The failure of the family part 1: the family and the basic wage

It is not just a matter of fashionable jargon. These changes of language are accompanied by substantial structural changes in these areas to make education and health conform to the structures of a commercial enterprise. Schools and hospitals form part of the common good, and obviously it is important that they are run effectively and within budget constraints approved or tolerated by the community to meet the needs for which they were created. To subject the personal and indeed spiritual dimensions of education and health-care to ruthless cost-cutting, simple economic criteria, indicates an unhealthy economic priority over other important elements in human well-being.

Another example is our present unwillingness or inability to address the corrosive effects of the market in the areas of entertainment, advertising and pornography. As the popularity of rap-singer Eminem shows, there are enormous markets in different forms of entertainment which are offensive, degrading, violent or obscene. Any attempt to place restrictions on the open-slather approach of the entertainment and advertising industries is greeted with outraged cries in defence of supposed artistic freedom, when in fact what is really at stake is profits. Genuine artistic merit is hardly ever a criterion.

The relentless glamorisation of consumption and materialism in contemporary advertising, and the repetitive endorsement of promiscuous sex, drug taking, violence and a generally disenchanted view of the world that comes from the music, films and video clips targeted at teenagers, serve as powerful and overwhelmingly negative counter-influences to the influence of parents, and their attempts to impart to their children values that will enhance their lives and the possibility of happiness. These are powerful forces working against the values upon which societies such as ours depend, and against the institutions which support these values, such as religion and the family.

It is only when we become a little bit like Marxists and insist that if only we can get the economics right everything else will look after itself that the blindness of the market becomes a problem. Only then do we get the situation we have in our society at the moment where the family is treated as something belonging strictly to the private sphere of life, as "a private life-style choice" with no consequences for social life more generally; and as something for which employers do not need to take responsibility.

One example is what some commentators have described as the disappearance of the eight-hour day; the greater and greater demands made on workers to put in longer hours, often driven by the implied threat or the fear that they might lose their job if they resist. This sort of thing is not always good for workers – at whatever level of responsibility, although some love it – and it is certainly not good for families or for children waiting for their parents to come home.

Other examples are the damaging effects of unemployment, and the squeezing of ordinary wage and salary earners, the decline in prosperity and numbers of the middle class, in contrast to the hyper-salaries of top executives. To the extent these things feed into family breakdown and the de-socialization of children (and they do), they are not good for the market either in the longer term, although the longer term is another one the market's blind spots.