TRADITIONAL AMERICAN CORPORATE FAMILY VALUES: I’m often asked what it is that binds market conservatives and social conservatives into a coherent political whole. How, folks on the left wonder, does the moral agenda of the religious right consistently cleave so effortlessly and completely to the fiscal agenda of organized post-industrial capital? Unaided, these endlessly inquiring minds quickly resort to prattling about cognitive dissonance, “double-think” and vast right-wing conspiracies; but, as I shall attempt to explain below, the real answer could not be simpler.
Conservatives – fiscal and social alike – have always known that America’s strength lies in its commitment to core values: family, industry, moral health and free markets. Active exercise of these values works a kind of alchemy in our great land, constantly presenting unique opportunities for principled individuals to achieve limitless empowerment through cultivation and application of their skills and moral qualities on the increasingly level (if endlessly complex) playing-field of modern market capitalism. Once that is understood, answers to lingering social ills become apparent in innovative applications of our already successful values system. Failing schools, single parenthood, child poverty and juvenile crime will all be ameliorated incrementally as we intensify – and further integrate! – our nation’s parallel commitments to family values and corporate rights.
For example, by means-testing family expansion and encouraging corporate sponsorship of promising individuals or family combinations, we can place strong incentives for moral responsibility and simultaneously bring the dynamism of the market directly to bear on the future of America: our children. Raising children properly is expensive for a family. Raising them improperly is expensive for society as a whole. When individual American families are permitted or compelled to turn to America’s corporate family for such financial assistance they may need to raise their children responsibly, everyone involved will benefit (provided that the arrangement is structured to provide adequate assurance of a reasonable return on investment and adequate recourse in the event of default).
Corporate adoption – whether implemented outright (as a recognition of full guardianship following properly instituted parental termination proceedings), or through support and sponsorship mechanisms that allow children to remain in their biological homes (repayable grants or debentures issued for child-rearing expenses, for example, or a discounted securitization of future wages to offset the cost of programs and benefits provided to indigent youth) – shows great promise for providing much-needed social resources as well as increased oversight on how those resources are expended.
I hope, in the days and weeks to come, to provide more insight into the promise that a corporate adoption regime offers for the increasingly bright future of this great nation, and trust that you will all join me in a spirited debate on the most promising aspects of such a system, as well as its potential pitfalls.
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