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Originally Posted by Still Growing  You mention the benefits that people get when they marry. Why can't some of these benefits be opened up in another fashion? Inheritances can be covered by wills, taxes can be flat and so on. |
The flat tax opens another can of worms. If that is required for your argument, then you're proposing a complete overhaul of US government as a whole, not of only marriage.
Again, I don't see what benefits there are. Setting aside the tax issue for a moment, folks will still want to have agreements about their life situation. They will still be aggrieved when relationships go wrong. They will still fight over children. They will still fight over who deserves what when a relationship ends. They'll bring up implied contracts, quasi-contracts, verbal contracts (all valid to some degree in my state). They'll discuss what each spouse's services were worth to the marriage. They'll discuss the degree to which a spouse relied on the other's promise of life-long support and companionship and the extent to which that reliance precluded their own work. They'll discuss living arrangements for the child and the best way to provide a good life for the child. All the same issues divorce lawyers deal with will still apply. The courts will still have to consider all of these issues whether we call it a marriage, civil union, divine partnership, or exclusive long-term relationship of monogamous intent. If folks are still having lives and having kids, we'll still have to deal with the issues.
We can, perhaps, find better ways to do so. Collaborative law is making headway, as is mediation and arbitration.
Doing away with marriage would have a profound impact. Laws would be extinguished. They would either have to be re-written to exclude marriage, or they would have to be replaced in the disputes. If they are replaced, common law principles would step in (in the US, at least). Either way, it would be extremely expensive to make that transition. The legal fees for new divorces would likely increase rather than decrease, so long as children or assets became involved.
As it is, the expense for divorces is heaviest on the parties themselves. The courts are burdened with divorces, yes. I see that daily. But the expense is small in the scheme of things. The salaries of all court personnel are defrayed by fees and court costs that litigants are charged. I do not have figures for how much tax money is required to continue court authority over divorce, but I would assume it is relatively small compared to the cost to run criminal courts and jails. If your concern is saving money, you're looking at the wrong kind of case... but other than that, I don't see any argument against letting the cultural tradition remain.