Ideology

childrenofmen

Families and time preferences: Should a libertarian society be childfree and polyamorous?

Usually when libertarians talk about marriage, it’s about how the government shouldn’t be involved. When we talk about children, we debate whether or not we can sell them. Rarely do we ever talk about the role of the family in a free society. The US is experiencing a huge decline in the nuclear family, and with it, some very clear economic costs. Fewer people are getting married and the ones who do are waiting longer to take the leap. The average number of children per family is down to .9 from 1.3 in 1970, causing some people to refer to our current period as the “baby bust.” In the face of these statistics and the popularity of social experimentation among young libertarians, it is essential to take another look at the role of the nuclear family in relation to both the well-being of society and the individual.

At first glance, it’s easy to look at these statistics and sing the praises of human progress and individualism. In his article, Capitalism and the Family, Steve Horwitz argues it was capitalism that pulled women out of the household and into the workforce, while simultaneously reducing the demand for child labor. In other words, the birth rate declined and women were able to focus on building their careers before getting married.

While I admire independent women (and men, for that matter) and respect a couple’s personal decision to have fewer or no children, I think my generation is going to experience a huge amount of non-buyer’s remorse for choosing the #singlelyfe or the increasingly popular DINK life. To be clear, I think that less child labor and more working women is likely a good thing; I just think that the pendulum may have swung too far to the other side in an attempt to rebel against the “shackles” of traditionalism.

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Ideology will set you free

PUT. THE GLASSES. ON. PUT 'EM ON.

PUT. THE GLASSES. ON. PUT ‘EM ON!

Ideology is not a system of thought that puts a distorting filter on our thinking. The common western vision of communism is that of miserable factory workers kept under watch by uniformed members of the omnipresent party. Anybody who makes the mistake of engaging in free thought is taken away to the even worse gulag. This is only what communism is from our naive, democratic, capitalistic perspective. When we put the glasses on, we can see what’s really going on. Those workers aren’t miserable, they are heroically building communism. Political officers aren’t there to oppress, but to make sure that the revolution which liberated those workers stays in place forever. And the gulags? Those are for quarantining the infection of bourgeois ideology, and perhaps we can even ‘force the glasses’ onto the incarcerated — if they are lucky. Ideology is what illuminates a dark and backwards world, and everything in this world is readily explainable by it.

A great example of the utility of the glasses is to decode the meaning of things that even we ourselves do not know we mean. Our true meaning must be decoded using the assumptions of the ideology. When I say that I want to marry a woman of a different race, the Nazidecoder glasses reveal that I actually want to destroy civilization. When I say I want to start a business, the communist decoder sees right through me — I truly just want to exploit the proletariat. By “employers shouldn’t be compelled to provide any specific benefits to their employees,” I obviously mean “I want to declare a war against women.” Compare Nazism to moderate nationalism, Communism to socialism, and radical feminism to moderate feminism. More than their positions on a spectrum, they are separated by the more radical versions adhering to ideology – they need the glasses. And where would we be without the help of the glasses? The decoder’s outputs are, of course, non-falsifiable assertions. This leaves us with curious ideas: rationalism is not enough. Rationalism is actually an enemy that obstructs the truth and enslaves us to the invisible order we are spontaneously embedded in. Democracy is not enough. Democracy is acceptable as long as the populace is willing to see the light. The webcomic Sinfest is the perfect demonstration of ideology not only to the ideologues that happen to agree with it, but to us benighted pawns as well.

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