Folbre Chapter 4    The Nanny State

1. Term used by R. Novak as a pejorative for the welfare state à a euphemism for the government’s programs that supposedly create excessive dependence.
2. Folbre says “competitive capitalism undermined family, not the welfare state.”
3. Right-wing notion: Providing welfare to poor encourages them to breed (perverse incentive).
4. Folbre: The fertility rate has declined as a result of the diminished agrarian character of America. Actually fertility rate has inverse relationship with rise in role of public assistance. In other words, public assistance was a response to young leaving family to seek paid work rather than work on the farm. Also, welfare mothers had same fertility as national average.
5. Right-wing notion: welfare  “crowds out” private charity or family sources of support. As well, if state gives unearned source of income it creates disincentive to seek paid work.
6. Folbre: The alternative is to give no aid at all to families in distress. And, anyway, the “growing obsolescence of the family (and rise of capital) drove a wedge between reproductive and productive work.” “Parents subsidized capitalists.” Also, pooling risks is more reliable and efficient.

                                                     Question: Yes or No? 

                 “People should take care of their own children and parents.” 

7. Right-wing notion: welfare system simply breeds bureaucracy that is self-perpetuating (rent-seeking) à solution: privatize public assistance of all kinds (welfare, social security, Medicare, Medicaid).
8. Folbre: Private safety net programs usually involve cutting out those at greatest risk (the unhealthy, the unlucky, the poorest, the oldest etc) because they will raise the cost of such programs. So, it’s the same as the use of private vouchers in education – it cuts out the neediest who are the most expensive. In other words, it’s no different than private country clubs, gated communities and exclusive private schools.

                                                 Question: Yes or No? 

             “Social programs simply gouge the hardest working Americans.”

9. Folbre: As in #2 – increased public assistance was a product of the emergence of capitalism whereby subsistence farmers were driven from the land, or forced into slavery or debt peonage and the subsequent loss of the extended family network (a source of support for elderly and the young).
10.  The Daddy State: Heightened individualism à weakening of family. If one earner enters labor market, someone stays home to care for kids and the elderly à the women (least politically powerful) were the chosen.  

       U.S. Supreme Court decision re why women should not practice law: 

“The paramount destiny and mission of a woman is to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.” (91)  

11.  Since the end of agrarianism more and more such rulings and laws suppressed women’s rights. This went on even though fertility rates were declining and by the end of the 19th century, “40 percent of all unmarried women were working for wages.” (93) Gradually, in the 20^th century the need for women workers ended the practice of discrimination against married women – and women got the vote in 1921.
12. As a consequence of this in Europe, more and more countries provided public funding for family support of children and the elderly – the American sense of male domination, individualism and independence forestalled all of these programs.
13. Social Security (1935) – the first real break in the dam in the U.S. It accepted responsibility of the state to care for the elderly. It was readily self-sufficient because the number of elderly to the number in the workforce was very low. The opposite is true today à increasing pressure to defund the program.  
14. The principle of Social Security is based on an inter-generational transfer of income. Implicit in this the assumption that because the young no longer care for the elderly then this principle of reciprocity must be socialized", i.e., society must underwrite the transfer regardless of whether the retired ever had children. (Benefits are based on wages, not whether you had children -- so, in some sense, it's a transfer of income from parents to non-parents.)
15. Other Considerations

• Fewer children per family & increase in childless couples.
• Increase in single mothers who work, pay into social security and care for their kids.
• increase in dead-beat kids.
• Racial/ethnic inequalities undermine sense of national familial loyalty.
• Resistance to paying for maternalism -- men increasingly encouraged to avoid relationships (Playboy era); pregnancy -- a woman's decision. Never married-mothers increase as percent of all mothers.

               "...percentage of mothers receiving child support from non-custodial fathers ...31 percent." (106)

16.  Folbre criticizes privatizing social security as encouraging a "go it alone" attitude & providing a disincentive to care for dependents. We need a more democratic provision of care, not a lesser one.