In my latest column for AIER I criticize NatCons for their inconsistency. A slice:
By intellectual inconsistency I instead mean clinging to beliefs, offering arguments, or staking out — and sticking with — policy positions that are mutually contradictory. Intellectual consistency is no guarantee of being correct, but intellectual inconsistency is a sure sign of being incorrect.
How many are the conservatives today who support the child tax credit while also proudly proclaiming their rejection of “market fundamentalism” and accusing so-called “neoliberals” of being blind to human motives other than those that are transactional? Whatever are the child tax credit’s merits or demerits as a public policy — that question is one that I here don’t address — that policy is a means of persuading adults to have more children by promising to put more money into adults’ pockets.
Why, for example, should we give credence to Oren Cass’s many proposals for the government to override the market on the grounds that (as he once put it) “markets reduce people to their material interests, and reduce relationships to transactions” given that he also supports the child tax credit? The child tax credit works to increase birth rates only insofar as it appeals to people’s material interests. If it’s appropriate to appeal to people’s material interests on a matter as personal as decisions regarding family size, Cass is surely inconsistent to criticize classical liberals and libertarians for focusing on people’s material interests when these scholars make the case for free trade.
My point here isn’t that Cass is wrong to insinuate that most classical liberals and libertarians worship a fictional homo economicus (although in this matter he certainly is wrong). My point instead is that Cass and many of his National Conservative brethren conveniently but unwittingly appeal to the homo economicus in us when they plead for the child tax credit. (They do also, by the way, in their endorsement of tariffs, which work their restrictive effects largely by appealing to the homo economicus within each consumer.)
These conservatives will respond by pointing out that they don’t deny that many considerations other than purely economic ones are at play when couples decide whether or not to have more children. They see the child tax credit as working only at the margin. This response is both believable and correct. Yet these same conservatives fail to recognize that when the liberals and libertarians who they attempt to slur with the label “market fundamentalists” argue for free trade and free markets, these liberals and libertarians also recognize that many considerations other than purely economic ones are at play when individuals engage in market exchange.
