It is an honor to be invited to speak to this important gathering of friends of liberty from around the globe.

At one level, the relationship of the family to the welfare state is obvious and direct. The "welfare state" component of Leviathan has grown only as the family has surrendered or abandoned functions that, for millennia, had belonged to it and to related small communities: including the central role of moral and practical education of the young and the dependency functions of care for the sick, the infirm, and of those at the very beginning and the very end of life.

Now some say that the family, in consequence, is changing, adapting, or evolving into new forms better suited to modern life. At the outset of my talk, I openly reject that contention. My own experience, and my study, tell me that family structure is rooted in human nature, and is no more subject to rapid secular change than is the instinctual blink of the eye or the shiver down the back. The "changes" we can see are either deterioration from a natural order, or restoration toward that order. Holy Scripture affirms these truths. So do the modern sciences of sociobiology and paleoanthropology, which are rediscovering the powerful, biologically-imprinted force of human nature on our behaviors.

This means that in all corners of the globe, and in every historical age, the family can be understood as a man and a woman bound in a socially-approved covenant called marriage, for mutual care and protection, for sexual intimacy, for the begetting and rearing of children, for the construction of a small home economy of production and consumption guided by altruism, and for continuity with the generations, those that came before and those coming after. The only important free cultural choice here is between monogamy and polygamy: that is, between a society composed of one husband and one wife vs. a society with one husband and multiple wives. Within the civilization known as Christendom, monogamy has been the rule.

Vocational specialization and the exchange of products through barter and sale are also in consonance with human nature, and universal to the species. Markets are where the altruistic economy of the family, based in sharing, meets the larger economy rooted in competition and the quest for profit. A challenge lying before every human society is protection of the boundary between these two economies from deep intrusion either way, so that "family altruism" is not forcibly extended to all of society (a system known as socialism) and so that "competitive individualism" is not injected into the family circle.

In our age, both the permanent revolution known as industrial capitalism and the exponential growth of state power have made extraordinarily difficult the protection of that boundary between the competitive and family economies. For example, large portions of the welfare state found initial justification as mechanisms to "save the family" from the depredations of competitive individualism. At the same time, it is clear that public bureaucracy, considered in the abstract, also holds an interest in family dissolution.

In the balance of my talk, I will examine four episodes in the development of the welfare state in the Western world, which illustrate the deeply problematic place of the family in the modern age. I will also look for lessons that chart a better future.

The first episode was the attempt by workers and altruistic reformers to construct a "family wage." Few terms are better calculated to start a fight than this one. As two feminist analysts explained a few years back: "Attacking the family wage is... like an atheist attacking God the Father: she went on to say that it does not exist, that the false belief that it does has evil consequences and that even if it did exist it would not be a good thing."

A fair conventional definition of the term comes from The Trades Newspaper, printed in England, 1825: "The labouring men of this country...should return to the good old plan of subsisting their wives and children on the wages of their own labour and they should demand wages high enough for this purpose....By doing this, the capitalist will be obligated to give the same wages to men alone, which they now give to men, women, and children....[Labourers must] prevent their wives and children from competing with them in the market, and beating down the price of labor."

It is normal today to view language such as this both as sexist and as an artful attempt at restraint of trade, a cleverly-veiled descendant of Christian "just price" theory. However, if phrased in terms of my earlier comments, a "family wage" system--if it truly existed--could be seen as a shelter for household units from full immersion into the industrial economy, by limiting to one the number of family members entering its employ. Competition between family members for the same outside work would be discouraged. At the same time, other forms of non-market social labor--meaning home production such as gardening, food preservation, education, simple carpentry, the production and repair of clothing, and child care--would remain outside the industrial economy (and, indeed, the taxable economy) with its value retained wholly by the family. In this way, families would hold to some degree of economic liberty and independence from the giant institutions of modern life, be they corporate or state.

Now it is true that a great deal of mischief has been done in the quest for a family wage. Labor unions in Great Britain and the United States placed the "family" or "living" wage at the center of their agendas, demanding male wages that would support a "family of five" in reasonable comfort. Such efforts at officially defining the typical worker and injecting "social content" into wage rates quickly ran into the obvious difficulties. For example, since few households had exactly three dependent children at any given time, a "family of five" standard conjured up a vast horde of fictitious children needing support; 16 million in the England of 1930, and 48 million phantom children in the U.S.A. Meanwhile, families with four or more children faced continuing strains, while bachelors made out quite well.

The "family wage" also lay behind the Minimum Wage campaign, starting in Australia in 1896 and spreading elsewhere in the English-speaking work over the next few decades. State Wage Courts in Australia quickly succumbed to the temptation of defining a proper family budget, including precise sums for items ranging from "union fees and one newspaper" to "tobacco and drink." In the effort to sustain heads-of-households, the wage courts also fixed female wages at 54 percent of the male wage. This had the quite unintended effect of driving male workers out of certain professions, as employers hired from the legally cheaper female labor pool. The gender-based wage differential also overlooked the fact that a significant number of children depended on their mothers for financial support, due to the death, sickness, or desertion of the father.

On the other hand, I think it possible to show that the American people, at least, did craft, without state coercion and under modern conditions, an informal family wage system that enjoyed popular support, and that worked as intended, delivering on average greater income to families with children and protecting the domain of the household economy. Allow me to elaborate.

During WWII, it was the U.S. Federal government that forced private employers and states to eliminate direct wage discrimination against women. General Order Number 16 of the National War Labor Board, issued in November 1942, required government contractors to eliminate so-called "marriage bans" and to pay men and women equally "for comparable quality and quantity of work on the same or similar operations." Over the next three years, thousands of firms reported their compliance. Scientific job and wage classification, adopted by the U.S. government in 1923, was also forced on government contractors during the war years, with elimination of gender distinctions a central purpose. During the Cold War period, the "Equal Pay Act" won political support as a measure to improve defense mobilization in the War on Communism, by expanding the labor pool with married women and improving industrial efficiency.

Despite these developments, though, the so-called "wage gap" between male and female workers actually grew during this quarter century. In 1939, median female earnings in the U.S. were 59 percent of men's. By 1966, the figure had fallen to slightly under 54 percent. Preferences for part time or seasonal work played only a slight role in this change. Although direct wage discrimination against women had vanished, another, more powerful, non-governmental force had more than compensated for this change: namely, job segregation by gender, or the cultural recognition of "male" and "female" jobs. The post war period witnessed the accelerated crowding of women into only 21 of 250 distinct occupations (including file clerk, secretary, and nurse). Indeed, between 1940 and 1970, women actually lost substantial ground in occupational groups that were overwhelmingly male, including attorney, engineer, chemist, and heavy industrial worker. During these years, the pay rates rose most sharply for "men's" jobs, while the slowest growth was among "women's" jobs. The system encouraged specialization within the household, so enhancing the economic gains of family living and the scope of the household economy. And oddly enough, the system was popular, and existed without complaint or meaningful dissent from any quarter of American life. Even the Lyndon Johnson administration, dedicated in many respects to egalitarian civil rights, in a 1964 report to the International Labour Organization, cited this wage differential as a necessary aspect of "the basic [American] legal principle which places on the husband the primary responsibility for support of his wife and family with secondary liability devolving on the wife."

Through these culturally-imposed preferences, the American people had found an accommodation between the needs of the family and the demands of the market economy. Whether biological or cultural in origin, assumed differences in the family roles of women and men served as a refracting lens, through which market signals were bent to accommodate family autonomy, to protect family bonds from excessive intrusion of the "competitive principle." Not coincidentally, I believe, the 1945-65 period also witnessed an unexpected blossoming of family life in the U.S., with the marital birth rate rising 80 percent, with the divorce rate declining, and with the proportion of the adult population in married couple households reaching an historic high. Through the cultural construct of a normative barrier between the public and family economies, Americans had found a way to have economic growth and social stability.

It was the Jacobin principle of abstract equality, enforced by the state, which destroyed this successful American version of a family wage order. The venue was the addition of the word "sex" to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The story of how this occurred legislatively is peculiar enough. As originally proposed by the Lyndon Johnson administration, this title would have prohibited U.S. employers from segregating or classifying employees, for any purpose, on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Yet, during debate on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, a "Dixiecrat" or Southern Segregationist, Howard Smith of Virginia, proposed an amendment to the bill, adding the word "sex" to the list of prohibited discriminations. His apparent purpose was either to scuttle the bill by adding frivolous amendments, or to swamp the intended protected class--black males--with an equal legal focus on the much larger class of white females. Despite the fact that there was no organized support for this change, the measure won approval on a 268-133 vote, after brief and uncertain debate. The House Amendment survived a conference with the Senate (which also never debated the issue or purpose of placing the word "sex" in Title VII) and this change became law.

For a few years, the impact of the measure was uncertain. In 1967, however, President Johnson issued Executive Order 11375, which prohibited Federal contractors from discrimination in employment on the basis of sex, and mandated "affirmative," "result oriented" measures to eliminate job segregation by gender. Between 1968 and 1971, according to a sympathetic commentator, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, or EEOC, "converted Title VII into a magna carta for female workers, grafting to it a set of rules and regulations that certainly could not have passed Congress in 1964, and perhaps not a decade later, either." The effect was large. One analyst suggests that in the absence of enforcement of Title VII, "the male/female earnings gap would not have remained constant, but would have increased, between 1967 and 1974." Instead, EEOC efforts directly narrowed the male-female earnings differential during these years by 7 percent. A measure I have developed of the family wage, called the Family Wage Ratio, shows surprising strength to the system as late as 1968, and its accelerating decay over the next 25 years. Again, it is not a coincidence, I believe, that these same years have witnessed mounting disruption of American families, marked by a low marriage rate, a very high rate of divorce, soaring illegitimacy, and a sharp decline in marital fertility.

The lesson here is fairly simple: a culture can create mechanisms that do protect the family; an ideologically-driven state can destroy them.

A second episode casting light on the relationship of welfare state and family concerns housing policy in America. Here, we may see how good intent, and even initial success, can quickly turn socially destructive.

Viewed in the mid-1960s, the state-stimulated and regulated housing industry in America appeared to be a dazzling triumph. The Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934, had devised the long term, amortized mortgage, featuring a low down-payment, which made a sense of "home ownership" possible for persons with little capital. The Federal National Mortgage Association, or "Fannie Mae, " organized in 1938, mobilized many billions of post-war dollars for housing investment. The GI Bill of 1944 provided millions of war veterans with insured mortgages and the waiver of down payments. Reconfiguration of federal income taxes in the 1930s and 1940s gave preferred tax status to owner-occupied homes. The underwriting rules for government-backed loans also insured that only traditional, child-oriented, married-couple families would qualify. As the preamble to the Housing Act of 1949 proudly declared: "the general welfare and security of the nation...require...the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family."

Between 1945 and 1960, and under the stimulus of these state-inspired changes, the number of owner-occupied homes in the U.S. nearly doubled. The suburbs of America grew exponentially, and the new housing tracts were filled by "baby boom" families. In a mere 15 years, a nation of renters had become a nation of child-centered home owners. To be sure, some dour economists complained about an over-investment in housing, or about housing tax breaks that had a tendency to redistribute income from the poor to the rich, or about housing subsidies that unfairly penalized renters. But in the exciting new America defined by Levittown and the shopping mall, these comments seemed to be sour grapes.

Around 1970, however, the incentives within the housing-market shifted (although the effects were not apparent for another ten years). Subtle changes in bureaucratic rule making on mortgage underwriting eliminated the implicit bias in favor of young, married couple families. Why? "Fairness" and "equality" were the public explanations given. More important, though, was recognition that the housing market was slowing down. Most young married couples now had a home, and demand was weak. The industry needed more buyers, and the unmarried and the formerly married loomed large as "undeserved" populations. Between 1970 and 1987, the number of one person households in mortgaged units rose 216 percent, while the number of married couples households in owner occupied units barely changed. Reflecting this shift statistically, average household size plummeted.

the real process was more perverse, though. As economists George Sternlieb and James Hughes put it in their 1980 study of housing demand: "The very decline in the size of household, with its nominal generation of increased demand for housing, may in turn be a consequence of the availability and costs of housing units generally." Non-marriage and divorce, they implied, were now being encouraged by the availability of federally subsidized mortgages, while the housing industry itself needed divorce to survive at the level to which it had grown accustomed.

Let me phrase that another way: not only had federal housing policy ceased to encourage family life; it had now become an engine intentionally destroying families. The regulators and the regulated had conspired to keep the housing industry afloat by sabotaging the very social institution they had once sworn to serve. A recession could be avoided, industry advocates explained, only through the maintenance of residential construction at an artificially high level. The American economy was hooked, with a super heated housing market as its drug of choice.

In retrospect, the lesson is that neither the massive state intervention into housing, nor the complete reconfiguration of the mortgage market by government institutions, nor even the "family bias" built into the early housing programs, were necessary or useful to the family. The "marriage economy" already contains within itself natural benefits relative to shelter and other consumption patterns: as the old adage had it, two can live cheaper than one. Compared to single adults, whether never married or divorced, the married couple does not really need state subsidy to compete. In a truly free "lifestyle market, " marriage will always win. It is divorce, illegitimacy, and cohabitation that require subsidy from the state to survive.

The third episode involves efforts by government to regulate gender roles.

The paleo-anthropologists offer mounting evidence that human males and females have a "natural affinity" toward each other, a desire to be together that goes beyond the sexual act. They argue that monogamous pair bonding, intensified parenting relationships and specialized sexual reproductive roles are behavioral traits defining the human species for over one million years. This seems to be an evolutionist's way of understanding the Biblical language of "two becoming one flesh."

The modern state, though, shall put asunder, what nature and nature's God have joined together. This might be seen most concertedly in modern employment patterns, which have a peculiar relationship to the welfare state.

Data from Denmark, to choose an example, show that the number of female homemakers in that country declined by 579,000, between 1960 and 1981. Over the same years, the number of employees in the Danish public sector climbed by 532,000, with most of the growth in just four areas: day care; elder care; hospitals; and schools. Roll these numbers together, and the process emerges primarily as one of women moving from tasks of family-centered "home production" to the same tasks performed now for the government. But there are obvious differences. First, the women do these tasks less efficiently because the objects of their attention are non-family members in whom they have no stake. And, second, their labor has now been transferred from private family to the state, and so must be paid for by taxation.

Recently, feminist analysts in America have abandoned their once fashionable "new left" pretensions and have become brutally blunt in their embrace of the welfare state, as the only possible vehicle for their ideological success. Carole Patemen, for example, argues that women's dependence on the state is preferable to dependence on individual men, since women do not "live with the state" or sleep with the state as they must with the male creature. Francis Fox Piven is equally frank in her stated preference for public patriarchy over private patriarchy, as offering a better venue for the exercise of female power. She adds: "Women have also developed a large and important relationship to the welfare state as employees of these programs...By 1980, fully 70 percent of the 17.3 million social service jobs on all levels of government were held by women, accounting...for the larger part of female job gains since 1960." So, while it is true that women living under a system of public patriarchy do not have to sleep with the state, they do have to work for it.

The stark lesson here resembles the title of Steven Goldberg's infamous book: the inevitability of patriarchy. Steely-eyed feminist analysis makes the only choice plain and clear: will that patriarchy be private? Or public?

The fourth, and final, episode involves the bonds between generations of a family.

Some of the best work being done on this phenomenon comes from Australia and New Zealand, where analysts David Thomson and Alan Tapper have described "the two welfare states."

The first welfare state emerged after World War II and was designed to help young couples and their children. Tax rates for such families were low, while child allowances were generous. Young Australian families also had access to subsidized housing, at a level not unlike that found in America at the same time.

Yet, as Thomson and Tapper show, the "youth state" of the 1945-70 era, gave way to the second welfare state, or the "elder state, " of the post-1970 period. The welfare system now became a vehicle for aiding the relatively old: large and generously-indexed state pensions unrelated to earlier and low social security "contributions"; fully-subsidized health care favored tax treatment; and an array of other special programs for those over age 60.

The critical fact to know about the two welfare states is that one generation has been the principle beneficiary of both: persons born in the 1920s. They gained dramatically from the benefit package available under the "youth state," 1945-1970; and they have gained dramatically under the "elder state" of the last 25 years. The losers were the generation born circa 1910, who funded the "youth state, " and the generation born in the 1950s and early 1960s, who are funding the "elder state." Thomson calculates that couples from the second losing age group will have to work at least 15 more years than couples born in the favored 1920s, to enjoy comparable real incomes. Converting this disparity between generations into dollars per average household, the "greedy geezers" (or the true "me generation") born in the 1920s will enjoy a gain of $500,000 (Australian dollars) over their lifetimes from state transfers, while the poor souls born in the 1950s will suffer an average half-million-dollar loss per household.

On top of this, married couple households with adults born in the 1950s and 1960s will have to support, through taxes and welfare, single mothers and their children. Tapper estimates a net gain of $50,000 to $100,000 for couples with children who separate and take the state benefit.

With the old cosseted by the "elder state," and with the unmarried-with-children cohabitating with the provider state, only younger married couples are left to pay the bills. In Tapper's calculations, the annual average cost for the "elder and illegitimacy states" is between $10, 000 and $15, 000 per intact household. To meet these costs, younger couples are driven to deeper immersion in the industrial economy (that is, toward the "two career family") and they are likely to forego additional, or any, children.

By way of contrast, under a truly free order, the economic incentives bind the generations of a family tightly together. Each generation has a vested interested in the success of those going before, and those coming after. This takes form in the communal nature of family wealth, in security centered on family relations, and in retention by the family of the talents of progeny.

The modernist responds that such principles are no longer possible, given the complexities and demands of the contemporary economy.

To which I always reply with my favorite counter-cultural example: the old order Amish in America.

Amish society violates every modern rule. Relative to the industrial economy, they use true horsepower rather than tractors in the fields. They rely on horse and buggy for transport, rather than auto and truck. They make their own clothes, furniture, and candles. They avoid credit. They resist most uses of electricity and electronic devices. And they build and sell products using hand labor, dedicated to craftsmanship.

Relative to the state, the Amish are, at their request, exempt from Social Security and Medicare. They refuse welfare, relying instead on help from their neighbors and relatives in time of crisis. They keep their children out of state schools, operating their own schools through the eighth grade, after which children are to learn trades from their parents or neighbors. Indeed, the Amish shamelessly exploit child labor from age three on, and they maintain harshly segregated gender roles in all aspects of labor and life.

Living by such rules in 20th century America, the Amish should have disappeared long ago. Instead the Amish population has grown from 5,000 in 1900, found only in nearby Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to 150,000 today, found in colonies in a dozen American states. To place this growth in context, it is important to remember that the overall U.S. farm population fell from 35 million to 2.5 million over these same years. Using even the modernist measure of mathematical success, I ask: Who succeeded here? and who failed?

Someone, though, will surely ask in shocked tones: Do you mean to imply that we should all become Amish?

Well, I can imagine worse fates for the world but that is not my message.

This is the lesson I draw from the Amish example: --we do not have to live as we do, in a regime of mounting family and social disorder. The modern economy and the modern state do not make inevitable only one pattern of life. Human beings can use the power of culture to build and maintain barriers that protect their families (and their family or household economies) from functional ruin, and still participate with success in the larger economy. It has happened on a broad scale in the recent America past; it is happening now among communities such as the Amish; and it can happen in the future.