Pelican
People don’t necessarily agree to raise a family. If they do, there is no issue.

The issue is if they don’t. You don’t have some kind of monopoly on deciding what is “fair”, especially since you are the one advocating violence, not me.

We can endlessly talk past each other about the existence or non-existence of a responsibility. But even according to your own view, there is no natural law, and morality is only whatever people think it is. Therefore others have an equal right not to be physically violated into a relationship they don’t want to be in.

I’ve shown reason why no responsibility exists without consent but you haven’t shown any reason why an involuntary obligation is justified, you’ve just assumed that moral values follow automatically from the fact of biology. But you deny that yourself!

Let’s talk brass tacks. Let’s suppose there was no compulsory child support of any kind. Let’s suppose that the women who want to raise children were to make the money themselves. Worse case scenario, they got the money by – shock horror - providing sexual services.

So? As Grim would say “there’s no law against it”.

If you are against it, that only proves that the purpose of child support laws is not to provide for children at all, since women can always get the money by consent. The purpose is to protect women from having to provide services – especially sexual services – in order to pay for their own choices in life by exploiting men for a double standard to pay for a privileged class of victims the unequal benefit of living at others' expense.

It’s unequal, based on violence, unnecessary, and unfair.

Antiseptic
Not even the CSA’s advocates can argue that it achieves fairness, equality, or ‘no child living in poverty’.

Subsidising people’s reproductive choices will only lead to them externalizing the responsibility for it. The more we do it, the worse the resulting social disorder, disadvantage and moral hypocrisy it will spread: from the single mother’s pension, to the CSA, to Australia’s social landscape of bitter destructive family law battles, to the bogan bonus, and so on.

What is wrong with the women who choose to have and raise children paying for it themselves, or obtaining the consent of any man from whom they seek payment?

The entire hoo-haa about compulsory child support is a complete furphy. Not even its own advocates can consistently support it. And government cannot raise families!

The CSA should be abolished, along with the sole parents pension and the baby bonus.

That is the only equal, fair, and practical solution. No disaster awaits us if we do. It only means people have the responsibility for their own choices.

Grim
An apple and an orange aren’t of equal value *as an apple*, are they you dill?

Brad Pitt and the Elephant Man aren’t of equal value as movie stars, are they?

If it was true that people are of equal value, then no-one would ever marry, or form a family? Think about it. We would treat everyone as being of equal value.

“that all men are created equal”
It was never true as a fact. And it was never true as a value – as you yourself are the first to argue. Did the resulting political entity ever manage to:
1. treat people equally?
2. make people equal?
No. Anywhere near it? No.

We’re not talking about an abstract value, knowable only in Grim’s confused hypocrisy, that has nothing to do with the conditions of human existence and natural scarcity. We’re talking about *real* values of *real* people motivating *real* actions.

>>“If the law treats people equally - formal equality - in practice people will arrange themselves unequally.”
>Why? Says who?

Says you, otherwise you wouldn’t be arguing in favour of any law intended to promote equality by treating people in the population unequally, like the law we are discussing now, would you? (BTW, notice how my argument is not circular? Yours is, - again! - because you assume the existence of a responsibility that is in issue!)

You don’t even agree with your own argument! If you did, you wouldn’t have divided mankind into two unequal classes: those permitted their freedom on condition they obey you, and those to be imprisoned because they don’t agree with your arbitrary opinion.

It’s not me, it’s you arguing in favour of treating people like cattle - remember?

You’re in favour of exploitation and inequality, therefore you lose the argument even in your own terms. Suck it up.

Economists can model anything to predict the effect of any change. I'd like to know the effect of a reduction in child support. I suspect that many men are minimising their taxable income to reduce the amount that they pay and that the economy wide benefit of a reduction in rates could be huge.

Parents with most custody might or might-not be compensated in other ways. Many only want the kids with them to save money. I would rather they were with the parent who wanted them more.

R0bert:"I doubt that it would fly politically"

I can see there would be much lobbying from single-mother groups who don't want to lose the ability to make somebody else make the ex's life miserable and there'd be a bit of "no new taxes, we'll all be rooned" and there'd be a certain amount of the generalised misandrist stuff like that put forward by Suzeonline, but if we have a genuinely rational democracy none of those things make it too hard.

It won't happen as long as there is lots of mining revenue, I suspect, mostly because politicians can simply throw more resources at papering over the cracks in the current system and pandering to the "opinion leadwers" who seem to inform so much of the female view.

Houellebecq, the economic argument is the one I first looked at. Any scheme that requires 4000 staff to administer and still accepts a high failure rate as unavoidable is fatally flawed, regardless of what one's view is of the rights and wrongs of individual responsibility for children.

Jefferson, children are the product of two people's endeavours, not just one. It is therefore not reasonable, nor is it desirable, for just one of those parties to be held to account willy-nilly for the costs of raising them.

I'm sick of hearing polemics on this subject. I want to see practical, politically possible suggestions to make the problems created by forcing a financial relationship on people whose interpersonal relationship is already in trouble disappear forever.

Benk, the modelling could be easily done, but there is no Government will to know the answer, just as there is no government will to know the real state of gender equality. If such things were clearly and unambiguously understood by the electorate, then the convenient political wedge they represent would be gone.

If we had a properly rational democracy, instead of one founded on "squeaky-wheel" crisis management, there'd be no problem.

“An apple and an orange aren’t of equal value *as an apple*, are they you dill?”
No, but they can still have equal value as pieces of fruit, can't they “you dill”.
“Brad Pitt and the Elephant Man aren’t of equal value as movie stars, are they?”
No, but they can still be treated as having equal rights as human beings can't they, “you dill”.
I strongly suggest you poke your tongue out of the side of your mouth, frown heavily and concentrate to the best of your ability “you dill”.
2 things do not have to be the same, to have equal value “you dill”.
“People don’t necessarily agree to raise a family. If they do, there is no issue. The issue is if they don’t.”
If men -or women- aren't prepared to wear the equal responsibility of raising their children, they can either not have sex, or wear a condom -or diaphragm (“you dill”).
“If the law treats people equally - formal equality - in practice people will arrange themselves unequally.”
No, you you didn't make a circular argument, but you didn't provide any concrete examples, either.
You just made a completely unsubstantiated statement which you then tried to have accepted as axiomatic (“you dill”).
Please show where in any of my posts I “have divided mankind into two unequal classes...” As far as I am aware, I have argued consistently that all humans have a right to be treated as equals, regardless of their differences.