The property division and alimony aspects of divorce degrees to a large extent follow from what one can think of as off-the-rack or default provisions that will govern any marriage that one enters into unless or until one ‘opts out’ via an ante-nuptual or post-nuptual agreement.

Given the perennial problem of ‘incompleteness of contracting,’ all law — even polycentrically-generated law — *must* supply default terms of some sort or other. Still, one can and should ask whether the current default provisions provided by state-generated family law are good ones (to see, for example, if they are consistent with what most couples entering into marriages *would* have chosen ex ante had they thought to spell out their wishes).

To the extent the current default-provisions fail have not been ‘updated’ so as to track changing social norms and expectations, they should be criticized and reformed. I suspect, though, that because there exist a number of widely-divergent conceptions of the nature of marriage out there in society, it would be a mistake for the law to simply move from presupposing a ‘patriarchal’ marriage to presupposing an ‘equalitarian one.’ Instead, I think the law ought to recognize several different ‘marriage types’ (something that one may be seeing with the emergence of so-called covenant marriages): So that, forexample, when a couple goes down to the courthouse to get a marriage license, they would not have to get the one-stardard type (and then modify that by contract) but instead could choose among patriarchal, equalitarian, or even matriarchal forms.

Anyway: just as libertarians complain that most feminists seem to be anti-libertarian, feminists complain that most libertarians seem to be anti-feminist. And, well, they’re both right — and so each side tends to reinforce the otehr’s prejudices. So what’s the solution? My suggestion is to become a libertarian who’s not anti-feminist, and/or a feminist who’s not anti-libertarian. Every time someone does that, that’s one more step toward critical mass.

Ditto for environmentalism.

Even if they work, the kind of job you cna get behind bars will often be less lucrative thna the kind one can get on the outside. Moreover, having been in prison may make it harder to get a good job on the outside. Plus I’m not a big fan of prison for nonviolent offenders.

I think the point is that, the predictable consequence of being sent to jail if one doesn’t pay one’s debts (including child support) will tend to make debtors able but otherwise unwilling to repay their debts more willing to do so, so as to avoid imprisonment.

Moreover, I think (but can’t recall my source or any details) that historically debtors’ prisons often allowed –or even required– that the prisoners work while behind bars, with some fraction of the proceeds of such work going towards the repayment of debt.

The most contemporary feminist scholarship tends to argue less that socio-economic inequality is rooted in “unequal pay for equal work” as much as in “occupation-segregation by gender” meaning that women are more likely to be in occupations that are less rewarding economically. Problem is this is just as true in the Scandanavian countries where feminist ideology is prevalent and influential as it is in the industrialized countries with more traditional views on gender
like Japan.

The occasional Wendy McElroy or Camille Paglia aside, I’ve generally found that feminists are hard-core statists, as much as any faction of the Left, perhaps paralleled only by environmentalists.

Probably the most interesting and evenhanded essay on porn I have read by a feminist is Laura Kipnis’ “(Male) Desire and (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler”, which gets into complicated issues of class, politics, and even aesthetics behind the culture of porn, and feminist reaction to it. I don’t buy all of it, but I will say Kipnis writes uncommonly well for being a pseudo-Marxoid Critical Theory-type.

In my own conversations with feminists, I usually find that what seems to count for equality is better representation in institutions that as an anarchist I would just as soon abolish. Doesn’t bode well for “saving the marriage”. (And yes, I know there are “anarcha-feminists” out there, I’ve just never met one.)