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Absurdistan in America
by Stephen Baskerville, PhD

In Iowa, the government has confiscated the savings of 11-year-old Rylan Nitzschke. Rylan saved $220 from chores and shoveling snow, but that now belongs to Iowa. Why? Rylan’s father allegedly owes child support (to Rylan), and his father’s name was on the boy’s bank account.

OK, so this is a mistake, and Iowa will return the boy’s savings, right? Wrong. State officials have no intention of returning the money. After all, they receive federal funds for each dollar they collect (and for each father they incarcerate). Rylan’s piggy bank helps balance the budget.

As Congress prepares to pass the Welfare Reform bill, the Washington Times reports that child support enforcement officials are ecstatic over provisions that will allow them to plunder and criminalize more citizens, using children as the justification. Yet no evidence indicates that there is, or ever has been, a problem of unpaid child support other than that created by the government. The child support "crisis" consists of little more than the government seizing people’s children, imposing patently impossible debts on parents (and others) who have done nothing to incur those debts, and then arresting those who, quite predictably, cannot pay....