[I’m responding to not just what you wrote, but also your self-description as “libertarian”]
Unfortunately, all I can say is that your case is quite vague, and the facts supporting it are too broad and one-shot to really make it convincing.
Let’s take a simple, one-policy example — those “baby boxes” I mentioned earlier. They’re commonly credited with rapidly diminishing infant mortality in Finland. Is this pro-family? If it is, then why can’t other policies also be (doesn’t it wreck your claim that all socialism must be anti-family)? If not, why not, given its success?
Or are you claiming that the slope of Socialism is so slippery that a single policy will inevitably end in totalitarianism? I don’t see it at all. I might buy that the state inevitably expands no matter what, but then libertarianism is doomed to fail anyway and the question is moot.
The second thing you don’t address is why exactly the family would be strong in the absence of state action. The family is strengthened by the traditionalist ethos; its decline tracks the decline of that ethos quite strongly. But should an economically advanced country adopt a laissez-faire economy, there would be virtually no force pushing it to keep or adopt a traditionalist ethos, and many forces pushing it away.
Finally, your point about the depression confuses me. (1) I don’t think it’s by any means settled that “socialism” caused the Great Depression, and in fact the conventional wisdom is against you [I’m not saying the conventional wisdom is necessarily right, just that I don’t see sufficient evidence to conclude that it’s wrong]; (2) A poor economy is hard on families, but I don’t see much evidence that laissez-faire is the best economic solution at all.
I even suspect that the libertarians/objectivists are falling into the same trap as the Marxists — trying to impose a moral theory on economics. Marxists worship economic equality and want enforce it dogmatically, and if it doesn’t work then too bad. Libertarians worship economic liberty and want to enforce it dogmatically, and if it doesn’t work…
Worse, even Econ 101, i.e. the extremely libertarian-friendly basic economic discipline, has many cases where laissez-faire fails. If one cannot find accurate information on products (e.g. imagine if we’d been uninformed this whole time about the effects of asbestos); if there are externalities; public goods (non-excludable, non-rivalrous); etc. Some of these cases require what I’d call “socialism” to solve, that is direct government intervention in the economy. Pollution legislation is one such case (and I’m not even talking AGW, though I’m worried about that too, but air pollution in major cities).
This is not directly related to the families thing, but if you want to rest on libertarian dogmas to attack any and all social policies to strengthen the family, I think it fair to respond by attacking those dogmas even on different grounds.
