Baskerville: The Road to Serfdom.

Welcome back!

Hope you are enjoying your holiday!

Here's an interesting article by Baskerville entitled, "Welfare and the Road to Serfdom," courtesy of the Fine ANCPR blog:

As conservatives congratulate themselves on ten years of welfare reform, they need to start looking at the larger picture and all that was left undone. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) addressed only one program in the welfare behemoth, Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The myriad other programs that constitute the welfare state remain untouched. Figures recently reported by the National Center for Health Statistics showing out-of-wedlock births at a record high confirm that, in social terms, we have barely scratched the surface.

Moreover, it is not called the welfare “state” for nothing. For unnoticed by reformers has been a startling development that is far more serious than even the devastating economic effects. This is the quiet metamorphosis of welfare from a simple system of public assistance into nothing less than a miniature penal apparatus, replete with its own system of courts, prosecutors, police, and jails: juvenile and “family” courts, “matrimonial” lawyers, child protective services, domestic violence units, child support enforcement agents, and more. This kafkaesque machinery operates by its own rules, largely outside the constitutional order, and represents the fulfillment of Friedrich von Hayek’s prophecy that socialism would eventually take us down a “road to serfdom.”

The first step in the mission creep transforming public assistance into bureaucratic tyranny was the extension of welfare operations beyond the needy. Having shut the front door to welfare abuse among low-income recipients, reformers have left the back door wide open, with welfare-originated programs quietly expanded to serve the middle class.

The prime example is child support enforcement, which grew directly out of welfare. Despite sanctimonious rhetoric about being “for the children,” the original aim was not to provide for children but to recover welfare costs; no other constitutional justification exists for this federal plainclothes police force. The program was begun exclusively for families on welfare and was to be applied to willfully absent parents who had abandoned their parental responsibilities to their children, leaving them dependent on public assistance to satisfy basic needs.

During the 1980s and 1990s – with no public debate, justification, or explanation – federal enforcement machinery conceived and created to address the minority of children in poverty was expanded (under bureaucratic and feminist pressure) to cover During the 1980s and 1990s – with no public debate, justification, or explanation – federal enforcement machinery conceived and created to address the minority of children in poverty was expanded (under bureaucratic and feminist pressure) to cover all child support cases, including the vast majority not receiving welfare. Unlike Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and virtually every other welfare program, child support enforcement is not means tested; indeed, there are no limitations or eligibility requirements at all.

This vastly expanded the size of the program and continues to do so by bringing in millions of middle-class divorce cases, for which the system was never intended. Unlike the welfare-related cases, where it is almost impossible to collect from impecunious young inner-city fathers, the divorced fathers have deeper pockets to mine...

Read the rest of it.

The piece ties in beautifully with what I have written concerning the very shabby condition of this country's financial system, in the long term.

For example, the Baskerville paper cites the following chart:

Cost to the Taxpayer of the Child Support Enforcement Program

As of 2002, the expense of both the state and federal child support programs has climbed into the BILLIONS of dollars!

And forgive me, dear reader, if I assume that the costs of administering these morally bankrupt programs have only increased since then. I say morally bankrupt because programs that undermine the family unit, such as child support, not only defy the laws of morality and logic, but they also create moral hazards that greatly discourage marriage, the familial arrangement that is the most conducive to wealth creation [a][b].

We are robbing Peter to pay Paul, and losing money in the process. In financial speak, our child support regime has a negative "net present value," and should be dismantled with excessive amounts of speed and fury.

No Cost Accountant in his right mind would continue such a program, but the Child Support Regime, as Mr. Baskerville points out, is very profitable for certain government agencies and private businesses that make a living off of the wages of sin:

Deuteronomy 10:18:

He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien (or the stranger, Strongs# 1616), giving him food and clothing.

In closing, feminism, along with other Platonic movements, is doomed to failure. It is inefficient, and unsustainable.

In a perfect world, our political leadership would catch on, see the iceburgs, and reverse the unsinkable U.S.S. Government before it's too late. However in the real world that you and I inhabit, this outcome looks increasingly unlikely.

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best... and save that last rack of BBQ ribs for me!!

Kumo.