Divorced From Reality
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 10:30AM 
With Special Guest:
- Dr Stephen Baskerville.
We are delighted to have the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, Dr Stephen Baskerville, on the show once again.
No one has done more to expose the ideological war against fathers by the welfare, family law, domestic violence and child support industries as Dr Baskerville. While those impacted by these industries, many of whom have seen their lives and their children’s lives destroyed, know all too well the disastrous impacts of the current reigning ideologies, separated fathers are traditionally ridiculed. With his academic credibility and forecefulness of personality, Baskerville has been able to articulate the shocking damage being wreaked not just on fathers and their children but on society as a whole.
In Australia, the Labor Party, now in power, created many of the country’s most despised and destructive institutions, including the Family Court and the Child Support Agency. The conservatives did nothing to stop their ever increasing power.
We last interviewed Dr Baskerville in 2007 on the publication of Taken Into Custody. This week we catch up with activities since, including the establishment of his own blog.
In his article From Welfare State to Police State, published in The Independent Review late last year, he argues that welfare is a form of political patronage, increasing the client population on the public payroll.
“Welfare reform in the United States has shifted the role of welfare agencies from distributing money to collecting it—not from taxpayers but from divorced fathers. Despite the stereotype of the “deadbeat dad” as a wealthy playboy squiring around his new trophy wife in a bright red Porsche, federal officials have acknowledged that most unpaid child support is uncollectible because it is owed by fathers who are as poor as or poorer than the mothers and children.”
Much of what he writes about the situation in the US also rings uncannily true for Australia; with the astonishing expansion of the welfare state in Australia over the past 15 years now meaning that more than 90% of Australian families now have a relationship with Centrelink, and therefore have a relationship with the government:
“Although the role of culture should certainly not be discounted, the problem is also driven by federal policies and funding that welfare reform did not remedy and may even have exacerbated. Once again we are faced with a question of incentives created by spending. Yet the problem has grown more complex than simply disincentives to work and family formation created by public assistance. Ignored thus far is how expanding welfare-originated entitlement programs have extended the subsidy on single-parent homes to the affluent. Moreover, the perverse incentives create perverse behaviors not only among the population, but also by governments. It is not called the welfare “state” for nothing. Unnoticed by reformers and even more striking than the economic effects have been subtle but far-reaching political developments. These developments involve the quiet metamorphosis of welfare from simply a system of public assistance into nothing less than a miniature penal apparatus, replete with its own tribunals, prosecutors, police, and punishments: juvenile and family courts, “matrimonial” lawyers, child protective services, domestic violence units, child-support enforcement agents, and other elements. Originally created to treat ills endemic to low-income, single-parent homes, this machinery is increasingly intervening with police actions in middle-class families. Kafkaesque in its logic, this machinery lends plausibility to the warnings, most famously by F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom (1944), that socialist and welfare-state principles would eventually threaten not only economic prosperity, but also civil freedom.”
In the same article he offers a superb analysis of the rise of child support regimes and the appalling impacts they have had on so many people.
He observes:
“In addition to providing incentives for women to divorce and to bear children out of wedlock, the federal payments also encourage governments to use means of their own to create fatherless children. Contrary to government claims, most fathers subject to child-support orders have not abandoned their children (Braver 1998, chap. 7). Most were actively involved in rearing them, and following what is usually involuntary divorce, many clamor for more time with them. (The vast majority of divorces involving children are filed by women, who can expect to gain sole custody of children regardless of fault and despite being the moving party in the family’s dissolution [Brinig and Allen 2000].) Yet for states to collect their funding, fathers who are fit and willing to care for their children must be designated as “absent,” with the implication that they have “abandoned” their children, when they have clearly done no such thing. In self-fulfilling fashion, these incentives put added pressure on divorce courts to shift their role from impartial tribunals dispensing justice into revenue- generating engines for state government by ruling that a child’s “best interest” is to have limited contact with one parent in order to conform to the welfare model of one custodial parent and one noncustodial parent. Divorce-court judges who might otherwise be inclined to allow both parents a shared role in parenting their children are pressured to evict the father—thus, the nasty “custody battles” that are now daily fare on the front pages and the bread and butter of divorce lawyers.”
And as he so rightly observes: “Diverting the criminal justice system from protecting society against violent criminals to criminalizing nonviolent and otherwise law-abiding parents and keeping them separated from their children has uncounted costs.”
There are also many similarities between the Obama government in the US and the Rudd government in Australia.
Baskerville’s blog has become essential reading for those interested in government policies towards families and fathers. Here’s what he has to say about the new US President Obama:
“Negative: Like all presidents, Obama will reward his supporters with jobs, money, and power. His principal constituencies are the bar associations, social work bureaucracies, and feminist organizations. Regardless of his rhetoric about “restraint,” Obama will reward these friends with federal appointments and federal spending. They will take up positions directing the welfare agencies such as HHS, housing, and education. These officials will be very hostile to fathers, parents generally, and intact families. Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – both of whom push an aggressively feminist agenda –will help distribute the largesse.
“The spending spre— uh, the economic stimulus will massively exacerbate all this. Administration economists are talking about spending hundreds of billions of dollars for its own sake and are simply looking for programs to spend it all on. With the country very unwilling to engage in foreign adventurism, the vast bulk of the spending will be domestic. It will go to programs that further erode families, encourage single-parenthood, and criminalize fathers.
“Obama and his court intellectuals have rationalized a free-for-all for leftist programs (and perhaps some apparently conservative ones, to diffuse opposition by ensuring that conservatives too have a place at the trough). It is a prescription for a massive federal patronage machine, centralization of power, and destruction of constitutional protections. This is precisely what was begun by the New Deal and has been steadily growing ever since. The present administration starts way ahead of where the New Deal began. It is a power grab on an unprecedented scale.
“All this will do little or nothing to stimulate the economy but, on the contrary, run the economy into the ground. As more fathers become unemployed, they will be divorced, unable to pay “child support,” and jailed without trial.
“Few will notice immediately the expanding power of the already burgeoning and authoritarian federal police forces: child protection, child support enforcement, the various agencies dealing with “domestic violence” such as the Justice Department. The welfare state is already becoming a police state, but now many more parents will be criminalized and incarcerated. The incarcerations will seldom be reported in the news, and there will be no information about them, as there is none now, from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“Positive: Obama is good to his children.”
More information:
http://www.stephenbaskerville.net/
http://stephenbaskerville.blogspot.com/