Why Aren’t Men Responding to Economic Signals?
7th April 2013
Not too many decades ago the US and the rest of the western world had marriage as the central organizing philosophy for family structure. This was a structure which created an incentive for men to produce more than they required for their own consumption and encouraged them to take on the responsibility of a family. This system not only benefited children, but men and women as well. Women benefited from the protection and resources husbands provided to them and the children they bore. Men were provided the only socially and morally sanctioned access to sex as well as the prestige and satisfaction which came from leading a family. Society as a whole benefited because children had the advantages of growing up in an intact home and men were willing to work extremely hard to produce the required surplus.
Through a combination of legal and social “reforms”, the US now has what appears on the surface to be a dual family structure but is in legal reality a single family structure organized around the concept of child support. Where in the past a woman needed to secure a formal promise from a man in the form of marriage before she could expect him to support her and the children she bore, in this new structure the law declares that any man she has children by are bound to support her and her children whether she marries or not, and whether or not she honors her own marriage vows.
While men were motivated under the old family structure, they absolutely detest the new child support system of family formation. Under the old system a man who married before fathering children could reasonably expect access to his children and the opportunity to direct their upbringing (in concert with his wife). Under the new system the children are de facto considered the property of the mother, whom the state compels him to pay so she can direct their upbringing generally as she sees fit. Since the new system has removed the incentive for men to work hard to provide for their families, it has to rely instead on threats of imprisonment to coerce men into earning “enough” income. Where men used to take pride in the birth of their children and celebrate with cigars, large numbers of men now fear fatherhood more than anything.