With Republicans in the Senate recently ramping up efforts to kowtow to the paid parental leave demands of Ivanka Trump, a debate has broken out within the libertarian and conservative alliance on how to handle the matter.
One of the worst libertarian tendencies is treating people as means rather than ends, and thus treating having a baby as equivalent to a consumer choice.
— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) March 13, 2019
I agree people should pay for their kids’ needs as much as possible. I also think it’s a mistake for you to say having a kid and a job is a poor choice.
— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) March 13, 2019
Two things can be true at once. First at the end of the day, the onus is on individual parents to care for their children; second, there are fiscally responsible ways for the government to make child care as efficient, cheap, and proactive as possible.
For starters, Washington Examiner Commentary Editor Tim Carney’s central premise, that kids are not a means to an end but rather the ends themselves, is correct in nearly any system of ethical thinking that libertarians or conservatives might hold. But, to a lesser extent, so are houses and aesthetics. We still expect people to take loans to pay off their houses responsibly and plan their home ownership. Why wouldn’t we expect them to do the same with their children?
That being said, children are more of a social priority than home ownership, and it’s possible for the government to use conservative incentives to enable better parenting. An easy example of this is the deregulation of the child care industry. There’s no reason for D.C., which has an average annual infant care cost of more than $23,000, to make prices even higher by requiring sitters to have college degrees.
Furthermore, there are easy and conservative ways to enable women to access contraception more easily and cheaply. Just permit its sale over the counter, as Republicans advocated recently. (Planned Parenthood opposed this, by the way, and it’s all about money.) Claritin saw its price fall by 50 percent within the first year it went over the counter. There’s no reason the same shouldn’t happen with contraceptives.
And I oppose the Cradle Act touted by Sens. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, because it robs from current taxpayers. But what about simply expanding child tax credits? Let parents keep more of their own money instead of giving them more of ours. Unlike paid leave programs, this wouldn’t discriminate against stay-at-home parents.
Conservatives don’t have to embrace big government entitlements to make parents’ lives easier. While the fundamental role of government is to protect the rights of individuals, conservatives and libertarians alike can agree that families and free association of communities are necessary as a bulwark against the threat of big government. We ought to promote policies with positive returns on investment and those which limit government overreach rather than expand it.
