The family sat at the center of nearly every neoliberal policy campaign

Evidence

It can be seen in efforts to repeal the estate tax on inherited wealth, a campaign that was loudly supported by neoliberal thinkers in the 1970s; in the local and state tax revolts that began in California in the late 1970s and then spread throughout the country, placing permanent limits on the power of the state to spend, tax, and most importantly, redistribute wealth; in the war of attrition to replace Social Security and work-based health insurance with private asset accumulation strategies; and in efforts to promote home ownership as a form of “asset-based welfare” under Clinton and George W. Bush. We tend to forget how central the problematic of the family was to each of these campaigns, but it was always front and foremost in the eyes of neoliberal policy-makers, who saw asset-based welfare as a way of replacing the “impersonal bonds” of social insurance with family-based forms of wealth accumulation and transmission. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 246

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Overturns the common stereotype of neoliberalism as pure market individualism by showing the family as the load-bearing unit of asset-based welfare — dense enough to reshape how one reads estate tax repeal and Social Security privatization alike.
• XREF: Directly challenges and complicates the crude ‘individualism’ caricature that this book’s reading purpose aims to fracture; connects to critiques like Nancy Fraser’s family wage debates and asset-based welfare literature. — connects to: Decades of neoliberal reform reinstated the family as first-line welfare provider — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 260; Family household was reframed as a site of political discipline; Neoliberals pushed a return to the hated family means-test — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 215

Broader Connections

• Decades of neoliberal reform reinstated the family as first-line welfare provider #corroborates (0.85) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 260
• Family household was reframed as a site of political discipline #expands (0.75)
• Neoliberals pushed a return to the hated family means-test #exemplifies (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 215