Monday 17 June 2013

Idle Thoughts on Child Support

     I recall feeling vaguely unsettled by one of the legal principles of child support in Canada, when I was taking Family Law in law school. The basic idea is that parents are supposed to contribute financially to the support of children while the children are in the care of the other parent, and the amount of this financial support is prescribed in the Federal Child Support Guidelines, based on the income of the contributing parent. 

     Now, I have no problem with the idea that a parent's duty to contribute should scale with the parent's income. What I felt uncomfortable about was the fact that, under the law, the child of a wealthy parent has a right to more support than the child of a poor parent. It's not that I begrudge wealthy children being well-provided for, but that it strikes me as unjust that poor children aren't seen as being equally deserving. Wealthy parents will naturally provide more for their children than poor parents, and that's a private matter that we can't do anything about. Nor should we want to, even if we could. But it's different when the law gets involved, and the courts officially rule that child A is entitled to only this much a month in support, while child B is entitled to that much.

     It's obvious, of course, how this came to be. After all, the money for these support payments is coming FROM the parents and going TO their own children. In the individual case, you can't get more money from a poor parent just because you think that child needs or deserves or even has a right to more support; the poorer parent just won't be able to provide, and that's that. I understand that the courts in child support cases are only dealing with the case at hand, not the income disparity between cases. I suppose it's a question of the rhetoric involved. If we limited ourselves to talking about the parents' obligations, then I'm perfectly comfortable with saying a wealthy parent has an obligation to pay more in child support than a parent of more limited financial means. But we do talk about the rights and interests of the children; indeed, in family law, the best interests of the child are of paramount importance. So when we admit the interests of a child as a matter to consider (as distinct from the obligations of the parent), the conflict arises: Why does this child deserve more support than that child? Is it not inhuman to say that a child living in poverty has less need for support than a privileged child?     And we're talking about children here, not the adults who earn the money. Of course wealthy people who earn their money are entitled to lavish as much of it on their children as they like. But the children themselves have not earned this income, and it's a little harder to argue that they are morally entitled to it as against each other. And if a wealthy parent chooses to run a frugal household, spending no more on piano lessons or ski trips than a poorer family, the state will not generally interfere, and no one would argue that the wealthy parent's child is entitled to a more luxurious childhood simply because the means exist. But even if we have a sense that the children of wealthy parents in some sense deserve to benefit from the good fortune of their birth, are we prepared to accept the converse: that the children of poor parents in some sense deserve to live in poverty?

     So while deliberating over this, I had a crazy thought. It's not something I could ever see happening in the current political climate, and I'm not quite sure how to square it with my own general philosophy on taxation, but the idea is this: What if a portion of every adult's income were paid into a general child support fund, which was then distributed equally among all children? That is, what if we simply applied the principle of child support universally, without regard for whether or not there was a divorce or separation? Parents who were still together would pay out their child support tax, but they'd receive back child support payments that would in all likelihood be more than they paid out (thanks in part to the contributions of adults without children of their own), thus ensuring that all parents with children in their care would receive some resources to take care of those children.
      Such a system would have costs, to be sure, but probably not much on the balance, since the administrative infrastructure for taxation already exists, and here in Canada we've a long history of providing various subsidies for child care, what my parents referred to as the Baby Bonus. It would also have the benefit of removing the issue of child support completely from family court and reducing caseloads accordingly.
      One of the objections I can imagine to this approach would come from adults who don't want to have children. I've heard in the past advocates for the "child-free" community argue that the choice to have children is a personal one that shouldn't impose costs on others who choose not to have children. I think we can dismiss this sort of whining by simply recognizing that while having children may be a "lifestyle choice", being a child is not; every single member of the "child-free movement" is a former child. There is nothing in the least bit discriminatory in providing a benefit that applies equally to all children, except in the sense that some of us were unfortunately born too early to benefit from it.
     The other likely objection, of course, is that this is just plain wealth redistribution, and of course it is. That's not a point in its favor, but neither is it necessarily a point against it; redistribution of wealth is only a wrong if you assume that the current distribution of that wealth is more just than the proposed redistribution. As a default position, we should generally assume that people have earned their wealth lawfully through informed and voluntary trades, and so we should be reluctant to interfere unnecessarily, but that assumption does not hold here; children do nothing to earn or deserve being born to either wealthy or poor parents.

Tuesday 4 June 2013

Crossing the Border: Answering a Xenophobic Chain Letter

      A few years ago, before we set her up with an iPad and her own email address, my mother used to give out one of my email addresses to her friends and business contacts in case they needed to get a message to her by email. Since we no longer live under the same roof, it wasn't particularly fast, but we have dinner together once a week, so it wasn't prohibitively slow, either.
     In any event, I am now on the contacts list of a number of elderly internet users, one of whom frequently forwards emails of a political and supposedly humorous nature. Most of the time I ignore them, though occasionally I will reply to refute the ones I feel really need to be refuted. The following, however, is one so exceptionally daft I feel a need to share. I've cut the clip art, but left the text verbatim.



LET'S SEE IF I GOT THIS RIGHT!!! 
 IF YOU CROSS THE NORTH KOREAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET 12 YEARS HARD LABOR.
 IF YOU CROSS THE IRANIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU ARE DETAINED INDEFINITELY.
 IF YOU CROSS THE AFGHAN BORDER ILLEGALLY, YOU GET SHOT. 
  IF YOU CROSS THE SAUDI ARABIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE JAILED. 
 IF YOU CROSS THE CHINESE BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU MAY NEVER BE HEARD FROM AGAIN.  
 IF YOU CROSS THE VENEZUELAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE BRANDED A SPY AND YOUR FATE WILL BE SEALED. 
 IF YOU CROSS THE CUBAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE THROWN INTO POLITICAL PRISON TO ROT... 
 IF YOU CROSS THE CANADIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET;
A JOB,
A DRIVERS LICENSE,  
SOCIAL SECURITY CARD,
WELFARE, 
FOOD VOUCHERS,
CREDIT CARDS,  
SUBSIDIZED RENT OR A LOAN TO BUY A HOUSE, FREE EDUCATION, FREE HEALTH CARE,  
A LOBBYIST IN OTTAWA   
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF PUBLIC DOCUMENTS PRINTED IN YOUR LANGUAGE 
THE RIGHT TO CARRY YOUR COUNTRY'S FLAG WHILE YOU PROTEST THAT YOU DON'T GET ENOUGH RESPECT
 AND, IN MANY INSTANCES, YOU CAN VOTE.  

I JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE I HAD A FIRM GRASP ON THE SITUATION!!!
A firm grasp on the situation? Where to begin?

First of all, facts: No, you don't get any of that stuff for crossing the border illegally into Canada. To get a drivers license, you still have to apply, take a test, pay a fee and so on. Same applies for all that other stuff. Oh, and to vote, you need to be a Canadian citizen, and it's rather harder to apply for Canadian citizenship if you're in the country illegally. It's harder to get any of those things if you're here illegally.

Second, I think you've confused illegal immigrants with immigrants in general. Illegal immigrants do not generally have a great deal of political influence, and no one who can afford a lobbyist needs to sneak across the border. Printing government documents in a variety of languages is not done, for the most part, for the benefit of illegals; there are lots of people legally in the country who aren't fluent in either official language, and in any event it's often in our interest to ensure that they're informed about things like, say, communicable diseases and traffic rules.

But let's forget about facts and focus on the truthiness of this complaint: that other countries treat illegal immigrants as criminals and punish them harshly, while Canada treats them mildly and even generously. While the precise details of the email are at best distortions, the fundamental truth is that yes, we are nicer to immigrants than the other countries listed. Is there something wrong with that?

"But they're ILLEGALS!" one might protest. "They ARE criminals, so why don't we treat them accordingly, like those other countries do?"
`
Well, for one thing, I don't know what you've heard about the living conditions in North Korea, but you probably shouldn't rely too much on the official propaganda about how gloriously peachy life is under the Dear Leader. The North Korean authorities know perfectly well that their standard of living is not the envy of the world, and they quite rightly are suspicious of the motives of anyone sneaking into their country. Probably, if you're sneaking into North Korea, you are a spy and an enemy of the state.

Contrast this with Canada. Sure, someone sneaking across our border may be a spy or perhaps a terrorist, but more likely they're desperate people who just want to live here. (Spies and terrorists,  if they're at all competent, will usually enter the country legally.) So there's a qualitative difference between your typical illegal immigrant in Canada and in despotic countries: Our illegal immigrants come here because they like us and want to join us.

Now, why might that be? The short answer is that we're a rich country. We may not feel rich, but we've got cars and houses and cell phones and lots of food and public health care and clean water and it's generally safe to walk the streets at night. We are fabulously well-off by global and historical standards.

And that's not just a coincidence. Sure, we may like to believe that our wealth is a result of our being hardworking and resourceful, but that's only part of it. People everywhere are hardworking and resourceful. The difference is that we, like the rest of the developed liberal democracies, have embraced the Rule of Law and the basic idea of human rights. That, among other things, makes it more worthwhile being hardworking and resourceful.

It also means that we apply these notions of human rights and such when we deal with lawbreakers, and that includes people who cross the border illegally. We don't, indeed can't, make distinctions between people with rights and people without rights; humans have rights, period. If we did make exceptions for this or that class of people, because they're foreigners or they speak the wrong language or didn't happen to fill out the right paperwork before crowding into a shipping container to escape brutal oppression overseas, well, they wouldn't be human rights anymore. They'd be "people we like" rights. And that's unprincipled, and incompatible with the rule of law and the reason we're so prosperous in the first place.

Seriously, O Anonymous Chain Letter Author, do you really mean to suggest that we should be more like North Korea?