capitalism

F
FAMILY
The social institution of the family has not received a great
deal of attention from libertarian theorists. Because it is primarily
concerned with political ideas, libertarianism has
emphasized the legitimate limits of the state and the ability
of voluntary associations to help achieve social goals. Those
associations have first and foremost been those connected
with the market economy. However, in the last decade or
two, libertarians have paid increasing attention to the crucial
role played by other social institutions, among them,
although less so, the family. The family presents at least two
sets of issues for libertarians: the relationship between the
family and the state in general, and the tension between
parental rights and the rights and interests of children.
As they do with many other institutions, libertarians can
find no rationale for the state to intervene in providing support
for the traditional family or in helping shape the various
forms that the modern family takes. Historically, the
relationship between the family and the state has been a
close one. The institution of the family was not created by
the state, but rather emerged out of prehistoric needs for
forging cooperative networks of extended kin in order to
survive in the face of scarce resources and to provide for
the needs of helpless infants. However, much of the
family’s evolution in the last several hundred years has
been shaped by the state’s attempts to support or punish
various forms that the family might take. Examples include
everything from coverture laws (the merger of a woman’s
rights into those of her husband at marriage) and other
restrictions on women as individuals, to regulations on who
could marry whom, to tax code incentives that punish secondary
earners (usually women) or that reward having
larger families.
Much discussion about the degree to which the state
should encourage or prevent particular familial forms has
obscured a question that is more important to libertarians,
which is ensuring that families are able to perform their
evolved functions and are allowed to continue to evolve
within the economic, political, and social contexts in
which they operate. Families are in this way part of an
ongoing, unplanned, social evolutionary process that is
driven by the wants of individuals and their own judgments
about how to accomplish the various ends they are
pursuing. Just as libertarians believe, in general, that the
diverse economic wants of individuals can be best met by
the unplanned coordination of millions of individual judgments
made possible by the market, so they have argued
that families need the same degree of freedom to create
forms that address their own needs.
The state, libertarians argue, should strive to remove
itself from issues involving the family (beyond any role it
might have in protecting individual rights), and, where it
cannot remove itself, should seek to make itself neutral
with respect to the kinds of families people might wish to
form. The contemporary debate among libertarians over
same-sex marriage illustrates these two principles. The
ideal solution from a libertarian perspective is to get the
state out of the marriage business altogether and turn marriage
contracts into private arrangements between the parties
involved, with religious institutions having their own
freedom to sanctify whatever marriages they might desire.
The more contentious debate among libertarians has been
over whether it is an appropriate second-best solution to
allow the state to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
For some libertarians, in a world where the state is
intimately involved in the marriage process, it is incumbent
on government to treat all citizens alike; therefore, it
should offer marriage on equivalent terms to any two
adults. For others, the desire for equal treatment extends
the state’s reach into marriage even further, which is especially
misguided given the first-best alternative of getting
out of marriage altogether.
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