Firms should build up the family unit

Last week, we talked about how the family is the basic unit of our society and our economy (read here) and how all larger institutions should be interested in preserving and supporting families simply because they ultimately depend on families for their own survival.

This week, and in certain future articles, we will pick out one of the larger institutions of society, and try to point out how and why it should put more effort into the support of families.

There are only a few institutions large enough to be real "engines of change" that can influence and impact our daily lives — big corporations, big media, big government, etc. Today we will look at business.

The family is the basic unit of our economy and only families can provide the stability that enables businesses to flourish.

Our private-enterprise system and free-market economy are the envy of the world, and we all owe a great deal of the quality of our lives to the innovation and efficiency of the corporate world.

Yet many business institutions, particularly large ones, motivated by self-preservation, profit and growth, have begun to squeeze and supplant and substitute for the very families they were created to supply, support and supplement.

They have taken over some of the functions that should only belong to families and have fostered the impression that families are losing relevance.

They have stolen away the time and loyalty of parents. They have promoted materialism and debt with hedonistic advertising and enabled and encouraged it further with liberal lending policies.

Businesses must come to better understand that it is in their best interest to do all within their power to preserve and promote strong and stable traditional families wherein the values of self-sufficiency and responsibility are exemplified and taught.

In doing more of this, Corporate America could spawn and develop and stabilize not only their present and future customers but their present and future workforce (employees and managers).

Like the cells of a body, the health and viability of families determines the vibrancy and vitality as well as the longevity of the larger business and economic organism.

Corporations that ignore the plight of and the needs of families do so at the peril of their own survival … they are slowly but surely dismembering themselves.