My new book Hayek’s Modern Family:  Classical Liberalism and the Evolution of Social Institutions will be available tomorrow from Palgrave and at Amazon. An excerpt from the book’s chapter on parental rights is now available as the lead article in the September/October  Cato Policy Report. It also includes my reponse to Rothbard’s argument that parents can neglect their kids. A snippet is below.

A key part of Hayek’s intellectual framework is the idea that knowledge is dispersed, contextual, and often tacit. No one knows everything, and it is those closest to choices and their direct consequences who are in the best position to know what to do. This argument is at the core of Hayek’s objections to socialism and his case for the market: by establishing well-defined and well-protected property rights, we allow people to develop and use their local knowledge in ways that make the best use of resources. In the same way, it is parents who have the right incentives and best relevant knowledge to know what is best for their children. Establishing well-defined and well-protected parental rights encourages parents to act on this local knowledge and thereby helps to ensure the best outcomes for children.

The intimacy of the family provides parents with deep and often tacit knowledge of their child that can be deployed in finding the most effective ways to transmit social rules and norms. A great deal of the parent-child socialization process works through imitation, as imitation is a way to pass on knowledge that otherwise cannot be articulated. The family provides an ideal setting for this sort of imitative learning.