> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.countermarch.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Where There’s a Will - URL: https://www.countermarch.org/where-theres-a-will/ - Published: 2026-09-29T15:00:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-29T15:00:50.000Z - Description: You’re likely to find a way. - Author: Scott P. Richert - Tags: Forward March In the fall of 1996, I attended a talk in Arlington, Virginia, by Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an ideological libertarian if ever there was one. Unbeknownst to most of the attendees, Hoppe had come loaded for bear. That year, Pat Buchanan had run for the Republican nomination for president a second time, and while most of the paleolibertarians associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute had followed Murray Rothbard and supported Pat’s attempt to unseat George H.W. Bush in 1992, Hoppe and many other paleolibertarians had defected from the Buchanan Brigade after Rothbard died in 1995. Hoppe began his talk with an attack on Pat for having made the prudential decision not to base his campaign on the abolition of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Referring to this approach, Hoppe declared that “You might call it ‘social nationalism,’ or perhaps better, ‘national socialism.’” Thirty years later, much of the debate about the “postliberal” right may seem, on the surface, to have taken a similar turn. After Trump, should conservatives return to the older agenda of constitutionalism and cuts to federal programs and spending, or should they embrace federal power and instead direct spending and programs to “good” causes, even if that spending and those programs would not have been considered conservative in the past? Those of us who supported Buchanan’s runs in 1992, 1996, and 2000 know that Hoppe’s characterization of his prudential decision was outrageous. But that does not mean that the postliberal right’s embrace of the power of the federal government today is what Buchanan intended back then — far from it. There’s a difference between picking your battles and abandoning the war by embracing the tactics of the other side. And that difference often comes down to recognizing the underlying problem so that you don’t think that ameliorating the symptoms is the same as curing the disease. Having thrown the “Nazi” slur at Buchanan and his supporters, Hoppe went on a rant that would have made Leni Riefenstahl proud, declaring that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security led to disease and death because they weakened the will of those who received benefits from the programs. Sickness, disability, and early death, he said, were the result of weak wills, and he presented himself as an example of someone who was perpetually healthy because his own will was strong. If this sounds crazy to you, dear reader, imagine how insane it seemed to those of us in the room, especially when spoken in Hoppe’s thick German accent.[\[1\]](#fn1) And yet the reason that Hoppe’s talk came to mind today is that, like every ideologue, he had started with a grain of truth but mistook it for the whole of reality. This summer, some conservatives have expressed great concern about the effect that rising housing prices have supposedly played in the decline of new marriages and the willingness of young married couples to have children. Such posts almost immediately jump to “solutions,”[\[2\]](#fn2) including freeing up existing housing by restricting immigration and/or deporting immigrants, legal and illegal; reducing interest rates; and building more housing. The posts always have numbers attached to them — for instance, a calculation of the monthly payment on a $500,000 home, at 10 percent down and 6.5 percent interest, or the rise of the median price of a home in recent years compared with the rise of the median income of the average American household. But none of these posts ever acknowledge that the average childless couple in their 20s or even 30s would not, in the past, have purchased the inflation-adjusted equivalent of a $500,000 house, nor that the median price of a house has been rising at a faster rate in recent years because of new construction by people who can afford million-dollar homes, along with the COVID and post-COVID increase in construction costs for new housing. I believe that homeownership is a good thing, and I also believe that housing prices in general are inflated right now, though there is considerable variation geographically, and older houses — which young married couples would have bought in the past, rather than expecting to purchase (much less build) a new home — remain more affordable than new homes pretty much everywhere. I’m glad that the mortgage rate on our house is considerably lower than rates for new mortgages. I’m generally in favor of local incentives to build more affordable housing, and even more in favor of programs that rehabilitate older housing and encourage young people to live in established neighborhoods that are walkable rather than suburban developments built on top of farmland, far from their work and their shopping and their social life. And yet: There is that grain of truth in Hoppe’s crazy talk. And we can see it in the reality that birthrates collapsed in the United States long before marriage rates did, and that marriage rates have been in decline, and the age of first marriage and the age at which couples have their first child have been rising, far longer than the relatively recent outsized rise in housing prices and interest rates. In the last third of the 20th century, mortgage rates were generally at least as high as they are today, and substantially higher throughout much of the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Yet marriage rates and birthrates were also higher, and age of first marriage and the age at which couples had their first child were lower. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of both existing housing and new construction per square foot grew relatively modestly in the 40 years following 1975, yet the decline in birthrates and marriage rates accelerated. And that’s where Hoppe’s grain of truth comes in. John Lukacs, a man who shared with Hans-Hermann Hoppe nothing other than the reality that both were immigrants to the United States from Central Europe, frequently pointed out that — setting aside truly extravagant expenses — people will afford what they want to afford. When someone says, “I can’t afford X,” what he more often means is that X is less important to him than something else is. Since 1973, the median size of a newly constructed house in the United States has grown from 1,545 square feet to 2,142 square feet, a 39 percent increase, while median household income, in inflation-adjusted dollars, rose 15 percent. During that same period, average household size declined approximately 18 percent, from 3.01 to just under 2.5. That the median size of a newly constructed home rose faster than median household income while average household size declined doesn’t support the claim that people are forgoing marriage and children because they can’t afford to buy a house. Rather, it suggests that married couples value 2,142 square feet of living space more than they value 1,545 square feet and a child, and they are spending their money accordingly. That’s a very different story. --- My starting salary at The Rockford Institute in 1996 was $26,700\. Amy and I had been married for three-and-a-half years, and we had a seven-month-old daughter. Amy was a stay-at-home mom. We had a small amount of credit-card debt that we paid off that year and no savings to speak of. Yet, by the middle of that year, our second child was on the way, and we had purchased our first house in Rockford, Illinois, with a five-percent down payment, a 30-year mortgage at over 7.5 percent, and a significant charge for private mortgage insurance rolled into our monthly payments because our down payment was less than ten percent. By mid-2003, when we moved from that 1,400-square-foot house (on which we had put a new roof, new gutters, painted the exterior, and renovated the interior), we had five children, Amy had begun homeschooling the two oldest, we had no debt other than our mortgage (not even a car loan), and we had saved enough to put a down payment of ten percent on our new (used) house, with a 30-year mortgage at the low, low rate of six percent. We had a new roof put on the house and the garage, redid all of the wood floors and the kitchen and the fireplace, painted the exterior and much of the interior, and welcomed three more children while we lived there, and Amy remained a stay-at-home mom and homeschooled all but the youngest, who turned five in 2017, the year we moved to Huntington, Indiana. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rockford had the highest property tax rates in the nation, though it had dropped all the way to third by 2017\. The property taxes for 2017 on our second home in Rockford were over double the property taxes on the house we purchased in Huntington that year, and the two houses were not even vaguely comparable in size, land, or craftsmanship. In recounting this bit of family history, I in no way mean to make light of the challenges that young married couples face as they try to afford a house and start a family today. But Amy and I never once had a discussion about whether we should not have another child because of the cost of housing. We knew many families who homeschooled and others who went to the Traditional Latin Mass at Saint Mary Oratory in Rockford who had even more children than we did, and I never heard any of them mention the cost of housing when they were deciding to have more children while relying (in most cases) on a single income. Social Security and Medicare don’t make old people sick by weakening their will. You don’t have to think that these programs are worthwhile, constitutional, or the best way to care for the elderly to acknowledge that lifespans have increased significantly since they were put in place. (And yes, correlation is not causation, but if Hoppe were right about the effects of these programs, one would expect the reverse to be true.) I have no doubt that rising housing costs and interest rates and rising prices in general give some people pause when considering whether to get married or to have children. But how many people, and how strongly do these factors affect their decisions? If a man tells the woman he’s dating that “I can’t afford to get married” or tells his wife that “We can’t afford to have another child” and cites the high cost of housing as the reason, it’s more likely that he places greater value on something other than a wife and a family. Ascribing declining marriage rates and birthrates to rising housing costs and other material factors makes sense if you have a material “solution” (immigration restriction, deportation, 50-year mortgages, pre-fab homes) you’re hoping to sell. But if the real cause of the decline is one of desire, of the will to get married, of the will to have a family, of the will to add another child to a household even if that might mean buying a smaller house or a less expensive car or cooking at home rather than eating out or paying $25 to have a burrito delivered through DoorDash, then your material solution won’t make much of a difference — assuming that you actually hoped that it would and weren’t using declining marriage rates and birthrates as cover for proposing it for other reasons. As with so much in life, so with marriage and family: Where there’s a will, you’re likely to find a way. --- 1. Hoppe gave his talk as part of the final panel of the John Randolph Club’s annual meeting. He thought he would have the last word, but he forgot that Tom Fleming, the editor of *Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture* and president of the John Randolph Club that year, was delivering the address at the banquet that night. After Hoppe’s panel, Tom went to his hotel room, tore up his prepared remarks, and wrote a new speech that included, among other things, a pointed discussion of the absurdity of Hoppe calling anyone a Nazi while extolling the Triumph of the Will. That was the last meeting of the John Randolph Club in which the Mises Institute took part. [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. Jumping quickly to solutions often suggests that the person making the argument started with a solution and went in search of a problem to which he could attach it. [↩︎](#fnref2) ****The Countermarch** is a labor of love. If you found this essay thought-provoking or useful, [please consider supporting the site](https://www.countermarch.org/#/portal/support).