The peculiar consequences that result from government intervention are similar in all areas of economic and social life. Problems such as indifference, evaporating solidarity, irresponsibility, and short-term thinking are more than often caused or exacerbated by—sometimes well-intentioned—government interventions. This holds true for interventions in the financial world and in business, and it is no different with family policy. To make this clear, we first want to make a few comments about the economics of the family and then explain how state intervention tends to destroy families from within.

A Power Plant without Equal

According to the Christian definition, the family is a community between a man and a woman, before God, with God, and for God. It is a kind of worship. Of course, this is not the only motivation to start a family at all, but worship is what defines the Christian family.

From this covenant of life before God, with God, and for God, a whole series of further consequences follow with logical necessity, e.g., the formal and public alliance of the spouses, lifelong loyalty, openness to many children, rejection of abortion, and Christian commitment outside of one’s own family. Conversely, where there is no reference to God, there is no logical connection between these elements. They then appear as more or less arbitrary conventions. They become optional in the free design of individual lifestyles. Sometimes they become superfluous and even a hindrance.

In a society that loses the love for God, the family also loses its solid form. The Christian family is then gradually replaced by a patchwork of other forms of being together, which are set up according to one’s taste. This is inevitable and cannot be prevented by any human intervention—not even by the state.

But the traditional dominance of the Christian family is not only threatened by widespread apostasy. It is also, and massively, under siege by state intervention. In order to understand these, however, we first have to consider the economic reasons from which families arise and grow. The very first of these reasons is the division of labor.

The theory of division of labor teaches us that the work of specialists who exchange their surpluses is more profitable than nonspecialized work. The shoemaker naturally produces more shoes, the baker more bread than he himself and his family would need. But the point is that their specialization makes more shoes and breads overall than if everyone had devoted part of their time to shoemaking and another part to baking.

The most important precondition of this little miracle is that the specialists have different talents. The productivity of the division of labor is based on the inequality of the exchange partners. And that is exactly why the Christian family is so efficient. Men and women are different, and they happily complement each other. They complement each other in their intellectual and physical abilities, in their social skills, in their spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities, and in their mental lives. It is therefore possible for them to grow together in all these dimensions of being human beyond what would be possible for them alone and on their own.

The cross-generational division of labor within the family is equally important. The generations are also different; they also complement each other. Young people typically have a large work capacity and creativity, but less experience and money. The cooperation between the generations of a family is also favored by trust and affection that has grown over many years, which still has to be built up in relation to people who are not family members.

From a purely economic perspective, families are probably the most efficient form of human organization. Unfortunately, this is hardly ever properly appreciated, not even by the economists. This is probably due to the fact that the family’s performance has many dimensions, most of which are difficult or impossible to measure, in distinct contrast to the performance of a company or of a sports club.

Families are exceptionally efficient, but not infallible. They usually fail in one of the major areas of conflict: finance, raising children, sexuality. If no common denominator is found here, if there is a lack of hope or openness to the gifts of God, then failure is likely.

But how is this failure promoted by government intervention?

The State and the Family

To answer this question, we first have to consider the nature of the state. According to Max Weber’s well-known definition, the state is a monopoly of legitimate violence. This concept of the state is rooted in the legal concept of the modern state—the state that determines the law at its own discretion. It emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from the debates on the natural law conception of objective law, which is beyond human arbitrariness. In the modern conception, the state itself does not only have special rights that correspond to its special obligations. Rather, it is above the law in a strict sense. The state is completely free to decide what is right and wrong.

Once this concept of the law and of the state has gained a foothold, there is a natural tendency toward unlimited state growth. There is no logical brake on this movement, because the powers and tasks of the state are no longer fundamentally limited, but fundamentally open and unlimited. And there is hardly any economic brake on state growth either, because as it grows, so does the income and power of state servants and all other interested parties.

Family policy has become an important area of ​​state growth in recent years. In the past, various state interventions served to protect the family (tax privileges, child benefits, etc.), but today’s politics are almost exclusively harmful to the family.

It should be noted that explicit political harm to families is rather rare. Communists like Friedrich Engels correctly recognized the family as a source of bourgeois morality and therefore fought them. Such fanatics still exist today, but they do not determine what happens.