The Family Is the Original Welfare State and the Cheapest One

Somewhere tonight, a grandmother is sitting at a kitchen table with a calculator and a stack of envelopes, working out how to cover the gap between her daughter's paycheck and her daughter's rent.

Nobody will give her a plaque. No agency will log her hours. She will not appear in any government statistic that measures what the country spends on helping its people. She will simply do it, because that is what a family does, and because she loves them. And tomorrow morning her son-in-law will drive an hour to take his father to a doctor's appointment, and her granddaughter will walk a neighbour's dog for ten dollars, and a cousin will sleep on someone's couch until the job comes through.

I want to make an argument that is easy to state and hard to overstate: the family is the original welfare state, and it is still the best one. It educates, feeds, nurses, disciplines, comforts and insures its members, and it does so for nothing. When it works, it does what no agency does well. When it fails, the state is left with the pieces, and those pieces cost far more than the work the family did. This is not sentiment. It is economics, history and common sense together.

The thesis in four sentences

1. The family does a set of jobs that no institution does as well. It raises children, cares for the old, passes on norms, and absorbs the shocks of illness, job loss and bad luck.
2. It does them with knowledge no agency has. A mother knows which child is lying, which is lonely and which needs a push. A caseworker with a stack of files does not.
3. It does them with motives no agency has. A parent works at 3 a.m. for love. A government employee works there, if at all, for a salary and a schedule.
4. So the sound approach is to support the family and, where it fails, to help in ways that leave the family standing. Policy that displaces the family, even with good intentions, tends to produce more need, not less.

What the great tradition says

This is not a new idea, and it did not begin with Republicans. The English statesman Edmund Burke wrote in 1790, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, of "the little platoon we belong to in society" and called love of it the first principle of public affection. He meant the family, the neighbourhood, the congregation: the small attachments through which we learn to care about anything bigger. A country, Burke suggested, is not an abstraction. It is built from those platoons, and a government that tears them down in the name of the public good is eating the seed corn.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in the 1830s, noticed the same thing from the outside. Americans, he observed, solved problems by forming associations: families, churches, clubs, volunteer groups. They did not wait for the state. Tocqueville Found America's Secret in the Barn Raising and the Town Meeting tells that story, and What Tocqueville saw in American clubs and why conservatives still quote him follows it into the world of civic life.

And there is a principle in the social thought of the last century that gives the idea its sharpest form. It is called subsidiarity, and it comes from the Catholic encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, issued by Pope Pius XI in 1931. It says that it is a wrong and a disturbance of right order to take away from smaller associations what they can do for themselves and hand it to a larger one. You do not need to be Catholic, or religious at all, to see the sense of it. Let the family do what the family can do. Let the town do what the family cannot. Let the state do what the town cannot. And the nation last. I'll leave the full treatment to Subsidiarity Is the Old Idea Behind Keeping Power as Close to Home as Possible.

A hypothetical: what the grandmother is really providing

Let me put a number on it, and I want to be clear that this is a hypothetical with invented figures, meant to show how the arithmetic works and not to describe any real family.

Suppose a grandmother looks after two grandchildren for twenty hours a week while their parents work. If that care were purchased at a hypothetical rate of $15 an hour, the weekly cost would be 20 hours times $15, or $300. Over fifty weeks, that is $300 times 50, or $15,000 a year. Add in the meals she cooks, the rides she gives, the sick days she covers, and the number grows.

No one pays her. No one counts it. If she were unable to do it and the parents had to buy the care, that $15,000 would come out of after-tax income, or, if they could not afford it, one parent would leave work and the household would lose a paycheck. If the family were to fall apart and the state took the burden, there would be a cost to the public as well, and it would be larger, because agencies are expensive and they do not love anyone.

Now multiply by millions of households. The unpaid work of families, the care of children and the old and the sick, is an enormous economy that never shows up in the usual statistics. It is, in the most literal sense, the foundation under the rest. An economist who ignores it is like an engineer who forgets the ground.

The Moynihan report and the argument it started

If you want to see how seriously this question has been taken by serious people, look at what happened in 1965.

That March, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration and later a Democratic senator from New York, wrote an internal report titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Moynihan was a sociologist by training, and he argued that the structure of the family was a crucial factor in economic and social outcomes, and that the instability of many Black families was a result of centuries of slavery, discrimination and unemployment, which made it harder to hold families together. His conclusion was that national policy should aim to strengthen the Black family, beginning with jobs, because the family was the foundation for the next generation.

President Lyndon Johnson drew on the report's themes in a commencement address at Howard University in June 1965. And then a storm broke. Critics, including some civil rights leaders and scholars, accused the report of blaming the victims and of treating Black family structure as a pathology instead of looking at discrimination and joblessness. The phrase "blaming the victim" was popularised that year by the psychologist William Ryan in an article attacking the report. The controversy was so heated that for years afterward, many scholars and politicians avoided the subject of family structure altogether.

What should we make of it? I'd argue it is worth looking at both halves honestly. Moynihan's critics were right that the report was open to misreading, and that blaming individuals for conditions made by history is unjust. Moynihan himself was explicit that discrimination and unemployment were at the root. But his central claim, that the stability of the family matters to a child's chances and that policy should not be indifferent to it, has been argued over by scholars of every political stripe ever since. The silence that followed the controversy did not help the families it was meant to protect. Conservatives do not have to claim that the report was perfect. We can say that the question it asked was the right one and was shut down too soon.

The objection: not every family can cope

Now for the strongest counter-argument, which I do not want to dodge.

"This is a lovely picture of a family that has a grandmother with a spare afternoon and parents with steady jobs. Not every family looks like that. Some are abusive. Some are broken by addiction, illness or death. Some are poor in ways that no amount of love can fix. If you tell these people that the family is the answer, you are telling them they are on their own."

That objection is correct that some families cannot cope, and some are dangerous. A child in an abusive home needs protection, not a lecture about the virtue of the family. No conservative I respect says otherwise. The state has a legitimate and important role in protecting children from harm, and it also has a role in helping families that are struggling.

But look at what follows, and what does not.

First, the answer to a failing family is to make the next family work, not to abandon the idea. A child removed from a harmful home needs a stable one, and the best substitutes are other families: foster parents, adoptive parents, relatives. ten steps from a church pew to a licensed foster or adoptive home describes how churches have stepped in on exactly this front.

Second, help should strengthen the family, not replace it. The difference is practical. A tax credit for each child leaves the money in the household and lets the parents decide how to spend it. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 doubled the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, and five changes in the 2017 tax law that reached the kitchen table explains how that reached ordinary families. A program that gives services directly, with strings attached, puts the agency where the parent used to be.

Third, policy should stop penalising the arrangements that work. Consider marriage and the stay-at-home parent. When benefit rules are written so that a couple loses more by marrying than by living apart, the state is putting a thumb on the scale against the family. When tax policy favours the household with two paid earners over the household where one parent stays home, it penalises a choice that many families make for good reasons. why family policy should not punish the parent who stays home takes up that argument.

Fourth, the welfare reform of 1996 is a case study. After two vetoes, President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in August 1996, ending the old entitlement and replacing it with block grants to the states and work requirements. Supporters said it ended a system that had trapped families in dependency. Critics said it left the poorest exposed. You can find serious scholarship on both sides. But the idea behind it, that aid should be tied to work and to the stability of the household, was a bet on the family, and two vetoes, one signature and the 1996 welfare law that put marriage in statute tells how it was made.

The limits of the argument, honestly stated

I owe you three cautions, because an argument that claims too much deserves to be trimmed.

First, the family is not a substitute for everything. Medicine, courts, roads and national defence are beyond any family's reach. Nobody is arguing that a household should repair a bridge or run a hospital. The point is narrower: that the family is the first line, and that policy should be built to reinforce it.

Second, "support the family" is not the same as "pay for everything." There is a trap on the right as well as the left. The more the government pays for what families used to do, the more it tends to displace the habits that kept the family working. A policy that reduces the reward for a father staying in the house, or for a daughter caring for her mother, has taken something from the family even as it has given something to a member.

Third, many families are not traditional and still do the work. Single parents, grandparents raising grandchildren, adoptive families and blended households carry the same load. A conservative case for the family that sneers at them does not help anyone and is not required by the argument. What matters is the function, which is to raise children and care for each other, and to do so over the long haul.

Why this matters for the debates ahead

Almost every fight in American politics touches this question, though it rarely admits it. When we argue about child care, we are arguing about who raises the children. When we argue about elder care, we are arguing about who looks after the old. When we argue about schools, as in Meyer, Pierce, Yoder and Troxel Prove the Constitution Puts Parents First, we are arguing about who has the first claim on the child. When we argue about fertility treatment and the many ways families are formed, as in The IVF question that splits pro-life conservatives, argued fairly, we are arguing about what the family is for. These are disputes among conservatives as much as between the parties, and it is better to have them honestly than to pretend there is nothing to decide.

My rule of thumb is simple. Before supporting any program that touches children or the old, ask three questions. Does it leave decisions with the family? Does it reward the behaviour that keeps families together and working? And if it fails, does it leave the family stronger or weaker than it found it?

The bottom line

• The family is the oldest and cheapest welfare system: it educates, feeds, nurses and insures its members for free, with knowledge and motives no agency can match.
• Burke's little platoons, Tocqueville's associations and the principle of subsidiarity all say the same thing: let the smaller unit do what it can, and help only where it cannot.
• Not every family can cope, and the state has a role in protecting children and helping the struggling. The conservative test is whether the help strengthens the family or takes its place.
• Judge family policy by what it rewards. Keep money in households, stop penalising marriage and the parent who stays home, and support the churches and neighbours who step in when a family falters.
• Do the small thing this week: call the grandmother, the cousin or the neighbour who is carrying a load, and take part of it.