SCHUMPETER, CAPITALISM, FATS AND FOCUS ON THE FAMILY

You may recall that Fats Limbaugh attacked Mike Huckabee for not being a real conservative because the Huckster wasn't a devotee of the Free Market Fairy.  At the time I thought this signaled an irreparable breajk between the Jeebus Fundies and the Free Market Fundies but I was wrong (e.g., Michele Bachmann).  That doesn't mean that there isn't a rift between these religious sects and Joseph Schumpeter, one of the 20th Century Apostles of the Free Market Fairy, admitted as much in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,. first published in  1942.  You can get an image PDF here and convert it to searchable text if you have Adobe Acrobat.

On pages 157-58 Schumpter notes that the calculations of Homo Economicus lead to the conclusion that having children simply doesn't pay:

Still more important however is another "internal cause," viz. the disintegration of the bourgeois family. ... To men and women in modern capitalist societies, family life and parenthood mean less than they meant before and hence are less powerful molders of behavior;

As soon as men and women learn the utilitarian lesson and refuse to take for granted the traditional arrangements that their social environment makes for them, as soon as they acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action--or, as we might also put it, as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting -they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions and of the fact that at the same time, excepting the cases of farmers and peasants, children cease to be economic assets. These sacrifices do not consist only of the items that come within the reach of the measuring rod of money but comprise in addition an indefinite amount of loss of comfort, of freedom from care, and opportunity to enjoy alternatives of increasing attractiveness and variety-alternatives to be compared with joys of parenthood that are being subjected to a critical analysis of increasing severity.