Stance: As we become a more free liberal society, we should remove default contracts, such as Alimony and Child Support.

My take: Default contracts between people are easily exploitable, reducing trust in society.

  • When default system contracts are exploited and broken, the broken contracts reduces trust in the System.
  • When negotiated contracts are exploited and broken, the broken contracts reduce trust in People.

It's better to lose trust in People than the System, because well-intentioned good people can proactively negotiate good fair contracts. However, if good people are exploited through default contracts by bad people, they don't participate in society at all. When good people stop participating, society crumbles.

Alimony

Alimony existed because the Equal Pay Act didn't exist.

Alimony was a womens rights issue because, women were unfairly compensated compared to men. Women didn't receive equal pay or have access to banks.

By law, Men and Women are now equal financially.

Due to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, employers must pay men and women in the same workplace be given equal pay for equal work.

I personally love this act. I definitely think that men and women must be paid equal pay for equal work. I own a company now and I definitely want to hire the best employee regardless of gender. I strongly believe this to be fundamentally important.

Because, Men and Women are now able to financially support themselves independently. Alimony doesn't make much sense. Alimony was more of an after the fact default equalizer of a default broken system. Since, we fixed system, it doesn't make sense as a default contract.

Men and Women should be able to proactively negotiate contracts between one another.

I'm really curious what types of marriage contracts could exist, as a liberal society we could pull from many cultures, creating a more fair stronger prosocial agreement between two partners.

Child Support

Child Support existed because Abortion and Contraception didn't exist.

Shotgun weddings were extremely common in the past. If a boy got a girl knocked up, they had to enter into the socially stable nuclear family configuration, through a shotgun wedding. The man would have to work long hours to provide for his wife, who couldn't work and was trapped in a life of childcare.

As a society we have normalized being a single parent, abortion, and contraception. Random children (and shotgun marriages) and teen pregnancies are rare. Planned pregnancies are increasingly common and when planned, children grew up in healthier safer environments.

Why can't we openly discuss financial commitment to the child prior to birth?

For instance, in the scenario of an unplanned pregnancy with a FwB, we don't enforce a shotgun wedding through society anymore, why are we enforcing child support commitment from the father/mother? Shouldn't the father and mother have open honest communication about the next steps, without any morally loaded social conventions?

Additionally, anyone arguing related to "Children have the legal right to receive financial support from both of their parents because it is in the children's best interests" please 1) define financial support and 2) answer whether you think couples that can't afford kids should be allowed to have them.

I believe children should provide financial support for themselves through future work, through a system like reverse social security. This helps all children in society, even children with two parents that can not provide for children financially.