Restoring a Lost Social Order

Hugh Nibley proposed a world without bankers.  More broadly, he proposed a world not obsessed with the accumulation of wealth.  To the modern reader this seems ludicrous.  Without bankers, how do the young get their start (how would Elizabeth and I buy our first house?)?  Without accumulating wealth, how do the old survive when they can no longer work?  In America (aside from the small minority of socialistic thinkers), we see no answer to these questions, and thus, our society becomes centered on banks and our lives become centered on accumulating wealth.

But one need not look back too far to see that there is an answer to these questions.  The answer lies in the establishment of a different social order.  Or more precisely, a return of a lost social order - a social order that centers on families instead of banks.  Just two hundred years ago, one of the primary responsibilities of a father was to provide his sons with an adequate start in life.  Sons depended on their father instead of on banks.  Likewise, the responsibility of children was to provide for their parents when they could no longer provide for themselves.  Parents depended on their children instead of their nest egg.

Now if the two systems accomplish the same thing (a start in life and support at the end of life), what is the advantage of one over the other?  I suggest the primary fault of the first (I'll call this the economic social order) and the primary benefit of the second (I'll call this the family social order) is where they require our focus to be.  The economic social order requires our attention to be concentrated on money (why this is bad is primarily a moral argument) whereas the family social order requires our attention to be concentrated on our family (this is likewise primarily a moral argument).  In the economic social order parents must spend most of their lives subject to a bank and devoted to building their nest egg.  In the family social order, parents instead would be concerned with the development of their children since their children would essentially become their nest egg.  Under the family social order, there would of necessity be some requirement for accumulation of wealth in order to give your children a start in life.  So you could argue that this aspect is really no different.  However, I would argue that accumulation of wealth in order to give it away does not have the same moral consequences as accumulating wealth so that you can spend your retirement years on a yacht.

The consequences of shifting to a family social order would be dramatic both for individuals and for society.  For the individual, absent the requirement for wealth accumulation one would have more free time to pursue what they like.  This highlights the importance of a family social order being introduced in the context of a moral society.  Specifically, principles of saving and frugality must be preeminent in order to prevent children from becoming subject to the debts of their parents (the inability for governments to exercise this sort of restraint is one argument against a socialistic social order). 

For society, if parent's end-of-life support depended on their children, the number of children parents had would dramatically increase.  Parents would be incentivized to have enough children to insure themselves against children who don't turn out well or die early.

All of this said, I differ from Hugh Nibley in my opinion of banks.  I believe that they have their role in society.  Specifically, I see little harm in a person getting their start through responsible borrowing from a bank.  This sort of a hybrid model would free parents from focusing on wealth accumulation entirely and freeing them to spend their time focusing on the important things in life: raising and developing children, gaining knowledge, serving others, etc.

And finally, it must be noted that a family social order will not remove the temptation to accumulate wealth (even when the family social order existed, prophets were still condemning the people for their obsession with wealth).  It will simply remove the requirement to do so as one would no longer be required to accumulate a large nest egg for retirement.