I want to again look at the juxtaposition of government and the family. I have been reading more of G.K. Chesterton lately and he talks a lot about defending the family. I find it very interesting because his prime writing years were from roughly 1900 to the 1930s when he died. We think a lot of these issues or the assault on the family is new, but it is not.
What is new in the last 50 years is the extraordinary attempt the government has made to make-up for the decay of the family. LBJ’s “war on poverty” and subsequent launch of the modern welfare state was a well-intentioned effort by a President who personally had grown up in and knew the struggles of poverty. Whether the family was in decline at that point or those policies hastened it is a debate for another day. But it was the start of the government trying to step in and provide for individuals apart from a family structure (or at least one was not required).
But if you take a step back and think about things, you come to two different views of the world. In one, we are, as we had been through most of our nation’s history, organized into family blocks. Families provided food, clothing, shelter, childcare, education, discipline, and even care to aging generations in some instances. They also provided a clear example for how subsequent generations should order their lives. It was a sustainable, self-perpetuating model. It was easier to have larger families back then because you lived close to sisters, aunts, or your parents to help you care for the kids. There was a broader support structure. When Hillary Clinton says it takes a village to raise a child, she was close, but it does not require a village, it requires a family.
So you had a nation made-up of families. It was largely through tragedy that families were broken up and the original design of Social Security (for widows and orphans) was one of the ways that was taken care of. Although it also happened through families, relatives taking kids in, etc. You had a collection of families and very few individuals floating outside of that structure who needed to be provided for.
What you see now is an inverted society. You see a weaker family structure and you see government having to expend more and more resources to provide for more and more individuals falling outside of a family structure. Fewer people are married, more kids are born out of wedlock or end up products of a divorce. Women often get custody of the children, but lack the income to support them. So the government often needs to step in and provide food stamps, a welfare check, and other services. In most communities, a sizeable charitable safety net exists of groups working to provide everything from rent assistance to cars.
Education is provided by the government and most parents use that as a reason to check out of the process. We have never been more educated, on paper, yet we have never been this morally adrift. And our economy is suffering for it, new business starts are down -6.2% versus pre-recession levels. The skills needed to really grow this economy may not be “skills” you can learn in the class room. (they might be values passed on by a family). If you look at your aging population, we are attempting to pay for things like in-home nursing care, that feels an awful lot like what families would have done in previous generations.
Where is all of this going? I think it is worth taking a step back and asking if a model by which the government is prepared to sustain a large number of individuals, on their own, in their own living situation, apart from a family, is actually sustainable?
To me it is pretty clear, fiscally, we cannot afford to take money from the productive families that we have to pay for a society not orientated around the family. But that is exactly what is happening. We are going bankrupt as a nation not solely because the costs of caring for those in need have gone up, but because the number of people with nowhere to turn but the government has exploded.
But we get stuck in this rut of a debate with one side arguing, “it is the government’s role, the government has a duty to do it” and the other side saying, “we cannot afford it”. The latter argument fails time and time again because of the blind faith so many put in the former.
The answer to this is again to talk about the ideal, talk about who is best able to provide some of these things. The answer is the family. That is the debate we should be having, where the role of family stops and the role of government begins. If we value the family, we will start to put in place the kind of policies to support a country built around families. If we do that, we will return to prosperity.
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