Paternity and "not because of anything the child did"

[Tim May]

At 7:58 AM -0800 3/15/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>On Thu, 15 Mar 2001, David Honig wrote:
>
>>The motivation for this is that the legals have decided
>>that supporting the children is more important than
>>fairness.  Its that simple; some legals will even admit it.
>
>"Fairness" is such a slippery word.  Is it fair for a child
>to have no support available?  Remember, it's not because of
>anything the child did.

The core ideological value of our Western society--and most of the 
rest of the world as well, is that families are the primary care 
providers for their offspring. While there are things like public 
schools (which have their own problems) and publically-funded 
vaccinations, the "Schelling point" for parents, children, and 
society is that those who have children pay for them.

Those who have children must support them and must work out the 
arrangements for supporting them with the biological fathers, the 
biological mothers, the adoptive fathers, the adoptive mothers, the 
surrogate fathers, the surrogate mothers, etc.

It is not the role of neighboring families (or families elsewhere in 
a state) who have their own problems to deal with to support the 
children of others based on some notion that "it's not because of 
anything the child did."

The same rationale could be used to justify society support for every 
child. In fact, some political ideologies have tried this approach.

The argument that my money should be taken from me to support a 
litter of kids that some other family elected to have is not 
persuasive. There are also excellent Coaseian reasons to not shift 
the costs of raising children to others in the society.

As for the "Is it fair for a child to have no support available?," 
there are many good answers to this. For starters, adoption. And 
charity. And orphanages paid for out of charity. Also, long term work 
contracts (indentured servitude).

>
>But anyway, this has little to do with crypto...
>

For the 23rd time, this list is not just about crypto. As the 
"Welcome" message which was just posted, for the 19th time, points 
out, there are academic and other fora which are purely 
crypto-related.

This list was started in 1992 to place more of an emphasis on the 
sociopolitical implications of strong cryptography, including 
remailers, nyms, digital money, laws, new political and economic 
systems, black markets, etc.

The issue of paternity and DNA tests is not directly related, but can 
be loosely related to these issues. As Big Brother demands extensive 
DNA data bases "for the children," note the points of intersection 
with our interests.


--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns