Remnant Review (April 21, 2012)
Defenders of the free enterprise system may be rare, but there are a lot more of them than of those who practice freedom. There are always more entrepreneurs around than free enterprise advocates, but I am not talking about entrepreneurs. I am talking about the depressingly short supply of free enterprise defenders who make micro-economic decisions in terms of a philosophy of open competition on a price-oriented market. The temptation of temporary economic advantage lures capitalist after capitalist into the arms of the statist regulating agencies. The micro-economic decisions at the level of the individual and the firm are the crucial ones, and it is precisely here that the war against statism is being lost.
Yet, if the firm seems to be an area of retreat, the family is a philosophical disaster area. Men and women who are personally committed to the idea of the moral superiority of the voluntary market and private ownership seem incapable of grasping the parental role of imparting their faith to their children. The family is the training ground for children in every sphere of their young lives. Why should the concept of private ownership and personal responsibility be deferred until the child reaches his teens? If the first eight years are the crucial ones in the development of the child's perception of things, the establishment of his habits, the beginning of his intellectual tools, and the channeling of his emotions, then why are these years so ignored by parents as a time of training in the ideas of property?
Is there any concept that a child learns more rapidly than the concept of "mine"? I know virtually nothing of Soviet education at the preschool level, but I am certain that "correcting" this concept gives the teachers at the child day-care centers their most difficult intellectual problem. Unfortunately, the child does not seem to learn the equally important concept of "yours" with anything like the same facility. It would seem to be a moral problem with the child, not an intellectual one. That is why the authority of the parent is so vital in getting the child to acknowledge the validity of both of these interlocked concepts.
Children learn at astonishing rates of speed. All parents take pride in this fact, yet not one parent in a hundred really seems to understand just how fast his child does learn. The ability of a child to understand and act in terms of the most subtle human nuances--the look, the change of voice, a parent's weariness--is so great that it puts to shame whole teams of social psychologists and their computer cards. Children are connivers; they are seldom stupid. At times they seem to affect stupidity in order to better expedite their conniving. Parents who fail to see the signs of an infant's con job only confirm the child in any lack of respect he may have for the family. Children see and they remember differences between stated principles and demonstrated action. That is a child's means of survival, and he learns it very well and very early.
Parents for centuries have used the phrase, "Do as I say and not as I do," as a cover for their own moral weaknesses. A child may do just as his parent says, but in all likelihood he is thinking something very different. The mind of the child must be challenged by something more than brute force as he grows older; the sooner his mind is challenged, the better. Force, used to conquer a child's rebellious will, does not guarantee anything about the state of the child's thoughts. Yet, in the long run, the parent's real battle is for the mind of his child; and there are innumerable competing institutions that are in the business of intellectual conversion. The competition begins the day the child goes to school.
If the concept of private property is worth defending, and if personal responsibility is the moral basis of private property, then the family must be the scene of the child's introduction to the responsibilities of ownership. Sadly, most parents have been so utterly compromised--morally compromised--by the collectivistic concept of "the well-integrated child" that they fail to take advantage of a marvelous opportunity to teach their children the meaning of responsible ownership. These same parents are later shocked to discover that their teenager has abandoned "bourgeois concepts of property and morality." The child drops out of his tax-supported university, joins a commune, and openly defies the parent to stop him. Of course he has no respect for such bourgeois concepts; he was never expected to adopt them! The family structure that produced him never rewarded him in terms of those concepts. He might have been expected to do well individually outside the family--in school, in athletics, and so forth--but not inside the family.
Take, for example, the idea of "sharing." All well-integrated children share their toys with their brothers and sisters and with all the other boys and girls they play with. "Let Billy play with your airplane, sweetheart." Now "sweetheart" may know very well that Billy is a semiprofessional demolitionist, but he is supposed to let Billy play with his airplane, whether or not it took him a week to build it. Or maybe "sweetheart" is just another Ebenezer Scrooge. It really does not matter one way or the other. If Mama enforces her request that Billy be allowed to play with the airplane, she has begun to undercut the idea of ownership in the mind of her child. A request is one thing; enforcement is another. The child should be given the right to ignore the request without physical reprisal from his mother or Billy.
The parent can always give a whole barrage of cogent reasons why sharing is preferable to stinginess: people do not like selfish people, people will not share their toys with selfish people (which is, I think, the really effective argument), selfish people are mean, selfish people become social outcasts. Yet, the child is simultaneously informed that it is impossible to buy people's friendship. It is up to him to balance these competing propositions in his own mind. (If the parent thinks this is a tough knot to untie, wait until he tries to explain that God's favor cannot be purchased, but that faith without works is dead.) In any case, the decision ought to be the child's. If there are social costs associated with being selfish, let the child find out for himself, and let him evaluate them in terms of his own psychic needs. Maybe he likes toys better than friends. Maybe he will grow up to be like Howard Hughes. But it will have been his option, and he will have borne the costs. That is what the free society is all about. It cannot guarantee that everyone will grow up liked (or even well-liked, as Willie Loman saw life's goal), but it can see to it that everyone pays his own share.
Children are not stupid concerning group relationships. They understand why and how their peers operate. They have a larger stake in this kind of understanding than their parents could have; parental memories grow increasingly dim with age, and parents often have many other things to worry about. A child's concentration is focused. He learns to predict how his actions will be received. He may not act in terms of what he knows, but he is continually learning. If he thinks that he ought to share with others, he will. He can test his parents' remarks about the benefits of sharing. If he likes the results, fine; if not, he bears the costs. It is a very good, and from the parent's point of view, very inexpensive form of training.
If the parent continually interferes with the right of the child to do what he wants with his own property, he is setting up the child for every kind of collectivist panacea. He will learn that titles to property are less valid than the ability to manipulate the authorities to your own purposes. He will learn that the authorities cannot be trusted to fulfill their promises with respect to ownership. He will learn that "yours" really is not that fundamental a concept, since "mine" is not enforced either. He will learn very early of the realities of what Ayn Rand has called "the economy of pull."
If a child is not taught the meaning of personal responsibility from the beginning, the family has failed in part of its function. That is why enforced sharing is so insidious. It destroys the links between ownership, power, and responsibility. The parent who makes his child share anything with anyone for any reason (other than disciplinary action for an infraction against another child's right of ownership) is courting long-run rebellion. He can suggest; he dare not enforce.
It should come as no surprise that violation of the rights of property by a parent brings with it an immediate punishment. I have seen parents spend whole evenings trying to straighten out what can only be described as property disputes among children. Hours and hours of listening to "Johnny took my fire engine," and "Bobby took my Baby Jane Throw-up Doll," and "Well, she won't give me back my Frankenstein monster." It must drive them crazy, as it does me; but I can go home later on. Kids are manipulators by trade, as all people without power have to be; if the parent sets himself up as the allocator of children's scarce resources, he can expect to spend a lot of time at that task.
Children can disrupt the family for so many reasons. They hit each other, tease each other, knock each other down stairs, compete for parental affection. That is what they do collectively; individually they can be equally trying on a parent. "When they're quiet, I worry," is a universal sentiment among mothers. So when the property issue is added to the long list of parental harassment devices, it ought to be shut off from the start. Each child must learn very early that the rights of his brothers must be respected, and that when the parent learns of an infraction, punishment follows with the regularity of a machine. Not that the parent comes in and settles the dispute in a friendly way, but that he comes in and settles it by swift justice. If the parent is only a friendly mediator, he will be a harassed mediator; no kid will cooperate with his brother when he thinks the authorities will only restore the status quo ante. He has nothing to lose and the toy to gain, and his brother knows it. But if he knows that the minute the story of his infraction gets to the parent, he will be punished, he may begin to see the advantages of self-discipline. He may begin to mature. (If states would see the truth of this with respect to mediating labor-management disputes, there would be fewer strikes and fewer non-negotiable demands--i.e., there would be more industrial maturity.)
There is one justification that is used by children for every kind of deviation: "He wouldn't give my toy to me, so I. . . ." A parent who stands ready to enforce the right of property in his household will not have to listen to that one; he can punish both the thief (for that is what he is) and the vigilante who retaliated. He can encourage victims to come to him because they can trust him to uphold them in their arguments. We expect that much as adults from the civil authorities; we should provide it in that sphere where we are the officials. We should be able to be trusted, day in and day out, to render justice, whether we are tired, happy, sour, busy. The regularity of justice, the very predictability of it, is more respected by the child than any theories that a parent might spin in those rare heart-to-heart talks. It takes self-discipline in an adult to provide this kind of regularity; that is why there is truth to the phrase that delinquent parents are the chief cause of delinquent children. The lack of self-discipline becomes a heritage of families throughout several generations.
A judicious use of the weekly allowance should be started as soon as the child can say, "Buy it for me" at the supermarket. He learns what buying means very early. That is why supermarket psychologists set up the candy counters by the check-out stands, and at eye level for tots. They know that few mothers have the moral fiber to say no to a squalling child; at least, they will not do it every time. The best argument to "Get it for me," is "Shut up or I'll tan your hide" (if it is meant); the second best answer is "Buy it yourself." The older the child, the better is the second answer.
One of the appalling things I have witnessed over the years is the sight of parents at church giving their children money to put in the collection plate. They think they are teaching their children to sacrifice for God. They underrate the child's intelligence. He knows quite well the difference between "giving" and acting as a financial broker for a parent. If a parent plays this game, the child should be told that he can keep every cent of it to use as he would his other income. Then the child can learn what sacrifice is. If the parents hold to the ancient and respected custom of tithing, then the child should be encouraged to tithe his income. But the only justification for a parent's requiring the child to tithe would be that the elders over the parent have the same institutional option. If he is not institutionally obligated to tithe, then the old rule holds: do as I say and as I do, for they are of one piece. The child should not be forced to tithe. The Bible says that God honors a cheerful giver; that is what the child should be taught to be.
The defense of the free market cannot be made simply in terms of charts and graphs and technical explanations of market efficiency by professional economists. It must be defended by a willingness on the part of its supporters to understand its principles and apply them in all the relevant spheres of their personal lives. "But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves," wrote the Apostle James. Indeed; if a parent is not willing to take the time to apply the principles that he professes to hold most dear within the confines of the institution that he holds most dear, he is not serious about his commitment to those principles. If parents use the family as a zone of safety from the responsibility of laboring to apply basic moral principles, then they should be ready to see their children on television during the mass arrests at the local university. If the principles of private ownership and personal responsibility are not worth teaching by word and example to one's children, they are not worth teaching at all.
Well, what do you think? Do you think this is all theoretical and hopelessly impractical when dealing with children? Or do you think that this approach would work for most parents in most societies most of the time? Do you think that children learn to share even though their parents do not require them to share? Do you think that it is a good idea to make tattle tales out of your children?
I wrote the previous article when I was 29 years old and single. It appeared in the September 1971 issue of The Freeman. It was in that month that I joined the senior staff of the foundation for economic education, the publisher of The Freeman. I have been writing for the magazine since February of 1967.
I was an only child. I knew nothing about interaction with brothers and sisters. I had one cousin, and we had lived under the same household on two occasions: in the fifth and again in the sixth grade. She and I got along fine. I lived with her parents. We did not argue about property. I do not think we argued about anything, except about whether on Saturday nights we were going to watch Red Ryder, which was my cousin's choice, or Tim McCoy, which was my choice.
She was an only child. So was I.
In other words, the article was entirely theoretical. I had no experience as a parent when I wrote it. The article was based on my understanding of what constitutes the proper defense of private property by a lawful authority.
I was to gain a great deal of experience beginning in 1975, when our daughter was born.
My wife and I raised four children by using this strategy. I was convinced before we got married that this is the best way to go with my children. I do not know if my wife really agreed with me, but she went along with it. We found that our children did not argue very often about property.
Whenever there was a dispute, I would ask this question: "Whose toy is it?" There was never any question about this, but I wanted to remind the violator of the principle of private property. The owner of the property did not have to say that the property was his. The violator always admitted that it was the other child's toy. Then I would impose some sort of penalty. In all cases, the violator had to return the toy to its rightful owner. I never asked any of them to share anything with a sibling. But they often did share on their own.
I might say, "It's a good idea to share, but you do not have to." That was all it took. They learned.
I was predictable about property rights. The children learned very early that it would do no good to take each other's toys. We did have this advantage: there was an age gap between children of the same gender. This was the birth order: girl, boy, girl, boy. That probably helped to reduce conflicts over who owned what.
One of the children, the youngest, was the main perpetrator. He was the one who was most likely to borrow his older brother's things. He had the most difficulty in developing respect for the concept of "yours." This stayed with him until he was in his early 20s. At that point, he began to learn to budget his money, a skill which the other three had learned before they were teenagers. They were very good with their money. He tended to be the one who had no savings. But, toward the end of his life, he turned around. He finally began to get a handle on both his time and his money. He was afflicted with some sort of neurological disorder. He could only sleep a few hours a night. Very often, he would sleep in a bathtub, because of the spasms that he would get if he was in bed. He had a tough time toward the end. But, on the whole, the affliction seemed to turn him around. The old saying is true: better late than never. There is no question in my mind that the strategy we used to teach our children respect for each other's property was the correct strategy. All of the children were good about sharing with one another. All of them were good about sharing with their friends. The fact that their parents did not force them to share in no way restrained the development of their sense of ethics regarding sharing. They always shared voluntarily. There was never any form of coercion on them to share their toys or anything else with their siblings. We taught them that it is a good principle to share wisely, just so long as you are not being exploited or taken advantage of. They understood this principle from an early age.
Because the children knew that there would be inevitable negative sanctions for violations of property rights, our children did not become tattle tales. They knew that the other children would rat on them if they violated their property rights. They knew there would be inevitable punishment. They knew it did no good to take each other's toys. So, there were not many opportunities for any of the children to perform the ancient and supposedly dishonorable function of ratting on the brothers and sisters.
I was always clear with them that they had better come to me to get it settled -- that for anybody to use threats or violence or retaliation against the perpetrator was prohibited. I made it very clear that I was in charge, and they were not. But, in order to gain cooperation on this basis, I had to enforce negative sanctions on the violators. I had to be predictable. In matters of property rights, I was.
It is important that parents teach their children from an early age that they do not have the right to impose violence on any of their siblings. This teaches him that coercion is wrong.
My children learned early that their parents would impose coercion, but since they were all subject to the same kinds of sanctions, they regarded the system of law enforcement as just. They knew they could get justice in parental courts. This predictability reduced the number of infractions.
What our children saw in us, I hoped would serve as examples of how civil government should operate. They should not be in the forced-sharing business. They should not vote for politicians who pass laws that require people to share and share alike.
Those kinds of laws are deeply resented by millions of others, and they lead to concealment of wealth. People want to hide their wealth from the tax collector. This reduces voluntary cooperation in society. When people are fearful of losing their property to a grasping bureaucrat, they hide their wealth. But this makes cooperation that much more difficult.
Today's children have a real problem in understanding how the private property system works. They are forced to attend bureaucratic educational institutions run by the state. Within those institutions, there constantly at risk of being bullied. The bullies have no respect for property other than their own. They have no respect for the concept of "yours." So, we find a generation of students who understand that the authorities cannot protect them or their property. They lose respect for adults generally, because the adults they deal with have no philosophical understanding of the private property social order.
The older they get, the more they are taught by adults who are committed to some version of Keynesian economics, if the teachers have any respect for economic thought at all. The higher the students go in the educational system, the more likely they are going to be taught by left-wing Democrats. When I was in college, the standard professor was a standard Democrat, which meant that he believed in state intervention into the market.
After the student revolts of 1965 through 1971, the most radical of my peers went to grad school to avoid being sent to Vietnam. The obvious place to get a job if you had a doctorate was in higher education. That hope began to fade in the spring of 1969, when the PhD glut finally hit. It hit right on schedule. Senior academics had known for years that that would be the year of reckoning. And so it was. Nevertheless, in the social sciences and humanities, there was a leftward drift of academia, as men and women who had been in graduate school in the late 1960s, and who had been radicalized by that experience, began entering the campuses as junior professors. By the 1980s, they were receiving tenure, and by the 1990s, they were generally in control of higher education
These people took very seriously the old phrase, "share and share alike." They were determined to persuade their students of the legitimacy of the federal government intervening into the economy and into the lives of citizens in order to force them to share and share alike. What was taught to them as children by their parents, they carried with them into graduate school.
A few of them were able to get positions within the federal government, and some of them rose to the level of senior policymakers. These people were determined to expand the power of the federal government so that everyone would be forced to share and share alike.
The very rich pay about 30% of their income to the federal government, on the assumption (correct) that the corporations they invest in pay taxes on their behalf. If we figure this way, they pay about 30% of their income to the federal government. A recent report indicated that Warren Buffett paid something like 17% of his income in federal taxes last year. It is not accurate if corporate taxes are factored in.
At 30%, the tax rate is three times higher than the prophet Samuel identified as tyrannical (I Sam. 8:14, 17). As long as the system works this way, the best way to deal with it is to shrink it. The best way to persuade voters to shrink it is to raise them as children to respect private property, and you have a clear understanding of who owns what. They grow up in a family structure where the parents enforce property rights, and the violators suffer negative sanctions.
Think about the standard public school. The adults do not want to make a decision as to who is right and who is wrong. So, if a fight breaks out, both of the students are punished equally. But, since the adult knows that one of the two is basically innocent, or least he suspects this, the penalty is light, because the adult does not want to penalize the victim too much. He is willing to penalize the victim a little bit, but he does not want to be excessive. This teaches the victims that they cannot get justice from adults. It teaches them that the system is against him, and if they want to survive in the system, they better be running it.
Hayek wrote a famous essay, "Why the Worst Get on Top." It appears in chapter 10 of his book, The Road to Serfdom. He argued that whenever the state becomes an agency of wealth redistribution through power which interferes in the lives of citizens, the kinds of people who want to get to the top of the system are exactly the people that you do not want to be at the top of the system. They are the most ruthless participants in the society. They understand power, and they respect it. When given the opportunity, they seek it. They will claw their way to the top.
What children need very early is the understanding that adults are fair and just. They also need to know that their property is protected. They need to know that in case their property is violated, they can go to their parents and get justice. They do not want the concept of shared share alike. They especially do not want this concept when it has to do with punishment that is deserved by one and not the other. They do not think that they should be the ones punished when they are innocent. Yet that is what parents do too often. They do not want to go to the trouble of finding out who really is responsible for the aggression, so they punish both of the children. This is exactly what the public school administrators do, too.
In an earlier era, parents could have the luxury of forcing children to share and share alike. But, in today's society, the child is under ideological assault. The authorities are constantly trying to persuade him that either somebody owes him something, or that he owes somebody else something. If he takes this seriously, he has two choices. First, he can become a recipient of the benefits of coercion. Second, he can become the victim of the system. Governments today create people with the victim mentality, and these people either become predators or else their very presence in society justifies power seekers within the government to redistribute wealth in their direction, by way of the federal government, in order to increase their own personal advancement up the chain of command.
I was convinced in 1971 that I would not raise my children in that kind of environment. In retrospect, that was one of the better decisions of my life. Fortunately, my wife went along with it, even though sometimes she may have thought that the system was too impersonal. My children became good money managers, and all of them have a servant's mentality. They share their time and their money with people who have less money.
So, I recommend my system. It may not work for you, but it worked for me, and it seems to have worked for my children.
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