minutes, and a good reminder that the generic talking points relied upon by the Old Right rarely fit the realities of modern economic challenges.

PARENTING IN REAL LIFE

Compass advisor Ivana Greco is one of my favorite writers and policy analysts when it comes to issues of the family—her Substack, The Home Front, is among those recommended to readers here at Understanding America.

I wanted to highlight in particular an interview she just published, featuring a couple (pseudonyms John and Rebecca) reflecting thoughtfully on the many tradeoffs and constraints they have faced in arranging their own family life. In particular, they realized, “let’s just share all responsibilities equally” made little sense and the advantages were enormous in having a primary breadwinner and a primary homemaker. There are so many great details in here, really bringing to life the distance between the generic, naïve, and idealized advice and wishcasting that passes for thoughtful commentary on the challenges of modern family life and the unforgiving reality that dictates the choices people actually have.

And yet, I was also struck by how abnormal John and Rebecca are. They are well educated, both have professional options that give them considerable flexibility, and demonstrate a superior ability to reflect on and shape their own lives. Most people have none of that. Historically, social forces and culture would establish the norms by which the typical couple could manage to make things work, and creative and flexible folks like John and Rebecca might then depart from that norm. Today, thanks to our progressive friends, those social forces and norms have been shredded, and most people are left to flounder. Only through creativity and flexibility does a family find its way back out of that mess and to what once was understood as common sense. That is our collective failure and one that, as we began up top, is accelerating the slide toward a culture that cannot last.

Anyway, read the whole thing, as they say. And I’ll be back with much more to read on Friday.

Oren