Families and Free Markets

Mark Movsesian is right to note that the traditional family is breaking down in Europe as well as the United States. That said, Europeans are much less likely than to suffer from the social ills that tend to be attributed to family breakdown (at least in this country). Rates of child poverty, family poverty, infant mortality, violent crime, and penal incarceration, for instance, are typically much lower in European countries at the same level of economic development as the United States.

What is interesting about Gray's work is that he does not limit inquiry to the world's wealthiest nations. He is particularly interested sophisticated developing economies of Asia--places like Singapore, Tiawan, and South Korea. Like Japan, these nations embrace the free market and democratic institutions, but reject American individualism and Anglo-American conceptions of liberalism. This is not to say that they are getting everything right, only that the experiences of these states raise the legitimate question of whether liberal democracy and free markets must always conform to social conditions that Americans find acceptable.

On balance, the American understanding of market and individual freedom undermines the family and other communal institutions by fostering cultural individualism that encourages and rewards selfish, self-aggrandizing behavior, and by rejecting an understanding of government as an extention of the communal life of society. In some instances to the promotion of dignity in community can only be assured at the level of the state. How does a nation as wealthy as the United States justify a health care system denies preventive care to the poor in order to provide the sophisticated extraordinary care to the rich? Why do we accept an educational system that, increasingly, barely serves the middle-class, much less the poor? How do we justify our extraordinary rates of incarceration, particularly of African-American and Hispanic men? Why are we willing to wage "preventive" wars, but unwilling to cut our oil consumption?

Some societies believe in shared sacrifice, and like so many things, it's a value that begins at home.

Vince