The difference is that supporting the family helps men and women. The family is the foundational unit of society, not the individual. Granted, strong and good individuals are a requirement for a healthy society, but the individual doesn't perpetuate society. You're argument about not using tax money to pay for welfare is fair, though. Different societies are free to explore either side, if it's for the benefit of the people, and not due to corruption. Large centralized governments almost universally become corrupt, however.

Humans are sexually dimorphic. Men and women evolved to be physically and mentally different. It's so the two sexes can specialize in different roles, while working together, to increase species efficiency. All work environments employ the same principle. Different workers specialize in different tasks, and work together to achieve a better product more efficiently. Men and women bargain with each other in a relationship. The man provides security and protection for the woman, and the woman provides the man with exclusive breeding rights. This, in combination with our evolved differences, results in the man accruing resources and doing laborious and dangerous tasks away from the home/tribe, and the woman taking care of the children and home, doing the less laborious and safer tasks. Both sexes benefit from this arrangement. A man's sexual market value increases the better he can protect and the more resources he has. A woman's sexual market value is correlated precisely to how many and healthy children she can bear, meaning beauty and youth is prioritized.

However, the West became so successful that it's usurped the role of men, both in the private sector and through government. We've created relative safety in our success, resources are abundant, and women now pursue their own careers and work jobs to accrue their own resources. Women have also been given voting rights, and because of their more empathetic and emotional nature, they can be more easily manipulated and have voted in government largess, more welfare, and increased the size of the nanny and police state. It's one of the main reasons why women have become so insanely picky in the dating market, why they initiate most of the divorces, why marriage rates are so low, and why we're not having enough children. This can't sustain itself, though, and when society inevitably collapses, the protection and resources that women now enjoy, free from fathers and husbands, would disappear. Women would require men on the individual scale again.