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, loc. 246