Family Questions / The Family Wage

...Rather than fretting about prejudice and discrimination, they are mainly concerned with lax courts and escalating crime...

...In addition—as the Swedes have shown—"parents relieved of financial, social, and moral responsibility for their children soon lose interest in offspring altogether...

...Friedan became the prototype of the college-educated, upper-income woman who was not happy with raising children or doing volunteer work, but wanted a full-time, salaried job...

...The logic was obvious...

...Very quickly, the system would unravel and all women would be impelled back into the work force...

...They are not ghettoized or discriminated against in housing (in fact, they are usually preferred as tenants...

...Higher men's wages only made it more attractive to employ women and children...

...Much more difficult, however, is proposing where we should go next...

...The same trend is occurring in middle-class America, but is masked by immigration and high reproductive rates among the poor...

...Malls, concludes Carlson, are widely embraced precisely because they are "havens for a normal, relatively decent life amidst the ruins of the postliberal, postdemocratic" society...

...This movement was generally successful...

...39...

...Bequeathed with perfect domesticity, the couple soon decide "this plum is too ripe...

...The burgeoning bureaucracy soon decided that women made a more attractive reform constituency than blacks, and the family wage was on its way to oblivion...

...The result was a "living wage," by which a man, in doing a week's work, could provide for his wife and family...

...Nor are the elderly in dire economic straits...

...Certainly, they are forced into retirement by Social Security laws, but in exempted categories they hold their own and better...

...Reinstituting the system, her critic charged, would require a "massive downward redistribution in income...

...All his positions are carefully laid out and supported by meticulous research and precise reasoning...

...Indeed, by 1980, twice as many elderly parents reported giving financial support to their grown children as reported receiving support from them...

...Si monumentum requiris, circumspice...

...Such a shift in incentives would encourage mothers to stay home and raise their children—more of them—while giving fathers a better chance to make a living...

...As another example of Carlson's dialectic, take his gloss on the "Ageism Scam...

...Carlson has testified before Congress, made it into the rolodex of the New York Times, and is frequently given "observer" status at liberal powwows on poverty and family issues...

...FAMILY QUESTIONS: REFLECTIONS ON THE AMERICAN SOCIAL CRISIS Allan C. Carlson/Transaction Books/$34.95 THE FAMILY WAGE: WORK, GENDER, AND CHILDREN IN THE MODERN ECONOMY Bryce Christensen, Allan C. Carlson, Maris Vinovskis, Richard Vedder, and Jean Bethke Elstain The Rockford Institute/$9.95 paper F or several years now, Allan Carl- ". son has been one of the best-kept secrets of the conservative community...

...Who would have known, for example, that shopping malls were first introduced into America as a socialist viWilliam Ricker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent...

...Minimum-wage schemes for women and children were upheld by the courts—as opposed to efforts to set minimum wages for everybody...

...In 1964—as a kind of morbid joke—a Virginia congressman proposed that "discrimination against women" be attached to the Civil Rights Act, which was aimed primarily at helping blacks...

...The family wage was born of nineteenth-century reform and eventually adopted through legislation, court decisions, and widely observed social customs...

...The National Association of Manufacturers was a perennial opponent of family wage schemes...

...The elderly, it turns out, are widely respected throughout the country...

...But he has been unknown to the broader public...

...A t the heart of Carlson's analysis of contemporary society is his archeological unearthing of the "family wage," a historical phenomenon utterly critical to our time but still largely unrecognized...

...The family wage was also enforced through a widely observed, although never fully legislated, rule that married women could not hold full-time jobs...

...The first was the business-owners themselves, who wanted to be free to tap cheap labor...

...That is why I cannot completely share Carlson's pessimism...

...Child labor was finally banned (although not until 1940) and women were generally THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 restricted to job categories in which they did not compete with men...

...America, it seems to me, is slowly finding its way back to marriage and childrearing in much the same way...

...More than anyone else, he seems capable of articulating exactly what it is the American people are saying when they pull the lever for Ronald Reagan or George Bush, election after election...

...Carlson admits he has toyed with the idea of a "natural" family wage—the notion that, if left to its own devices, the market may create a system in which women are not forced to work...

...With the publication of these two books, Carlson emerges as one of the most profoundly sensible voices on the American landscape...

...But he is not too optimistic...

...West Germany, Austria, and Sweden are reproducing at only 60-70 percent of replacement level...

...Oblivious of all causality, however, the Democrats blame it on Ronald Reagan...

...The result, of course, was the usual cranking into gear of the bureaucracy...

...They are commonly overrepresented on the poverty rolls, but only because poverty statistics grossly overestimate their housing costs: two-thirds of the population over age 65 lives in homes owned free and clear, while only one-fifth of other adults do...

...The second was a coterie of radical feminists—for many years concentrated in the National Women's party—who did not care about preserving the family but wanted equal access to the job market...

...Not incidentally, the Social Security system was simultaneously transformed from a modest pension plan (the maximum payroll deduction in 1965 was $174) into a runaway entitlement (the deduction for a $30,000 self-employed person is now over $3,000...

...Its main strategy was to raise the income of male heads of households by closing the labor market to children and married women...

...They set about shortening hours, improving working conditions, and setting minimum wages for women and children...

...38 sion by Austrian architect Victor Griin, who wanted to provide "crystallization points for suburbia's community life," after concluding that capitalism had ruined the cities...

...Carlson documents this phenomenon by citing a stunning passage from Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England, in which Engels described a Yorkshire craftsman sitting at home darning socks while his wife and children worked at the factory...

...The family wage went by the boards in the late 1950s, probably beginning at the moment Betty Friedan was asked to leave her newspaper job after getting married...

...He would finance these losses by raising tax rates 1.5 to 2 percent...

...In a 1974 essay entitled "Two Cheers for ZPG," Norman Ryder told Americans that "a collective commitment to population replacement is a defensible posture only if we assume that whatever it is that we are proud of must be transmitted biologically...

...Much of our current prosperity, says Carlson, comes from "consuming [our] ghost children...

...With the socialization of care for the elderly, however, people have discovered they can live off other people's children...

...Like many others before him, he may be underestimating the enormous resiliency of the American people...

...What is most fascinating, Carlson points out, is that none of the brouhaha about ageism was based on the slightest shred of evidence...

...As a result, birth rates in countries with comprehensive old-age pensions have dropped far below zero population growth...

...Aficionados of this powerful publication (now co-written with Bryce Christensen and retitled The Family in America) have awaited its arrival with the same enthusiasm usually reserved for a magazine like—well, The American Spectator...

...The elderly are strongly represented in state legislatures and exercise more influence over local communities than does any other age group...

...Engels blamed this "universal decadence of family life among the workers" on capitalism...

...Conferences were held, directives issued, niceties of language prescribed—the whole bouquet of liberal thought-control, based on the premise that whatever the advantages or disadvantages of aging, they were all the product of other people's minds...

...No proselytizer of ageism ever took the trouble to interview elderly people and gather proof of actual grievances...

...Lacking other alternatives, he proposes a series of tax breaks to families with children that would cost the Treasury $40 billion a year...

...A 1916 survey found that, after twenty years of effort, four times as many women and children were in the work force as in 1896...

...As Carlson points out, their schemes would only create a loveless, depersonalized, daycare society (and make single-motherhood economically more viable...

...Is Carlson exaggerating...

...Unfortunately, these efforts soon bumped up against the laws of supply and demand...

...Ironically, in contemporary America, families with children have become just another special-interest group...

...Its purpose was to guarantee THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 a "living wage" to the head of every family...

...Thus when researchers finally started surveying social attitudes toward the elderly, they found them almost the opposite of what the apostles of ageism were proclaiming...

...Labor unions, progressive Catholics, social-gospel Protestants, Progressives, and feminists—all joined together in the attempt to create a "family wage...

...Allowing both a man and his wife to earn full salaries, however, was considered an unethical "double-dipping...

...The horror of nineteenth-century capitalism, after all, was that it made no distinctions among men, women, and children...

...In other words, says Carlson, what we have is a "decadent intelligentsia presiding over collective suicide...

...Single women were allowed to pursue careers because they were supporting only themselves...

...One of the most common reasons people have had children, he notes, is that grown children are generally considered a potential means of support in old age...

...Working out of the Rockford Institute in Illinois, Carlson has been publishing a series of minor masterpieces in Persuasion at Work, the institutes monthly newsletter...

...Jean Bethke Els tain, one of the coauthors of The Family Wage, tells of being savaged by a radical feminist a few years ago after casually suggesting that the family wage wasn't such a bad idea...

...Even the Democrats have become unnerved by the relentless economic pressures that force 50 percent of new mothers back into the work force...

...Women's wages were set at 54 percent of that level...

...Today we live in a world created by the collapse of the family wage...

...A panoply of worldwide reformers thought differently...

...By raising the price of female and child labor, they made it more economical to hire men...

...This would encourage him to send his wife to work, lowering still another man's wage, and so on down the line...

...According to an old rumor Carlson uncovers, the National Women's party was being secretly funded by the National Association of Manufacturers...

...They can have smaller families, or no children at all, saving themselves the enormous expense of childrearing while still remaining secure in their old age...

...Karl Marx criticized the same conditions and fully expected them to lead to revolution...

...One polemicist complained that Pepsi-Cola's jingle, "You've got a lot to live and Pepsi's got a lot to give," was "ageist" because it reminded older people that they didn't have much longer to live...

...T'world is turned upside down...

...Reading Carlson, I am reminded of The Fantastiks, the early 1960s play about a suburban boy and girl who are tricked into marriage by their conniving fathers...

...The system left only two groups dissatisfied...

...Here was yet another persecuted minority, subject to disrespect, treated with callous neglect, discriminated against, and in need of the intervention of the welfare state...

...Whether the family can be put back together again, neither Carlson nor any of his co-authors seem sure...

...He extends the list to include childbearing, sexual modesty, the suburbs, churchgoing, common decency, and so on...

...From the speeches of Theodore Roosevelt and the works of St...

...Not that Carlson should in any way be confused with his liberal counterparts, who want to socialize parenthood through national day care, child allowances, and so forth...

...In The Family Wage, the Rockford Institute has dedicated a whole volume to curing this historical amnesia...

...It might seem so—except that, once again, he is able to parade yet another liberal dimwit who gladly confirms the whole thing...

...During the early seventies, Carlson notes, a whole literature suddenly appeared chronicling the injustices allegedly suffered by America's older people...

...There is plenty of Wark for Wemen and Bairns [children] in this quarter but very little for men," the tearful fellow told Engels...

...What makes Carlson so different is that he is not simply preaching or expounding noble sentiments...

...Carlson is a foursquare defender of mainstream American values—home, family, and religion...

...If one married woman worked, she would lower another man's wage...

...After installing their labor-saving machinery, factory owners were only too happy to dismiss high-priced journeymen and hire their wives and children instead...

...Yet don't think for a minute that liberals don't understand what's going on when their own interests are at stake...

...I n these two books, Carlson and his colleagues have given us a very clear idea of where we are and how we got there...

...Nevertheless, the "ageism scam" was not without consequence...

...Now that's real socialism for you...

...Or who could anticipate Carlson's defense of these same malls as revivals of medieval manors, where the ability to defend private property has prevented publicly used spaces from being invaded by the wackos and derelicts who have used their constitutional rights to overrun airports and bus terminals...

...They abandon each other for a life of adventure...

...The most self-conscious effort was made in Australia, where national industrial boards fixed men's wages at a level that could support a "family of five...

...Seeing the failure of the Australian effort, reformers in Europe and America took a different tack...

...his forte is scholarship, a mastery of the literature ranging through history, sociology, philosophy, and psychology...

...This purely social market intervention accomplished two things: it allowed married women to stay home and raise their children, and it raised men's wages by limiting the size of the work force...

...But after many disappointments and disillusionments they eventually reunite, deciding that the calm, domestic life they left behind really wasn't so bad after all...

...Instead, he argued, we should satisfy our "thrust toward immortality . . . by efforts to ensure that future generations share our values, whether or not they share our genes...

...As an antidote to liberal civilization, however—and as a source of that resilience—Carlson is unsurpassed...

...Labor-force participation, originally perceived as a fetching option for well-educated women, has become a necessity for nearly all women...

...It bears down particularly hard—as Carlson grimly notes—on families just starting to incur the enormous expense of raising children...

...That may be about to change...

...As Carlson points out, the growing socialization of care for the elderly through government pensions has created perverse incentives leading to a precipitously declining birth rate, both in this country and in Europe...

...Augustine to the writings of some obscure nineteenth-century reformer—Carlson brings them together into an exciting panorama of intellectual history...