The February issue of reasononline carries an article by associate editor Matt Welch entitled Injustice by Default, How the effort to catch "deadbeat dads" ruins innocent men’s lives. There is much about this article that is worthy of a link and an invitation for readers to click on it. Unfortunately, when the article is wrong; it is really, really wrong.

Mr. Welch does an excellent job of bringing attention to the injustice of wrongful paternity establishment and the bureaucracy that earns its existence by forcing as many men as possible to pay child support, whether or not they are fathers. The two cases he highlights (one of the men is a personal friend) are in California. Unlike many California newspaper articles that have focused on problems in the child support system (and have often done a pretty good job of it) Mr. Welch informs his readers that the problem is not local, but national, driven by federal laws and funding, and that a few states have taken steps to combat the problem.

The difficulties men face due to false paternity establishment are horrendous, and this is the primary focus of Mr. Welch's article. The article is well researched with respect to its primary focus and leaves no doubt that a large number of men have their lives crushed due to the systematic injustice of a government program. I will not try to summarize the entire content of the article here. There is a link above. The article is worth reading.

Had the subject of the article remained entirely within its primary focus, I would have been willing to recommend the highest rating from MensNewsDaily.com (if we had such a rating system – we don't). But Mr. Welch seemed to have felt a need to bring a superficial "balance" to the article, and tried to do so by including information that was not well researched. Despite the corrupt nature of what he found, he assumes an honest and worthwhile motive for the federal child support program. After exposing intentional injustice, motivated by federal funding, he still treats program lobbyists as credible sources and asserts that the program has been a resounding success.

The subtitle of the article, How the effort to catch "deadbeat dads" ruins innocent men’s lives, already gives a hint about the trouble ahead. The "deadbeat dad" propaganda has already been reviewed. Conclusions of academics and other analysts, by independent analysis as well as review of the basis of the propaganda itself, leave no doubt that my use of the word "propaganda" three times in this paragraph is well justified.

It would take someone who has investigated the child support enforcement program to a much greater extent than Mr. Welch to challenge Carolyn Kelly's justification. I won't fault him for not slamming a counter explanation directly against hers. But she's just a warm up.

As I said, the article does an impressive job of dealing with the issue of false paternity establishment. Mr. Welch continues; "But you can read thousands of pages of laws, reports, and testimonies, and not see a single reference to the importance of naming the right guy, or to the gravity of making a mistake." The statistics he provides in California open the possibility that the nationwide increase in paternity establishments could be mostly due to the treatment of false paternity establishment as legitimate (although he hedges against making that allegation).

My word processor says that Mr. Welch's article is 4,667 words long. My complaint comes down to about 23 of them (17 of which are Marilyn Smith's). "The bottom-line results have been impressive: Since 1993,  ... child support collection nationwide jumped from $8.9 billion in 1993 to $19 billion in 2001." By the numbers it might seem petty to write an entire article just to mention that the information is false. But claims such as these by program lobbyists provide the entire political justification for the dramatic federal invasion of family law and family life that has taken place over the past two decades, and created massive injustice and corruption well beyond that of false paternity; including the elimination of fundamental rights from application in family law.

I have written so much about the child support system that reference to my article archive makes more sense than trying to cover all that old ground again in this piece. Still, something has to be said for those who haven't been paying attention and won't go to the archive now.

Since the creation of the federal child support enforcement program in 1975, there has not been a significant increase in the percent of child support ordered that is paid each year (the compliance rate).

Most of the dollars that move through the program are payments (which honest people differentiate from "collections" but the child support enforcement program does not) made by well-employed middle and upper-middle income fathers to mothers who are not on welfare.

The compliance rate in welfare cases has dropped since the program began as has the compliance rate in non-welfare cases since the 1996 reforms. The primary cause of non-payment is still the same as it was before the program began; the person ordered to pay is not able to pay what has been ordered.

Much of the increase in payments reflect an arbitrary increase in amounts ordered (paid not "collected"). Arbitrary, politically controlled child support formulae have replaced rational child support judgments related to individual circumstances. An arbitrary increase in the amount ordered paid by those who pay, rather than collections efforts, have been primarily responsible for increasing the amount of federal funding states receive. The judicial branches of state governments are among the beneficiaries, and it is their maintenance of this system that has resulted in the greatest loss of recognition of fundamental rights in American history.

As I pointed out in Is Male Passivity on the Wane? (12/5/03) "It isn't grandpa's divorce anymore. Decades of political manipulation opened the door to social engineering and not unexpectedly, corruption. Today, fathers aren't expected to take it on the chin. They get rammed with bureaucratic bull dozers and flattened by the government's multi-billion dollar child support megalith. Family law is just generous enough to keep them alive so they can feel red-hot pokers jabbed into their eyes by politicians on the take." In fact, not all survive. Some have been driven to suicide. Others live desperate lives without the means to see their children.

There is no honest justification for the federal child support enforcement program. It is all about cheating taxpayers, parents, and children in a pork-barrel scheme, and there is a very influential private child support enforcement industry walking away with lots. The excuses given by program lobbyists have long since been played out. The only cover they have now is that so many people don't pay attention until they or one of their close friends gets run over by the system, and then apparently, their attention is limited to the specific problem at hand.