“Rounding Up” is a newsletter rounding up various links, newsletters, and podcasts from the perspective of political reform. If you’d like to join this experiment, please subscribe.
Lots of material about family policy this week. Plus, Bitcoin, fusionism, reforming the GOP, and even a short story.
Tips? Comments? Questions? Drop me a line (through Twitter, email, etc.). Check out @fredbauerblog or fredbauerblog via gmail.
Thanks, as always, for reading!
Home sweet home. American Compass has a package of articles about family policy.
Throughout the month of February, Home Building will offer a blueprint for buttressing the American family. A survey of parenting-age Americans assessed the family’s state, priorities, and preferences as well as its policy attitudes. Opening essays by Helen Andrews, Kay Hymowitz, Patrick T. Brown, and Lyman Stone explain why conservatives need a positive family policy suited to the needs and interests of the American people. American Compass’s Oren Cass and Wells King weigh the arguments for improving family benefits and offer a new proposal, with responses from experts across the political spectrum. Essays by Sean Speer and Neil Gilbert offer lessons learned about crafting and implementing family policy from abroad, while Michael Lind and Samuel Hammond widen the scope for family policy to transform existing programs and approaches to reform. A range of other experienced policy experts offer potential pathways for reform as well.
Some highlights: A survey of class divisions on family formation (something Kay Hymowitz also discusses). Helen Andrews on why family-building should be a political priority. Lyman Stone on how pro-family policy can help people have the number of kids they want.
Still going…
So the debate about Mitt Romney’s new proposal for a (fairly) universal cash benefit for all children is still going on. (Romney’s proposal was discussed in last week’s issue.)
Samuel Hammond (a proponent of the policy) and Scott Winship (a critic of it) recently debated this issue. To do a fair excerpt, I’d have to post the whole transcript, which you can read here. A significant part of the debate, though, comes down to competing ideas about what a universal child allowance would mean for family structure and for incentives to work. Winship fears that it could discourage work and marriage, while Hammond argues that it would not discourage work and could reinforce families.
Other takes:
Matt Yglesias in favor of Romney’s proposal.
Matt Weidinger claiming it would “revive welfare as we knew it.”
Yuval Levin says it goes in the right direction.
Mickey Kaus remains skeptical.
Joseph Paul Barnas uses Romney’s proposal as a springboard for thinking about the family and the market.
Related: Marco Rubio pushes back against a Biden proposal for direct-cash benefits for parents (Rubio argues that child tax credits should be expanded instead): “A government check can never replace the ability to earn high wages and fulfill the American promise that if you work hard and live responsibly, you and your family will flourish.”
Christopher Caldwell examines the prospects of the GOP pivoting to becoming a party of workers—and the efforts of Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio to chart that path. A key thing that the GOP would need to embrace is the virtue of tight labor markets, Caldwell says. (A very traditional idea for Republicans, by the way—the benefits of tight labor markets were a major policy theme for Calvin Coolidge.)
Stephanie Slade mounts a defense of fusionism:
Fusionism, properly understood, is not a marriage of two groups. It's a marriage of two value sets. A fusionist is someone who sees both liberty (in the classical sense of freedom from aggression, coercion, and fraud) andvirtue (in the Judeo-Christian sense of submission to God's commands) as important. Fusionism is therefore a distinct philosophical orientation unto itself. What's more, it has historically been the dominant orientation on the American right.
Conservatives going back at least to the country's founding have believed that virtue and liberty were mutually reinforcing—and that neither could survive long without the other. A free society depends on a virtuous populace.
Speaking of virtue…Brink Lindsey makes a case for the recovery of civic virtue.
Daniel Tenreiro talks tech and Bitcoin with Miami mayor Francis Suarez.
Blake Smith examines the legacy of Habermas for Foreign Policy.
Dimitrios Halikias argues that Max Weber’s 1895 work “The Nation State and Economic Policy” captures some of the major themes of his career.
Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy on the costs of doublethinking.
Walter Kirn posts a new short story:
The night I sold the winning ticket I walked to work. I’d wrecked my Jetta. I hit a small deer by the river west of town. The deer came out of a gulley, from the tall weeds. I didn’t have time to brake. I hit it square. It launched into the air, turned upside down, and landed on its head and broke its neck. I was high, so I saw it happen in slow motion. Then my car died. Blue clouds rose from the hood. The needles on my dashboard sunk to zero. A highway patrolman came along in minutes and parked with his lights swooping blue against the snow and his radio softly squawking in his car. He’d stopped me before and he knew I was a tweaker but he didn’t push me to admit it. He called for a tow and waited until it came, exhaling steam like that coming from my car and stamping his big brown official-looking boots. He asked me if I needed a ride to town but I was afraid to sit inside his cruiser with all of its glowing communications gear and Tasers and clipboards and restraint devices. There was still meth on my breath. It smelled like Band-Aids. Like when you first open a brand-new box of them, before the air gets in.
Regarding family: Anthony van Dyck’s portrait (c. 1635) Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke with his Family: