Part-Time Pundit

The Absurdity of the Marriage Debates

This week a study came out that shows how unilateral divorce laws make divorce more frequent. The empirical research shows what any sensible person would already guess — easy divorce laws make for more divorces. This is only magnified by the fact the divorcing party usually has great incentives to divorce and few incentives to stay (independent of whatever marital problems may exist). The fact that this is even a debate in academia shows how politicized and irrational the academy has become. Sure, there are plenty of other reasons to divorce that also drive the high rate of marriage failures, but government incentivizes failure, not success. That certainly doesn't help.

Add into this debate on divorce law the current debate on gay marriage. With easy divorce, marriage has been demoted to the status of a contract. If it's just a meaningless contract, why can't any combination of participants enter into it? A good question that cannot be easily answered when framed that way.

First off, marriage in this society (independent of its religious roots) is not even a contract. Contracts are designed to be enforceable in the event of a breach. Divorce rewards the breaching party most of the time. None of the terms of marriage are enforceable in any real way. There are no options for a spouse to rein in an adulterous partner and the few laws still on the books against adultery are waiting to be declared unconstitutional.

Further, easy divorce ends up putting the entire lives of the parties into the public record and under the control of a judge. One can walk to any courthouse in this country and start reading detailed accounts of broken marriages. Judges have tremendous power to allocate assets, assign living arrangements, and exercise large amounts of control over the parties. This should greatly worry any libertarian.

One wonders why gay people want a piece of that action. Straight couples are putting off marriage because many wonder if it's really worth all the risk. Gay couples certainly aren't immune from divorce either. Marriage is a loaded term devoid of any meaning behind it. It appears that gay marriage is an attempt at social acceptance, not any desire for benefits. Any real look at marriage shows that on the balance, marriage confers a net liability, not a net benefit.

Before discussing who can participate in marriage, the discussion that we should be having is what the institution of marriage should mean. Right now, the institution currently in place in the United States (again separated from its religious roots) is bordering on meaningless. There is certainly no shortage of people who think so considering every time a government program comes down to support marriage, the usual suspects try to stop it.

The fact is, any serious look at the history of the institution of marriage will show that it is a religious institution. Governmental recognition was not only a later development for marriage, but it also is a secondary aspect. The argument that marriage is a legal institution, a mere creation of government, is a profound mutilation of marriage. One would think that the myriad of governmental forms throughout history would have produced a myriad of forms of marriage, but it has not.

If there is going to be public recognition and support of marriage, there needs to be a corresponding public good and duty. Government shouldn't give out money simply because someone wants a paycheck. What public good is fostered by the recognition of gay marriage? The same could be asked of marriage in the way it is practiced here also. The fact is, until the promises made and the obligations uttered on the wedding day are actually binding in any real way, it's hard to find much of a public good.

Instead of arguing the particulars of marriage and haggling over the petty details, it's time the question of marriage in its fundamentals enters the public discourse. What should marriage mean? Should its obligations be actually binding? What public good is to be fostered? These are the questions that really matter.

July 23rd, 2007 Posted by John Bambenek | Columns, Law / Legal Issues, Politics, Religion | 4 comments

1 in 6 Americans Blow off Paying Taxes

Something I wrote for Associated Content…

Around 1 in 6 Americans Do Not Pay Their Taxes (Digg it here).

According to an IRS spokesperson in an article about anti-war tax resistance, 16.3% of Americans are in non-compliance with their taxes according to the Associated Press.That isn’t fudging the numbers or coming up with creative tax deductions; it’s simply evading taxes outright. While the story about the anti-war movement calling on people to not pay taxes to protest the war is interesting, the fact that a growing number of Americans are simply evading taxes is startling.

According to IRS estimates, that means there is $345 billion in uncollected taxes per year or roughly 2.6% of the national GDP. As a result of collection efforts, the IRS has generated over $48 billion of that amount in 2006 (or about 15%) according to CNN. These estimates do not include corporations using tax shelters (which “legally” protect them from taxes) or the rich using similar tactics. In 2006, the IRS audited about 1.3 million tax returns out of 130 million filed or an audit rate of about 1% according to an IRS source quoted by CNN. With over 16% overtly flouting the IRS, at best only 1% of those will even be challenged.

July 5th, 2007 Posted by John Bambenek | Misc | one comment

Red vs. Blue: A Poor Ending to a Great Web Series

The popular web video series Red vs. Blue has put out their 100th and final episode of the series with three alternate endings. It marks the end of one of the staples of the Web 2.0 culture and citizen-produced media. It also is one of the few things that said culture has produced that doesn't make me want to head butt the sidewalk. Someone please tell Lonelygirl15 to stop making videos.

Web 2.0 as a media-producing enterprise is a remarkable failure. Sure, there are some successes such as Ask a Ninja and Barats and Berate, but for the most part the content produced are either cheap knock-offs or so stupid that it makes reality TV look good. Wikipedia makes better fiction than most of these attempts at entertainment.

The fact that Red vs. Blue has amassed such a following and had such a long run is remarkable for a society that has an attention span of about a half a second. I've enjoyed the series from the beginning, having seen all 100 episodes and all the PSA extra episodes they put out.

The first 25 or so episodes were the best by far. That isn't to say that after episode 25 they jumped the shark like say, Battlestar Galactica with the Season 3 finale (seriously Ron Moore, where is your brain?). But the episodes seemed to lull somewhat. It remained entertaining nonetheless. Towards the end of the series the quality stepped up greatly as the end was in sight which likely motivated the creators.

However, episode 100 is a dismal failure, and a poor ending to an otherwise good series. The fact that there were three different endings underlies the fact that the creators likely had no idea how to wrap up the series. They probably would have been better off to keep putting out episodes instead of wrapping it up arbitrarily at 100. The plot seemed to be something added on later in the series, and there was no thought at the time on how to bring it to a close. The disappointment was exaggerated because the series had such a good run before the last episode.

That said, the passing of Red vs. Blue (or at least the Blood Gulch Chronicles) will leave a void in the Internet. The only bright side is that likely the American worker will have five more minutes of productivity a week that they would have spent watching the series.

July 2nd, 2007 Posted by John Bambenek | Columns, Misc | one comment

Socializing the Free Market of Ideas

In response to the Center for American Progress's hit piece on talk radio imbalance, various Senators have expressed support for resurrecting the Cold War era "Fairness doctrine" which requires equal airtime for opposing points of view. Senator Feinstein (D-CA) specifically rejects she said they wanted a legislative fix for conservative talk radio, but still suspiciously supports the fairness doctrine as does Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). Senator Kerry (D-MA) has also expressed his support.

The underlying notion is that somehow conservative talk show hosts and conservative radio owners have colluded to produce an effective monopoly on talk radio. Instead of bringing anti-trust charges, they've decided to try to regulate it. They conveniently forget the frequent attempts (and failures) of left-wing radio to get and stay on the air. The fact that there have been so many left-wing radio shows that make it on the air (but eventually fail) shows that market entrance is not difficult.

There is a latent idea that the public is unable to come to the "correct" conclusions on policy because talk radio is indoctrinating them. This vicious, un-American and treasonous idea is unworthy of political debate in this country. People can be trusted to make up their own minds and much research indicates that people listen to conservative talk radio not to make up their minds, but because their minds are already made up. If people can't be trusted to make their own minds up, then we ought to be having a discussion on repealing the right to vote, not about media ownership.

One thing to notice is that the market of news and opinion is not synonymous with AM radio. There is the internet, television, movies, podcasting, print, books and lectures. While conservatives do apparently dominate talk radio, liberals dominate television, movies and certainly academic lectures. If one doesn't want to listen to AM radio, they can turn on the TV, surf the internet, or listen to a podcast. There is nothing even approaching a limitation of the flow of information.

Yet, the fairness doctrine is only to apply to talk radio which is obviously an ideological-based attack on certain speech. It is no mistake that Democrats are the voices supporting this (though to be fair certain Republicans are warm to the idea because politicians always like silencing criticism). The resistance to "immigration reform" (which is essentially legalizing at least 12 million illegal immigrants and then not addressing the problems that caused the issue in the first place) was based on talk radio and the cognizanti don't want the influence getting in their way.

As a compromise measure, if we are going to enact a "fairness doctrine" for the radio waves, we should do so also for television. Let's have fairness on NBC, ABC and CBS which are also transmitted over the air. Let's have fairness on the movies shown on those channels so that they fairly represent all viewpoints instead of the latent left-wing propaganda that animates Hollywood. Let's have fairness in the various sitcoms that all portray fast and loose morals. We could have real family-friendly entertainment again.

We could also apply the fairness doctrine to the Internet to balance left-wing biases outlets such as Wikipedia and the Daily Kos. Let's apply the fairness doctrine to colleges and the classroom where indoctrination is most prevalent (and most left-wing). The possibilities are endless and the lawyers could be well-employed. Let's empower the Family Research Council to litigate fairness on all our media outlets.

The "fairness doctrine" is a relic of the past for a reason which will accomplish little more than stifling speech and more accurately stifle only certain ideological forms of speech. In their benevolence, Democrats will allow conservatives to have "free speech" as long as they are not allowed audiences. Unfortunately for them, "free speech" doesn't work that way. The free market of ideas doesn't need to be socialized by those who would pre-ordain the ideas that we are to hold.

July 2nd, 2007 Posted by John Bambenek | Columns, Congress, Freedom of Speech, Politics | 6 comments