Our age is an extremely individualistic one. This may sound wrong to the observer who sees collectivism on the rise, but collectivism and individualism are not opposites, as philosophers Alexis de Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt explained — they are two sides of the same coin.
The less you trust and depend on your fellow man, including your family, the more you rely on the government. And the more intrusive the government, the less room there is for family and community.
These days, the individualistic collectivists are targeting marriage. Economists in two recent studies make the case for individualizing families and diminishing marriage.
A husband and wife shouldn’t be considered a unit, argue economists from the University of Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. In 2023, the trio argued that everyone would be better off if the IRS treated a married couple as two different adults.
The economists think they are just being clear-eyed analysts, but they are unwittingly preaching a particular notion of marriage and even a hidden anthropology.
It’s easy for them to miss, because these are the dominant assumptions among today’s elite. They see humans as fundamentally atomized individuals and marriage as a bilateral contract for the advantage of each individual.
A “family” is just an accounting fiction in this mindset.
Their reason for the IRS to pretend marriage doesn’t exist is almost as perverse: “When married couples are taxed individually, a more progressive tax system leads to higher labor force participation and thus more labor market experience (higher human capital) in the economy.”
That is, the economists think that too many parents are spending too much time with their children, and changing the tax code will push more couples to adopt the dual-income model (and probably have smaller families).
The secondary benefit, to the economists, is that this will make it easier for the government to increase tax rates and thus increase the size of government.
More time in the office, less time with children, bigger government: win, win, win!
But that’s not the weirdest recent study along these lines. Cambridge University Press’s journal Politics and the Life Sciences published “Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men.”
The three psychiatrists behind this paper urged governments to launch “large resource transfers … to motivate sufficient individualistic reproduction.” That is, get rid of sex and marriage, and subsidize in vitro fertilization and single-motherhood-by-choice.
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The common theme between these papers: have the government intervene to break up the natural bond between men and women (and baby-making) so as to make us all more autonomous individuals, disconnected from one another.
That doesn’t sound great, unless you think the problem is too much family and cohesion, and not enough government and individualism.