More comments on child support article

Yesterday's WSJ child support essay drew some comments on another blog:

I have to agree with Obama on this one. The idea of child support is archaic. It hearkens back to a time when it was assumed that people didn’t have sex until after they were married, and if it happened before marriage it was assumed that the man scammed the woman into doing something she didn’t want to do. Child support, perhaps, was seen as punishment for doing something immoral and then not getting married.

The blogger is a very class-conscious Jewish Republican.

Other comments:

If the parents have joint custody, which should be the norm unless one parent is unfit, there should not be child support. Each parent supports the children when they are living with him/her. If one parent has sole custody, the other one should pay child support. People do have a moral obligation to take care of their children.

Why does a man have a moral obligation to “support a child” the other ripped away from his care with a unilateral divorce?

Do men have a moral obligation to take care of a child they never wanted? Women don’t.

I agree with most of that.

I have to thoroughly disagree with any policy that makes the United States more like a Black ghetto hellhole. I don’t want to live in a world where non-Blacks have the incentive to live like Blacks. In fact, if such legislation were passed in all majority-White countries, I would have to seriously consider living among different race peoples. ...

This article genuinely made me angry.

We are reaching end-game of alpha-fucks, beta-bucks, and even the government is in on it.

Due to the ever diminishing integrity of our country and rule-of-law, the government is giving up on trying to extract money from alphas to pay for their children, so instead they double down on the low hanging fruit – beta bucks. ...

A woman needs child support like a fish needs a bicycle.

Live by your own standards, bitches. ...

Philp Greenspun’s blog (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/) is mostly about the U.S child support system, and he has me convinced that the system is both insane and evil (and he has collected alot of data on the subject). Essentially its evolved to yet another way to reward system gamers.

Its probably impossible to enforce child support in a way to ensure the money is actually spent on the child (there is now no requirement to do this at all, and the money is often not spent on the child), but it should be a flat rate per child calculated off of the poverty rate. If the custodial parent effectively denies visitation rights to the paying parent (such as by moving out of the area), then the obligation should be suspended. I’m actually fine with just automatically awarding custody to the women and support obligations to the man, unless the woman is in jail, crazy, otherwise incapacitated, or waives, mainly to avoid the nasty custody battles, though capping child support at a fixed amount would accomplish alot of this anyway.

Women are no longer disadvantaged in the labor market, at worst it is harder for women to get really high level jobs (but the studies show it is easier for them to get entry level jobs), so alimony should no longer exist.

There are many things wrong with the current system. They are just scratching the surface.

Update: Just to be clear, I am quoting the comments of others. I regard them as only partial understandings of what is wrong with child support. I will post on Greenspun separately.