Welfare is the Enemy of the Family, the Church and the Community—Time for Conservatives to Oppose it

One of the most oft-repeated criticisms of the classical liberal / libertarian ideal is that it allegedly atomizes society. According to its opponents, in a society based on the nexus of voluntary interactions, in a society from which the initiation of force against persons and property has been universally banished deep friendships disappear, family bonds lose their value and churches will no longer have any social function. In short, everyone will become a materialist consumer no longer interested in building and maintaining families, communities and relationships.

When making this argument, the critics always derive their conviction from historical facts and experience. In other words, they look at the state of our world, they conclude from what they see that the modern world is indeed an atomized society (which may or may not be the case in actuality), they furthermore also observe that we live under a system of capitalism — and the conclusion readily presents itself: capitalism atomizes society.

However, it is a fatal fallacy to believe that we can ascertain the causes of certain social phenomena by looking at history and historical facts only. This was one of the most crucial insights of the great Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. Mises explained:

In the natural sciences knowledge comes from experiment; a fact is something experimentally established. Natural scientists, in contrast to students of human action, are in a position of being able to control changes. They can isolate the various factors involved, as in a laboratory experiment, and observe changes when one factor is changed. The theory of a natural science must conform to these experiments — they must never contradict such an established fact. Should they contradict such a fact, a new explanation must be sought. In the field of human action, we are never in a position of being able to control experiments. We can never talk of facts in the field of social sciences in the same sense in which we refer to facts in the natural sciences. Experience in the field of human action is complicated, produced by the cooperation of various factors, all effecting change.

From this it follows, argues Mises, that

no general laws can be determined from the study of history. Observations of history are always complex phenomena, interconnected in such a way that it is impossible to assign to specific causes, with unquestioned accuracy, a certain part of the final result.

So how can we gain an understanding of the processes taking place in our societies — past and present? How can we determine what specific causes brought about certain effects? Mises argued that history can only be understood through the lens of a correct, a priori theory of human action, which is not derived from experience or historical facts, but from the concept of human action through means of logical deduction. In his magnum opus, Human Action, Mises went on to demonstrate how the entire corpus of economics may be deduced from the concept of human action — of purposeful human behavior aiming at specific ends with the use of definite means. An understanding of history can only be attained through the use of this a priori theory. As Mises said:

There are two functions involved in understanding: to establish the values, the judgments of people, their aims, their goals; and to establish the methods which they use to attain their ends.

So how could we gain an understanding of the phenomena of atomized society through this means?

Let us first accept the premise that our modern age indeed presents us with an atomized society with isolated individuals, with the withering away of communities, families and human relations.

To understand this spectacle, we first have to ask the crucial question: what are the aims, the ends people strive for when they create and maintain interpersonal relations and bonds in the forms of communities, families and so on? In other words, what are the functions of churches, fraternal organizations, friendly societies, friendships, neighborhoods and families in the social order?

These social bonds are not the results of instincts and they do not arise as a rule, necessarily when humans live in close proximity to one another. As Mises argues (emphasis mine):

neither cohabitation, nor what precedes it and follows, generates social cooperation and societal modes of life. The animals too join together in mating, but they have not developed social relations. Family life is not merely a product of sexual intercourse. It is by no means natural and necessary that parents and children live together in the way in which they do in the family. The mating relation need not result in a family organization. The human family is an outcome of thinking, planning, and acting. It is this very fact which distinguishes it radically from those animal groups which we call per analogiam animal families.

In short, these bonds aided the survival and prosperity of everyone involved. They provide the social safety net in a voluntary social order unhampered by aggressive violence. Members of a family cooperate to ensure the best possible conditions for every member. Families, secular and religious communities, friendly societies and neighborhoods existed and thrived in the past precisely because they provided vital benefits to their members: they helped through the rainy days those who were in trouble. Whether it was illness, widowhood, financial and economic troubles or any of the long list of sufferings and struggles, these communities were the means by which their members made it through the hardships.

During the last two hundred years however, the State gradually took upon itself the responsibilities of these communities. Let us remember that in the beginning, when presenting the argument of the critics of liberty, I noted that they conclude that currently we live under capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Mises always emphasized, we live under a system of interventionism. There are innumerable ways by which the State intervenes into the network of voluntary interactions. One of these interventions was the birth of the welfare state which proclaimed that it is responsible to take care of the calamities of its subjects. And indeed it is not capitalism — the network of contractual, voluntary cooperation — but government intervention in the form of the welfare state that is the cause of those phenomenon that the critics of atomized society deplore.

Two critical consequences followed the government takeover of the duties and responsibilities of communities. One, it devalued social relations in the eyes of its subjects in direct proportion to the degree of the governmental takeover of their purpose and functions. People built and maintained their secular and religious communities, their friendships and family ties precisely in order to maintain their beneficial role. As the government decided to step in and fulfill that role instead of communities, there was no longer any vital need for them. True, man is a social animal and his soul is often consumed by loneliness. However, the incentives to create and maintain social relations are entirely different in those societies in which voluntary communities shelter the individual from calamities than the incentives in those societies in which the State performs the communal functions.

Whether we are talking about government pension, social security, unemployment benefits or any of its forms, government welfare has destroyed, or at the very least radically decreased the incentives that motivated people to create and maintain social bonds. It devalued communities. Human ends didn’t change: to live and to prosper. However, the means to attain them has changed tremendously in the wake of government intervention: voluntary and mutual aid was replaced by government redistribution. If one is in need of aid, he no longer needs to ask a friend, a family or a community member, but a bureaucrat.

The other consequence of the nationalization of the function of communities relates to the very nature of nationalization. Private charity is voluntary. Nobody forces the contributors with the use and threat of physical violence to give their money to their neighbor in need. People participate by their own accord, freely and voluntarily, and a key characteristics of liberty is that one can say no to things. One can offer his help on certain conditions. He can say: I am not going to help John Doe, because he is and has always been a horrible, antisocial person. He walks the streets at night and yells in a state of drunken stupor. He treats the children playing around the neighborhood horribly. He terrorizes his own family. And as a matter of fact, it is quite obvious that he caused his problems for himself. In general, he is an unpleasant, hideous, unbearable figure who not only does nothing to make our neighborhood more pleasant, but, on the contrary, he actively debases and ruins it. The consequences of the freedom to say no are obvious. The freedom to refuse to help others with one’s resources creates an incentive that makes people civilized — that drives them to be kind, friendly and humane. It incentivizes people to make sure they leave the best possible impression on their fellow men, because quite literally, their life might depend on it.

All this completely disappears when voluntary assistance is replaced by compulsory assistance. When you can no longer choose whether to help or not to help somebody, when the State takes away your resources through the robbery of taxation and hands it to those in need — or those it deems to be in need — this incentive disappears alongside liberty. Once the State takes over and makes assistance compulsory, no matter how abusive, vile and unbearable someone is, the State will force his neighbors to help him if the State thinks he needs it. It no longer matters whether he caused his own problems or he is the victim of a tragic twist of fate; the State will force frugal, cautious, responsible, provident people to give their money to their irresponsible, spendthrift, toxic neighbors.

In short, when government compulsion takes the place of voluntary charity, the process of civilization is replaced by the process of decivilization. Or perhaps the other way around. Maybe when liberty is replaced by force, decivilization is already well underway and the nationalization of the function of communities itself must be seen as a sign of barbarism that leaves even more decline in its wake.

So it must be understood that nothing is more destructive to communities, to genuinely voluntary cooperation, to the strength of social bonds than the narrative that equates society with the State. The State is not the community. Government welfare is not the social safety net. Indeed, they are opposites and the former can only exist at the expense of the latter.

Let us take for example the institution of “parent support”, devised and signed into law by the self-styled right-wing conservative Hungarian government under the leadership of the ghoulish Viktor Orbán. This government — that calls itself “pro-family” while banning homeschooling and mandating compulsory kindergarten attendance from the age of 4— created an unprecedented, unspeakably evil piece of legislation and named it “parent support,” as in the mirror version of “child support”. It means that if the government were to ever default on its pension obligations for the elderly, the children of the elderly have to step in to directly support and finance their parents. What kind of effects does this have on the institution of the family? Based on all we have laid down before, the answer is obvious. Similarly to the effect of government pension itself, people no longer have to be good, loving, peaceful parents in order for their children to support them in their old age; they can abuse their children, they can terrorize and beat their children, indeed, they can even molest and rape their children and turn their childhood into a living nightmare by the means of poisonous pedagogy, and the State will still force their kids to support in their most vulnerable years those who treated them with utmost cruelty in their own most vulnerable years. This simply abolishes those incentives that drive barbarians to try and become civilized.

This is why it is imperative for all those who want to usher in the renaissance of communities, families and churches to radically oppose government welfare. Just the other day I’ve heard someone mention — who symphatizes with the libertarian stance on many issues — that as a Christian, he still cannot support the libertarian position on welfare and he believes Christian morality demands that the government provide some amount of “social safety net” for the vulnerable. But what he is asking with this is precisely the nationalization of the role of the church. The truth is the exact opposite: it is precisely because of the importance of communities, families and Christianity — and I say this as an atheist — that we need to lead our civilization back to the family, to friendly societies, to secular and religious communities by restoring their ancient social role.