No party for liberty

I think religious people DO think there’s a negative externality generated by e.g. gay marriage and prostitution – it angers their magical sky friend, or it helps their magical evil opponent, or something like that.

And from the point of view of uneducated workers, working for below-minimum-wage (or “scabbing” or related conduct) seems to be negative-externality-generating (to their in-group, of course). Lots of people are convinced that consensual drug use creates negative externalities.

Defining what’s an externality and what’s not is not a simple matter.

True indeed, IVV, and something I also considered when writing my response.
I would say that society has a positive externality with regards to raising children that are not captured by parents. Thus as a society to exist long-term, there needs to be incentives for the formation of child producing families. We can think of a few of the advanced countries with plummeting birth rates as examples of what not to do.

Again a matter of asymmetric information. The heterosexual couple knows more about their mutual fertility than the state does. It is costly to screen all prospective heterosexual couples for mutual infertility and there is no payoff–in regard to enhanced assurance that the children of fathers are truly theirs–to show for it.

Because the interests of the prospective father are harmed if he has to wait that long.

And incidentally, why is there not a checkbox on the marriage license application which reads, “I affirm under penalty of perjury that to the best of my knowledge and belief I am able to bear children?”

I mean, shouldn’t we at least stop the honest ones?

Your answer below is irrelevant to my point, which is that we should make sure that the woman (and the man) are capable of having children *at all.* So first, we should make it illegal for people who *know* they’re infertile to marry. Secondly, we should not allow them to finalize their marriage until they’ve demonstrated fertility. This hasn’t got anything to do with the paternity problem: it has to do with the goal of using marriage to encourage childrearing. If you can’t rear children, no marriage benefits. We may not know for sure that the husband is the father, but we at least know the mother is fertile. Why shouldn’t that be the minimum requirement if your goal is a preferred childrearing environment? Why should people who can’t provide the societal benefit get the privileges?

I keep settin’ em up, you keep missin’ em. Is that little blue bonnet on too tight?

Legal marriage grants a set of privileges *from* society *to* the participants. Your claim is that it is justified for society to give them disparate privileges because it is in society’s interest for children to be raised in legal marriages. Even if we grant that it’s too expensive for prospective couples to be screened for fertility, if a person KNOWS they are infertile, they shouldn’t be allowed to marry: it’s free-riding and there’s no benefit to society to justify the grant of extra privilege. In other words, it’s fraudulent. Why are you condoning fraud?

For about the third time, the payoff is the legal privileges that attach to marriage. The harm is the granting of privileges – which have a cost – to those who do not provide the benefit they are intended to reward and/or encourage.

Please just answer the specific question, if you don’t want to listen to what I say in general: why should there not be the checkbox I describe on the marriage license application form? It doesn’t ask you to affirm your fertility. It asks you only to affirm that you don’t know you are not infertile. If our basis for denying marriage to what we consider non-ideal childrearing couples is just that they will be non-ideal childrearers, why does this not make perfect sense?

I can only assume that you are arguing in bad faith, as the argument that there are no legal privileges attached to marriage cannot be advanced in good faith. It’s patently untrue. So I guess we’re done here.

Courts do that all the time. It’s very common for a court to say that it’s in the best interest of a child to force a man to pay child support for it even if it isn’t his kid, he didn’t adopt it, and he and the mother had no relationship beyond a few minutes of proximate body parts. And woe, I say woe, unto him if he decides not to do it.

Now, we aren’t quite to your literal example yet – we don’t pick them from random groups – but I have read cases where this happens:

1) Dick has one-night stand with Jane.

2) Jane delivers Anne and tells Dick he’s a daddy.

3) Dick believes that Anne is his child and even though Jane wants nothing to do with Dick so Dick doesn’t fight for visitation or custody rights, he pays child support.

4) Dick finds out later that Anne is actually Tom’s biological child. (In one case I read he found this out because somebody pointed out that Anne bore a strong resemblance to Tom, which they noticed *because Tom was living with Jane and Anne and had been for some time.*)

5) Dick goes to the court to ask that he be relieved of his child support obligations and the court says, “Hmmm. Let me think about that. Okay, I thought about it: Fuck you. Keep paying or I’ll throw your ass in jail. Best interests of the child nanny nanny boo boo.”