Free markets are good for individuals and for families, and that’s why Reagan pursued them.
One straw man of free-market advocates is that we don’t care about the family, or that regulatory reform and tax reform are impersonal and disconnected from social concerns. This characterization is disproven by the record of the Reagan administration, which was acutely aware of the connection between free markets and everyday life.
Samuel Gregg wrote for Law & Liberty about the history of the free-market movement and its opponents. He talks about how Reagan and Thatcher broke through. “A commitment to ending the default Keynesian settings for fiscal and monetary policy was central to their respective agendas,” Gregg wrote. “But this pledge was integrated into a bigger program: most notably, shaking off the general torpor and mentality of managed decline affecting America and Britain in the 1970s, much of which was inadvertently summarized by President Jimmy Carter in his 1979 ‘Malaise‘ speech.”
On Reagan specifically, Gregg wrote:
Millions of American blue-collar workers may have had their doubts about Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of free markets during the 1980 and 1984 presidential elections. But Reagan’s uncomplicated patriotism, firm anti-Communism, and patently sincere optimism about America’s future detached many such Americans from their traditional allegiance to a Democrat Party wedded to interventionism. Absent Reagan’s larger message of national revitalization, it is reasonable to wonder if his economic policies would have gotten off the ground.
John Shelton of Advancing American Freedom, the advocacy group led by Mike Pence, wrote an article for National Affairs about how free-market conservative policies are good for the family. He points to research about how government regulations can be bad for family formation in ways that many people don’t expect:
Strange as that may sound, as Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon found in their 2020 study, “Car Seats as Contraception,” the adoption of car-seat laws saved as many as 6,000 lives since 1980, but it resulted in 145,000 fewer babies being born. Nickerson and Solomon explained that because many cars cannot easily fit three car seats in the back row, laws requiring children to ride in a car seat at increasingly higher ages often indirectly compel families to purchase larger vehicles like minivans when expanding from two to three children. These vehicles, per Nickerson and Solomon, not only tend to be more expensive, they also “have class and lifestyle connotations that may not appeal to everyone.”
In other words, for every life saved by car seats, 24 children were never born — all because families chose not to have a third child under these policies. Americans would probably be reluctant to relax car-seat laws if doing so increased child mortality. But if the impact on mortality were negligible, all but climate-change doomsayers and the anti-natalist fringe would balk at a policy that led to a reduction in births, especially with birth rates in the United States continuing to fall below the levels necessary to replace the previous generation.
Policies that increase the general cost of living are bad for families. Policies that reduce the general cost of living are good for families. And they would probably help families more than policies that are socially engineered to help families specifically. Such schemes are prone to unintended consequences, and faith in government planners should always be small.
The famous “Morning in America” ad from the 1984 reelection campaign is, justifiably, remembered as a perfect encapsulation of Reagan’s message. Here’s the full text of that ad:
It’s morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country’s history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?
Note how it seamlessly relates inflation and interest rates — things that can be seen as impersonal and wonky — to marriage and family formation. That’s exactly what Gregg and Shelton are talking about. Free markets are good for individuals and for families, and that’s why Reagan pursued them.