As defenders of the competitive free market order, neoliberals may not have cared much for the active promotion of marriage, responsible fatherhood programs, and faith-based provision of services, all of which were supported by communitarians and social conservatives and included within Clinton’s welfare reform. But neoliberals were certainly in favor of efforts to enforce kinship obligations as an alternative to the redistribution of income by the state. When welfare recipients refused to take care of themselves within the proper structure of the family, neoliberals believed that the state had every right to leverage (or indeed to create) these relationships by force, just as it had every right to compel the long-term unemployed to work. Unmarried mothers who sought welfare from the state should first be obliged to seek support from an “absent father,” via child support orders, before the state disbursed any funds.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 212