Much like Friedman, Gary Becker credits AFDC (along with social insurance programs and public services such as state education) with weakening the bonds of familial obligation. For Becker, the family in its equilibrium state or free market state could be understood as serving a kind of natural insurance function that was fatally disturbed when the welfare state socialized insurance. Writing in the early 1980s, Becker credits the postwar welfare state with destroying the natural altruism of the family, but surmises that the decline in welfare initiated by Reagan will ultimately compel the poor to restore the bonds of kinship as a source of privatized welfare.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 239