Sorry to hear about your mother.
Okay. I get your template. Bottom up.
That seems appealing on its face.
But then you run into all kinds of problems.
Sometimes top-down is the model that works best.
Imagine, if you will, that you live in bottom-up-land. In bottom-up-land, family is the foundation. Even so, you have a few things you want to accomplish.
First, you want to have property rights which everyone can enjoy.
Second, you want to build freeways so that vehicles can move efficiently around the country.
Third, you want clean air so folks can breathe less pollution emitted from the vehicles on those roads.
The first of these is everywhere resolved by means of the development of property rights. Property rights are both a restriction on freedom (person b can no longer trespass on a's land) and an extension of it (now person a owns property he can do things he could not otherwise). But the way we create property rights and update them is by means of government. So even in bottom-up-land government is necessary.
The second issue occurs because if you want to build a straight road rather than one that moves around the edges of rectangular fields, you need some authority to represent social purposes. A society grants this role to government as the representative of our common purposes. Some benefits in common rise above individual freedoms.
The third issue occurs where one or several individuals benefit while applying a cost to society. The example I have used is vehicle pollution. The driver enjoys the use of his vehicle. Other individuals are forced to bear the costs of the vehicle's pollution even though they are neither enjoying use of the vehicle nor compensated for its harms. In order to prevent this occurring, governments usually make rules. So we end up with vehicle emission standards rather than dense smog.
So government is necessary to make laws, provide public goods and prevent social harms. Even in bottom-up-land.
The family also does good and useful things. People in families work to make a living, provide a basis of love and trust, own things etc.
The world isn't polarised between government and family. They both have roles to play in a society.
No one sensible is arguing for the extension of one and the exclusion of the other. Societies are onions. Different rights and duties belong in different layers.
Or put another way, we are not forced to make choices between extremes. The temperate zone exists between the poles. We can live in a society which has a smart and sensible government and which celebrates the family and its benefits.
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