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I am sure that Canada would love for the US to adopt this policy. Are you prepared to go full Walter Ulbrecht to make it stick?
I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.
Sure, a few people might get stuck in an abusive relationship because they can not prove to the standards of criminal justice that their partner is abusing them. But really serves them for marrying the wrong person, right?
And a few others might have a huge incentive to frame their partner for abuse to out of the divorce tax.
And I am sure that little Timmy will have a great intact family home if his parents are forced to stay together by economic necessity. Yes, perhaps there might be a lot of yelling, fighting and weaponizing kids, and perhaps both of his parents will bring their boyfriends/girlfriends home, but at least he will not be scarred for life by having to endure a divorce.
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If you pass all these laws by some miracle, here is my business idea:
The company aims to provide tax benefits for people who are disinclined to raise children. For maximum benefits, unmarried men and women are sorted by state and will marry (potentially over zoom) in a minimal civil ceremony. Subsequently, a fertility clinic will be create a number of embryos from the germ lines of the couple, three of which will be implanted in surrogates in Mexico. After the births, the 'couple' will become the legal guardians of the children, getting full tax credits. As the parents, it is their legal right to task others with helping them to raise their kids, so they can just pay a Mexican orphanage to raise them. When they come of age, they will be US citizens who may or may not be eager to come work in the US. The parents pay the costs for the surrogates and however much it costs to raise 1.5 kid in rural Mexico.
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Seriously, if you want to lower the costs of having a child to zero, I am ok with that. If you want to specifically incentive people who earn well to have kids (perhaps because you expect that by nature or nurture, their kids are more likely to be productive members of society) by also compensating them for lost earnings, I am okay with it.
But using tax cuts to bribe or bully people into having more kids feels deeply wrong. I believe that kids deserve parents who actually want to have them instead of parents who put up with them as an unfortunate side effect of some tax optimization scheme.
Chesterton's fence is a fence that it's not totally obvious what the reasoning for construction is. No fault divorce is a chesterton's well documented power line. One can very reasonably argue about what the line powers and the downstream implications but there is no doubt on the original motivations.
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No-fault divorce isn't a Chesterton's fence, it's what we got by knocking down the Chesterton's fence of requiring grounds.
We've had it since the 1960s. Please recalibrate what are proposed radical changes to long established norms.
What kind of "conservative" would consider a "fence" built in living memory to have any history at all?
Any time someone appeals to tradition you should ask whose tradition and when? Back in colonial New England civil divorces were granted for reason of spousal abandonment. So you could just bail on your spouse and they'd get a civil divorce in your absence.
Lots of things are like that. Interracial marriage wasn't common in 1750, but it was legal and accepted. But in 1950 it was very much illegal and almost universally opposed across much of the United States.
I'm not going to greatly respect the hallowed traditions of 1950 in opposition to 1650, 1750 and 1970. Norms and traditions drift in a variety of ways in various places. Then a modern 2024 Conservative cherry picks one they happen to like and declare it to be Tradition, can't be frivolously tearing down Chesterton's fence, etc.
Having no enormous respect for a carefully chosen set of norms and laws circa 1950, and since we're a few generations into the current set of laws and norms, I'm going to follow the good example of Conservatives and declare the current norms to be Tradition and warn everyone not to too easily tear down this fence.
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No-fault divorce still loses on long enough time-frames.
That's an easy assertion to make. But I have no reason to think that is better than the previous norm of a married couple working together to contrive a fake at-fault divorce.
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We knocked it down because it was starting to normalize perjury to the point where it risked the legitimacy of the entire justice system. When you need grounds but don't have them,. you're incentivized to invent them,.and it's easy to get away with it when both parties agree to the charade. Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.
And now she is entitled half your assets, plus alimony and child support; not exactly an improvement.
She isn't entitled to half of your assets, because when you're married there are no "your" assets, only "our" assets (excepting what you had before you got married). So before she leaves she drains the bank account and there's nothing you can do about it. In modern times it's considered fraud to take assets in contemplation of divorce, but since divorce doesn't exist in this scenario, what are you going to complain about? And forget estrangement, she's still entitled to live in the house, so what if she decides to stay and make your life a living hell? She could give her boyfriend blowjobs in your easy chair while you're home and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it, except surrender the territory and move out.
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