Kay Hymnowitz thinks we're destroying the infrastructure that creates us:
On the one hand, libertarians make a fetish of freedom; it is their totalizing goal. On the other hand, libertarians depend on the family--an institution that, in crucial respects, is unfree--to produce the sort of people best suited to life in a free-market system (not to mention future members of their own movement). The complex, dynamic economy that libertarians have done so much to expand needs highly advanced human capital--that is, individuals of great moral, cognitive and emotional sophistication. Reams of social-science research prove that these qualities are best produced in traditional families with married parents.Family breakdown, by contrast, limits the accumulation of such human capital. Worse, divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing leave the door wide open for big government. Dysfunctional families create an increased demand for state-funded food, housing and medical subsidies, which libertarians reject on principle. And in courts all over the country, judges who preside over the manifold disputes occasioned by broken families are forced to be more intrusive than the worst mother-in-law: They decide who should have primary custody, who gets a child on Christmas or summer holidays, whether a child should take piano lessons, go to Hebrew school, move to California, or speak to her grandmother on the phone. It is a libertarian's worst nightmare.
I'd agree that there are libertarians who too readily dismiss social conservative questions about the innate structure of marriage as if they were wacky considerations unworthy of a moment's thought. But even assuming, arguendo, that letting gays marry were undermining the broader institution, it would be at best a trivial contributor to the problem. And the libertarian response to Kay Hymnowitz is the same response she'd likely be perfectly comfortable with if it were on the topic of any of the rest of the world's ills: what do you want the government to do? Shall we ban household appliances, so that it's harder for women to work, so that they're more economically dependent on their husbands, so that they're less likely to seek a divorce? Perhaps we should restrict birth control to women who've had five kids, at which point everyone will be too tired and poor to get a divorce? Should we send vans into inner city neighborhoods to exhort them to get married--pretending that we haven't noticed that every other government program of this sort, from abstinence education to job training, is pretty much a miserable failure? Government sponsored hope chests? What policy do you want us to support?
Or is it that we're contributing to a lower moral tone in America? Look, I love the folks at libertarian think tanks, and all. They're lovely, attractive people, witty and urbane, and they cook some great seafood. But they're not exactly role models for the nation. I very much doubt that anyone out there doing the things that undermine marriage--getting ill-considered divorces, having babies out of wedlock, committing adultery--is thinking to themselves, "I wonder if this will make me as edgy and cool as a policy analyst at Cato."
For starters, the government frequently prevents private enforcement of morality, e.g., by telling landlords that they must rent to unmarried couples or schools that they may not fire unmarried pregnant teachers. Social conservatives want libertarians to denounce those government restrictions on private action and the rights of owners of private property. But you aren't going to, are you?
Nice!
Do you also love it when the right blames libertarians for being too left and the left blames them for being too right?
Here a simple recipe for how to cook a delicious libertarian in order to impress your guest:
"Take one Republican and remove all the sexual fears as well as the religious superiority complex. Take one Democrat and remove all the statism. Blend it all together e voila...!"
PS: This "sex/marriage" stuff has nothing to do with social norms and bonds - those are biological and will never go away. The Neo-Republicans are for the integration of church and state for Christian reasons - not for social, economic or political ones. Jesus was not born yet when Plato wrote The Republic (The Republican Party's initiation document) - in which Socrates envisions the equality of women (which in his book implied that women will no longer be the property of men - which he saw as the positive end of marriage!)
I for one grew up in an atheist statist society (communism). From my own life - I prefer the religious mambojambo to statism any second! That is why I have considered myself more of a Republican than a Democrat in the past. But since both have the ideological backbone of a social butterfly.. they are all the same anyway?
Democrats and Republicans are like twin sister.. too similar not to spot their minor differences and to fight over them?
Near as I can guess, she's talking in deep code about Roe v. Wade. Pretty much everything else she hints at as being destructive to the family is due to some combination of increasing wealth, increasing mobility, and increased access to communication and information. It's true that libertarians have been surprisingly alone in championing all of that stuff, but I'm afraid we can't take much more credit for causing it than anyone else in our economy. For that matter, neither libertarians nor anyone else has come up with any good way of stopping the relentless march of technological progress, slowing it down, or otherwise controlling it, even if we wished to.
That said, there's a good argument to be made that libertarian ideas have done more to strengthen the family recently than anything else has. The retargeting of American welfare policy from AFDC with EITC is a long-standing goal of practical libertarians, originating from Friedman himself, and has had quiet impressive impact on teen-pregnancy, out-of-wedlock-birth, child-poverty and divorce rates since it was implemented as "welfare reform" back in '94.
Ok - I just read the whole verbal diarrhea by Kay Hymnowitz... It was funny! But.. it was published in the Opinion pages of the WSJ???? This was published in the WSJ????? Helloo?
May I ask a serious question: Is Mr Kay Hymnowitz a catholic priest? (Actually, most catholic priests who I have met and acquainted would find his text "strange"? I mean - it is no coincidence that no other group other than catholic priests and religious Republicans abuse young boys? Must be the marriage thing?)
I would love to engage in a serious debate about the arguments and some of the issues raised by Mr Hymnowitz - problem is - there are none?
Attempting to have a serious discussion would only give the impression that one wants to insult the intelligence and pre-puberty modus operanti of Mr Hymnowitz. It should be avoided in his own best interest?
Dave - what did you just say?
On the one hand, libertarians make a fetish of freedom; it is their totalizing goal.
False. Liberty ("freedom" is too polluted for my taste, and I've abandoned it to the mainstream)... Liberty is our "totalizing" political goal. But there is, and should be, more to life than politics. Much, much more. The failure to understand this is common on both the left and right.
Who cooks great seafood? I demand names!
in courts all over the country, judges who preside over the manifold disputes occasioned by broken families are forced to be more intrusive than the worst mother-in-law... It is a libertarian's worst nightmare.
This is not my worst nightmare. In fact it's not a nightmare at all; it's hardly even a bad dream. Families do break up, and have for time immemorial. As a result, many of them need adjudication of some sort in order to live in peace. I'd prefer the judges handling such things be privately hired by the parties involved, but come on. Someone has to and the answer for "who someone is" in most cases in modern society is: the state.
Lane,
Bob Kinkead.
Everything that's happened to the family over the last four decades is the slow-motion collapse of a building whose foundations were detonated long ago.
What were the explosives used to destroy it? The first was no-fault divorce for adults in families with children. The second was the extension of the right to paternal child support to children born as bastards. Between them, they radically reduced the costs of breaking homes and forming pre-broken homes, to the ultimate disadvantage of children.
The result is that marriage is no longer in practical law an institution for the raising and support of children, but merely an arrangement between adult partners with a handful of vestigial privileges left over from when they had a justification. It accordingly makes perfect sense to abolish marriage as a government institution, either directly or by broadening it to any arbitrary grouping of people.
Since there isn't a chance in a million that people will revert the major contours of family law back to the 1950s, the appropriate action is to clear the rubble of marriage from the lot where it rests; to abolish it in formal law as it has been abolished in practical law.
Don't forget the money paid to single mothers to encourage them to stay single! I read an interesting article on the evolution of the single-mother problem and it's quite impressive how government policies were so effective in creating this problem. Who says government can't do anything?
Ironically, the policies that led to this were anti-libertarian...
EI
Rising divorce rates are produced by economic modernization and egalitarianism. Divorce rates go up in every single society that goes through the economic takeoff of modernization; from Turkey to South Korea, the first thing you see as societies start achieving affluence is a whole generation of young divorced women, as women with access to capital and jobs refuse to put up with the bullshit which their mothers and grandmothers had to put up with from time immemorial. At the same time, they start having fewer children. Nothing the United States did in terms of government social policy in the 20th century had much to do with this; it just comes with modernity.
I just read a recent interview with Singapore's semi-retired leader, the brilliant Lee Kuan Yew. As a champion of family-centered, Confucian "Asian values", he used to demonize Western-style individual rights, which he associated with social evils such as gambling, homosexuality, and spitting in public. Lately, he's taken a different tack, and in the interview he says his personal distaste for homosexuality is irrelevant; modern countries who want to attract talent need to be gay-friendly, so Singapore must become tolerant, too. As for Confucian values, he says his children still have a functional Confucian moral outlook, with its familial primacy and respect for elders. His grandchildren, he says, no longer do.
The post-industrial economy breeds flexibility, interoperability, and loose networks. It dissolves solid structures, including the family. I am a family maniac, and find this sad and probably nefarious, but I don't try to blame it on the government or my political enemies. This is just the way societies are heading these days.
Hymnowitz on libertarians:
For many people, the term evokes an image of a scraggly misfit living in the woods with his gun collection, a few marijuana plants, some dogeared Ayn Rand titles, and a battered pickup truck plastered with bumper stickers reading "Taxes = Theft" and "FDR Was A Pinko." The stereotype is not entirely unfair.
Megan on libertarians:
Look, I love the folks at libertarian think tanks, and all. They're lovely, attractive people, witty and urbane, and they cook some great seafood. But they're not exactly role models for the nation. I very much doubt that anyone out there doing the things that undermine marriage--getting ill-considered divorces, having babies out of wedlock, committing adultery--is thinking to themselves, "I wonder if this will make me as edgy and cool as a policy analyst at Cato."
Where do we go from here? what does a Republican or Democrat role model look like?
Socrates - who can be defined as a libertarian - given that he stood up intellectually for the liberation of women and the corresponding change of the meaning "marriage". He himself has been married most of his life to only one woman who was apparently a beast at home - commanding him around (she often bothered his morning dance which he performed for exercise, etc.). When asked why he was married to her, he replied: "If I can love her - I can love anybody!" They had two sons?
Historically there must have been a time where the bond of marriage had more to do with the needs of life and less with religion (just as the ban on pig meat in some religions). In order to raise children one had to share labor and working functions etc. and that was socially only possible with a religious bond (as economics and the law were not fully developed).
But those times are over in many regions. Women who want a baby can go for a mate who they find psychologically or physically attractive - rather than somebody rich or powerful? Aka: Women have become more liberated and have almost as many rights as men! Romeo and Julia will be, one day, changed to: Julia and Romeo!
Here some advice from Epicurus (nobody's writing in the history of the planet have been burned as often and successful:
...It is the same with a man wounded by
Venus’ arrows, whether they come at him
from a girlish boy or from a woman whose
whole body hurls love at him;
He runs at the person who shot him and
wants to copulate and to plant in that
body the fluid from his own body;
His dumb desire suggests it will give
him pleasure.
That is Venus for you, it is that which
we call love which is the source of
sweetness which Venus pours drop by
drop in our hearts: and then we are
worried.
If what you want isn’t there, there are
always images of her, and her sweet
name will ring in your ears.
.
Keep off imagination and frighten away
whatever encourages love; turn your
mind elsewhere,
get rid of the fluid in any body you
can instead of keeping it for a single
person which is bound to lead to trouble
and end in grief.
If you have an ulcer there is no point
in feeding it, the madness gets worse
every day and the burden intolerable if
you do not confuse the first wound with
several others and wander and lose
yourself in the genial Venus: Unless
you can turn your mind to another
subject.
.
No need to do without sex if you keep
off love; You simply have it without the disadvantages.
For surely those who are perfectly well
have more pleasure than the afflicted:
even in the moment of triumph lovers
drift in all kinds of doubts and
confusions, not knowing whether to start
with the eye or the hands. They squash the
body they sought until it squeals and often
their teeth make a gash on the lips
in the course of affixing a kiss, which
is hardly pure pleasure.
They are indeed rather provoked to injure
the object, whatever it is, which causes
this onset of lunacy.
But Venus mitigates pains such as these
for the lover and a gentle admixture of
pleasure will soften the bite.
...
These evils are found in the most prosperous
love: As to the ills of those who simply
get nowhere you can close your eyes and
imagine how many they are:
They are innumerable—so better watch out
and take good care, as I said, that you
don't get caught.
Quite useless, for out of the source of
so many attractions something bitter comes
up, and the flowers are a pain.
Either the mind will reflect and become
remorseful at so much waste of time in
pursuit of debauchery or else the girl
lets drop some ambiguous expression
which sticks in the heart and burns away
like a fire, or possibly turns her eyes
in the wrong direction and lets fall the
trace of a smile at somebody else.
To avoid falling into an amorous entanglement
is not so hard as to get out once you are
in for the knots Venus makes are very hard
to untie.
.
But even if you are caught in the
entanglement you can avoid the worst if
you don't stand in your own way by blinding
yourself to the faults of mind and body
there are in the person you are so keen
to follow. Yet this is exactly what men
generally do; They attribute qualities
which are simply not there.
...
Even supposing the girl you love is
beautiful and her body has every kind of
amorous attraction: Still, there are
others, and you did without her before;
And she does all the things the most
unpleasant ones do and chokes herself with
the horrible smells she gives off
while her maids run away or snigger behind
her back.
.
The tearful lover, shut out, will cover
the entrance with flowers and even garlands,
while the splendid doorposts he plasters with
oil of marjoram, adding his kisses. Yet, if
he were let in, one whiff from the boudoir
would make him think of excuses for getting
away; His long-thought-out campaign would be
forgotten; He would curse the stupidity which
made him think of her as somebody who wasn't
actually mortal.
Our Venuses know all this and go to great
pains to keep such matters hidden behind the scenes:
It is hardly worth it; a little reflection
will tell us just what is happening and why
the servants are giggling. If the girl is
sensible and not full of pretenses, be sensible
too and allow her human functions.
.
Coda
Yet sometimes without the intervention of Venus,
a rather sub-average woman may come to be loved.
She manages by herself and by what she does,
by compliant ways and keeping her body clean
to get a man used to sharing her existence.
For the rest, what you get used to you tend to love;
However light the blows, if they are repeated
they will end by bringing down whatever it is.
It has long been a matter of ordinary observation
that constant dripping wears away the stone.
"I wonder if this will make me as edgy and cool as a policy analyst at Cato."
thanks for the chuckle of the day Megan...
I've spent a lot of time with Libertarians and members of the Aquarian Left. There is one huge difference between them. Leftists, as befits their allegiance to collectivism on a macro level, act, talk, and dress very similarly. Libertarians are just as wacky, but like snowflakes, each one is eccentric in his own way. So I have to completely dismiss the idea that people with libertarian tendencies would follow _any_ role model. And I really don't think other people are sitting around saying, "since Murray Rothbard thinks I shouldn't have to provide material support to my child, I'll go ahead and ignore these court orders for child support."
I note the easy way for the government to stop divorces as women in a society become wealthier is to not grant divorces.
Imagine you're back in 1965, and people are committing collusion and perjury in court in order to establish phony fault in divorce cases. Sure, you can do what the state governments of the U.S. did, and establish no-fault divorce. Or you can up the standard of fault to requiring a criminal conviction of the at-fault party in order to grant a divorce. How many people are willing to collude to send themselves to jail, after all?
If you look at marriage as an obligation by parents to children to maintain a household to raise them, allowing divorce only in cases where one spouse is the victim of crimes committed by the other is a logical move. Is anyone willing to go that far?
Similarly, if you want to encourage children to be raised by married couples, shouldn't the financial incentives be structured that way? No child support for bastards, no state support to unwed mothers for raising their kids, plenty of funding for the orphanages to which the mothers are encouraged to give their children, programs to help unwed mothers who give up their kids to get a fresh start in life, large tax breaks for married couples and their children?
There's only so much you can do to defend traditional families against the tide of increasing financial independence for women, but lowering the barriers to divorce and unwed motherhood works the exactly wrong direction.
Hymnowitz's arguments scare me. Megan counters with her 'Dagney' voice, but really there's no need. Ms Hymnowitz is using crude scare tactics to attack freedom, no less. It's sad and pitiable. What's the motivation? She herself says that Libertarians are "cranks and crazies" so why the WSJ sponsored offensive? She owed something from Cato she didn't get?
Freedom comes in many flavors but my own definition includes the freedom to enjoy the benefits bestowed by society on married persons regardless of the sex of my partner.
My parents gave me many advantages and I intend to pass along many of those traits to my son, but I see no role that the government played in ensuring that either of these things happened/will happen. Fortunately the expectations I have for myself (divorced and gay) appear to be much higher than those possessed by Ms. Hymnowitz and her ilk.
There's only so much you can do to defend traditional families against the tide of increasing financial independence for women
There are matrilineal societies where inheritance follows the female line. Presumably they already have the increased financial independence for women.
I wonder what effects this has on divorce etc.
My complaint about libertarians has nothing to do with them being too left or too right.
It has to do with the massive gaping hole in their plan. Yes, we have a plan that sucks. Yes, it would be really great to have a plan that works. In the absence of a plan that works, yes, we probably should have nothing at all.
The problem is that I see a critical difference between "having nothing" and "throwing something away".
If we were just now considering "maybe there should be an FDA", I would lean very heavily in the direction that we build something which ought to work. If we couldn't do that, I would say "let's not do this until we can do it right". And then there would be no FDA. It is very likely that something much like the FDA would spring up in a free market anyway, and market forces would demand that it not suck.
But that is not reality. The reality is that we do have an FDA. It employs people. It receives funding. It is an integral part of the business model for many companies. There is no effort anywhere to compete with it, because the very idea is ludicrous.
So if we remove the FDA, my first thought is: what about the people and the funding and all those companies? What happens to them between shutdown and the rise of a free market substitute? How long will that be?
The libertarian never says. So I view his plan with great suspicion, because - just like defining an FDA from scratch - I lean very heavily in the direction that we make plans which ought to work.
I do like the ideals behind libertarianism, but I don't confuse ideals with reality.
Calibian
There are many libertarian policies in place that are merely not labeled as such... It is not WHAT you do but HOW you do it that defines who you are?
"Helping the poor" - we have deteriorated to a level where many automatically think of liberal Democrats.. what a lot of BS. It is HOW you help the poor (e.g. life-long state sponsored average wage unemployment benefits) that defines who you are?
When Bill Clinton as a Democrat announced that "the times of big government are over" - he did NOT make libertarian statement (yet). A small government can also be run in a statist, unscientific manner? His statement was a jump to the center of the POLITICAL scale - towards Republicans.. but not ideologically towards libertarian (as we simply do not have the full picture of this vision).
The same is true with GW when he acknowledged the threat to the environment... yes - but what does he mean? In other words - the question: "FDA yes or no?" - is not libertarian in principle. yes it makes sense to prohibit selling cakes that kill everybody after only one bite... but the question of how to best achieve this, the HOW, is what makes it essentially libertarian (or not)?
There are libertarian thinkers on both sides - among the elephants and donkeys - they all have to live with compromise and the nature of politics? I wonder what Mr Greenspan meant in his recent post when he wrote on Amazon.com:
There was also a personal story to tell. I’d known every president from Richard Nixon to Reagan, Ford, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And what about all those other assorted characters from my childhood in New York, my years as a jazz musician, my complete career switch to economics – and my friendship with Ayn Rand? I wanted to make the leap from writing economic analysis to writing in the first person about what I’d experienced. And after years of talking “Fedspeak” in carefully calibrated congressional testimony – I could finally use my own voice!
I would like to end with a question to you. Given that libertarians can be both Republican and Democrats and that we are not comparing politics but rather ideology - "what other competing ideologies do you think are more pragmatic and real than libertarianism"?
How exactly does having a baby out of wedlock undermine marriage? It neither prevents any marriage nor hinders or harms any existing or desired marriage.
That's like saying David Boaz undermines marriage by liking cock.
Cato Caelin,
I think the fundamental difference is that Dave Boaz's sex life has no effect on the welfare of a child, but children born out-of-wedlock are by definition affected by that circumstance. And the parents are fundamentally affected since they have demonstrated a disrespect for marriage. Even if they eventually get married, to the baby momma/daddy or someone else, they are more likely to see that marriage fail.
The people who say that marriage is 'just a piece of paper,' are generally the same people whose marriages fail.
ad,
Many matrilineal societies don't work the way you think. Instead of a mother passing her posessions/title on to her daughters, it's more frequently the uncle passing his onto his sister's sons. The woman has no more power than in patrilineal societies. Of course there are a handful of societies that do follow matrilineal succession as you envision it, but they are not the rule.
Christina
Please define when a marriage "fails"? When it is over? Or when there isn't much fun over decades (because both partners do not know of alternatives)?
The bliss of getting children is still there and still oh so different from soccer mom to soccer mom and dog-owner to dog-owners? I am not saying that many do it because when they were little they were told to and never heard a socially accepted alternative... but do you know the term self-reinforcing behaviour?
There will always be several "types". Those who become bankers because they like to earn lots of money, cars, houses, travel and those who are merely drawn to the field of economics due to personal interest and many combinations in between. Is it not the same with marriage? some people work for one company all their lives and some...
my partner and I have been sharing much more than many married couples that I know. i am faithful to her because I do not want to hurt her and NOT because of God, the fear of sin/hell or because I do not find other women attractive... The ONLY difference in OUR book is that we do NOT get tax benefits. Some(times), depending on your life, you run away from domestic problems and separate and sometime you work on it (for better or worse)..
marriage - as it is defined today - is about taxes and nothing else (all other eternal human nature challenges remain)? Tax - that is the ONLY reason that I would marry? But please - Christina - enlighten me - what other benefits do I get other than that?
Cato -- You're actually illustrating exactly how out-of-wedlock births destroyed marriage. Marriage used to be the core societal institution for the raising of children. In that role, every out-of-wedlock birth was a challenge to it. With the massive rise in illegitimacy, the challenge has been so successful that the institution of marriage has been destroyed. Now there's just a type of domestic partnership between two adults we call by the old name.
By analogy, what does Gordon Brown having the power to decide where British troops are deployed have to to with the weakening of monarchy in Britain? Absolutely nothing, as long as we look at the modern monarchy; whether or not Gordon Brown withdraws troops from Iraq doesn't affect Elizabeth II's role at all. Absolutely everything, if we look at the historical role of the monarchy as direct commander of all British forces; the fact that Elizabeth II isn't making the decision is proof the monarchy has been weakened.
Warmongering Lunatic
With the massive rise in illegitimacy..
What? Illegitimacy goes back to Jesus (it was obviously not Josef but the holy milkman who helped Marry conceive?) and beyond? Where do you live - Vulcan, Saudi Arabia?
"Ok - I just read the whole verbal diarrhea by Kay Hymnowitz... It was funny! But.. it was published in the Opinion pages of the WSJ???? This was published in the WSJ????? Helloo?"
While the WSJ is a fine paper, the editorial page is widely regarded as a step below the National Enquirer. The reporters at the paper are embarrassed by it. Don't worry, I'm sure Rupert Murdoch will eliminate the disparity between the news and opinion pages.
"What? Illegitimacy goes back to Jesus (it was obviously not Josef but the holy milkman who helped Marry conceive?) and beyond? Where do you live - Vulcan, Saudi Arabia?"
For a good chunk of this country's history, it was normal (except at the highest strata of society) for couples to have their first child before marrying. It's not like many unattached women were dropping kids from multiple fathers and living alone, but it is a long way from the ideal fantasies of the religious right.
Njorl
The WSJ statement was a quick one and meant more humor than serious critique. I suppose the article is half-as-bad compared to average journalism on an average subject.
But to me there are absolutely baffling notions in the text. why can we not equate (serial or not) monogamy or at least long-term relationships as perfectly adequate to fulfill the same goals of child-bearing as does marriage?
It works for animals. It has worked for humans for millions of years...
To be frank - the only real argument against libertarians that MS Hymnowitz could derive was "marriage" and she runs with it, knowing, that many people will follow without thinking.. per default! Marriage is a marginal issue for the average libertarian. But confidence in our inherit nature is more than marginal...
Men will not turn gay if they started wearing purple, child bearing will not disappear if a bureaucratic peace of paper were to disappear? I mean - do we need a government or a church for falling in love and having sex and then feeling love and responsibility for our children?
Frankly - I do not want to live among men who think that they will turn all gay when they... and I do not want to live among women who do not believe they could be satisfied PARTNERS/mothers unless the have a certain paper from the government/the church.. I rather lived among animals who seem to be more confident in their inherent nature as mammals!
do we need a government or a church for falling in love and having sex and then feeling love and responsibility for our children?
I believe that in fact many conservatives do feel that we need a church to convince us to love the women we marry. For the small but prominent group of them who are closeted gays or serial philanderers, the logic is at least understandable.
Caliban:
So if we remove the FDA, my first thought is: what about the people and the funding and all those companies? What happens to them between shutdown and the rise of a free market substitute? How long will that be?
I generally vote Democratic and largely agree with your perspective, but I've started several companies and believe something like the FDA would very quickly be replicated in the private marketplace. It won't necessarily be better, but in the information age there is a huge opportunity for services that manage trust and reputation.
Of course, that was a lot harder to do back in the day when the FDA was created... But that's true of every industry. Once upon a time Western Union was the dominant communication company and AT&T was an upstart. If Western Union had been a government agency, they might still be on top of the heap.
"I generally vote Democratic and largely agree with your perspective, but I've started several companies and believe something like the FDA would very quickly be replicated in the private marketplace. It won't necessarily be better, but in the information age there is a huge opportunity for services that manage trust and reputation."
I agree. Keep in mind, the FDA farms out the bulk of the actual research to non-government entities. If it were eliminated, only the management of resources would need to be replaced - most* of the labs and researchers would still exist. I'm not saying I'm in favor of privatizing the FDA, I think it would be a mistake, but disruption could be kept to a minimum.
* "most", because I think the FDA keeps some in-house expertise doing research. This lets them tap their own personel for the purpose of auditing questionable outside work.
've started several companies and believe something like the FDA would very quickly be replicated in the private marketplace.
Oh absolutely -- in fact, demand for trust is so strong, there wouldn't be just one private FDA; there'd be two, or even three or four! Which one should you, the patient or doctor, trust? Up to you! And since the new safety entities would be paid by the drug companies (much like similar private bodies for corporate compliance, "green" products and so on), they wouldn't be encouraged to do such long, intensive safety studies; they'd be more inclined to get the drugs to market fast. The ones that were more stringent would lose clients to the ones that were more lenient. And if it turned out that a drug certified by one of these private entities were actually unsafe, a la Vioxx...well, actually, how would one ever find that out? Once a drug were certified, who would ever have a strong interest in checking up? And if someone tried to gather enough evidence to show that they or a relative had been harmed, and tried to take it to court -- well, it'd just be one private party's evidence against another's, and who has the deeper pockets to pay for research like that?
Of course, patients and doctors would have a simple recourse to avoid all this: they could refuse to buy any drugs that hadn't been certified for use in the European Union, which would never be so idiotic as to do something like privatizing its drug certification authorities.
Christina, I take your point, but I still think that if we are going to discuss the effects of different marriage laws, womens independence etc, we should try comparing societies with different laws.
Instead we get people declaiming that every change in our own society is inevitable, or proves whatever they believed to start with.
Like every other political debate, in fact...
Hugo,
I define the failure of a marriage as divorce. Loveless marriages still work, even if you or I wouldn't want to be in one. Hey, there has to be some reason the wives of gay/philandering men stick around, despite our own inability to understand it.
Maybe I'm coming from a distinctly personal place on this marriage topic because I'm happily married and simultaneously watching the demise of several marriages within my circle of friends and family. Without exception the death knell for those marriages could be heard long ago in conversations that made light of their commitments and displayed disrespect for each other. They weren't interesting in fixing the problems they were facing. They just wanted to get the hell out.
Obviously there exist committed unmarried couples who are far more mature and have healthy relationships, but they are few and far between, because any day either partner could just leave, and many do, because relationships require maintenance, and they don't want to bother if they don't have to.
The reason marriage is fundamentally different from committed relationships is that it is a PUBLIC (not necessarily restricted to government and church) recognition of your existence as a family unit. You are a team, together for life (presumably), and outwardly and inwardly working for the same goals. When two people in a long-term relationship break up, their friends and family may say, "man, that's tough luck," but when a marriage ends people take it very seriously, like something died. Especially when children are involved. This encourages people to take marriage more seriously, but as I discussed, too often people don't. It should be the MOST important part of their lives. Children, important though they are, are not more important than the spouse. Hopefully you will be married before you have children, and after they leave home, so maintaining a healthy marriage is vital. As one man said to me, the best thing he could do for his children's wellbeing was love his wife.
Christina, I don't see what connection you think this has to changes in the law.
I have spent the last 7 years in third-world countries which are beginning to experience the kinds of modernizing changes we in the US saw from the 1920s through the 1970s; I'm currently in Vietnam. A few things are clear. First, people here enter into marriage more lightly than we do in the developed world. They come from village societies where familial duties were enforced by tight social hierarchies, extended-family relations, and village authorities; in a village you have few choices for your spouse, and which one you get doesn't matter so much because behavior is constricted and monitored. Now they have moved to urban environments and factory jobs, they have hundreds of potential mates instead of a few, and no one to enforce social rules; but they have not developed the emotional and social tools for picking a good mate or forging one-on-one relationships. Many marriages here resemble the young, haphazard, ill-fated "war bride" 1950s marriages in the US that brought on our first divorce epidemic.
Second, women here are going through a vast emancipation. They have jobs, skills and money, and they are not interested in putting up with lazy, cheating, violent men. Men have not yet adjusted to this new reality.
It is clear to me that I am watching in some respects a replay of what happened in the US from the 20s through the 70s or so. There are going to be a lot of divorces in Vietnam in the next 20 years -- they're already starting. This has nothing to do with legal changes or with a permissive official attitude towards divorce; the state still gives awards to "happy families" here, and divorce is still stigmatized in Confucian society. But tradition is simply being forced to give way before new economic and social realities. We're not talking about some kind of superficial change in attitudes, psychology or what kinds of movies people watch. We're talking about a shift towards equal rights and more opportunity and prosperity in society, and that simply changes everything. The whole deal has to be renegotiated. I'm a family man with a strong commitment to my wife and kids. But I don't think there's any way to turn the clock back to 1955, let alone 1910.
That said, I also find it mystifying how quickly some of my American friends' marriages have dissolved in the last few years, and wonder what the hell they were thinking when they tied the knot, and when they undid it.
brooksfoe,
Please don't misunderstand me. I in no way see there being a legal remedy to the dissolution of so many marriages. I don't want to make divorce more difficult to get. It's already terribly expensive and time-consuming, and is generally a miserable experience for everyone involved. I don't even think we should make it harder to get married.
I just think that as individual members of civil society we should be more responsible with our decisions. I for one wish that my girlfriend who married a man against the advice of every friend and her pre-marital counselor would have listened to us. Then she wouldn't be going through a divorce less than 3 years later. But I certainly can't say that I want a law to be passed that says that no woman can get married unless her girlfriends say it's OK. Just because something is good or bad doesn't necessarily mean that government should get involved to reinforce/discourage it.
My larger point, that seems to have gotten lost, is that marriage is serious business and should be treated with respect.
Brooksfoe,
First, people here enter into marriage more lightly than we do in the developed world.
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That said, I also find it mystifying how quickly some of my American friends' marriages have dissolved in the last few years, and wonder what the hell they were thinking when they tied the knot, and when they undid it.
The easier it is to get out of something, the more willing people will be to get into it.
Christina, marriage, being a publicly announced intent to have a contract that two people will wokr together, be a unit...etc...also work for the gay or lesbian couple who want to make the same acknowledgement for the same reasons (minus the creation of kids, at least until biotechnology catches up with that thought)?
I believe that, yes, marriage is a serious proposition, but that making the vow in front of friends and family, acknowledging you made it, all have a much stronger commitment and feeling of commitment by the participants, than rushing to Vegas and having a marriage in front of a justice or one of the 'licensed marriage practicions,' could ever have. There are definite legalistic reasons why having that certificate is quite important.
Socrates - who can be defined as a libertarian
I'm a little rusty on my Socrates, but I was under the impression his ideal government was some sort of Authoritarian state run by Philosopher Kings.