AND PROPERTY ARE SYNONYMS – LOVE IS AN INCENTIVE, NOT A NECESSARY REQUIREMENT –

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=7337MARRIAGE AND PROPERTY ARE SYNONYMS – LOVE IS AN INCENTIVE, NOT A NECESSARY REQUIREMENT – ROMANTIC NOTIONS TO THE CONTRARY

The are only two things that distinguish marriage from any other arbitrary relationship for the purpose of securing affection, sex, companionship, love, care-taking, cost-reduction-of-cohabitatin, and a division of labor in child rearing.

1) PROPERTY: When you marry, you form a corporation with shared assets, and a two person board of directors, from which the state must divide assets upon the disbanding of the corporation. Prior to the institution of private property, you could just marry and un-marry by saying so in public. In fact, the western Celts practiced serial marriage this way until the 19th century, and the European jews until the middle ages. In most primitives societies, women were literally property, but in Europe the church granted women property rights back in the 1200’s. So the need to resolve property disputes increased as the complexity and amount of property increased, and the productivity of individuals, and therefore their ability to obtain and use property increased.

2) KINSHIP: We have evolved laws to avoid conflict by stating that the other shareholder has certain powers (of attorney) to act as Voluntary Kin in periods of duress, and it that takes precedence over other involuntary Kinship ties: blood relatives. In this sense when we marry we sell ourselves to the corporation as an asset.

THE STATE AS MONOPOLY

The state is the arbiter of property disputes – that’s what a state is: a territorial monopoly on the use of violence; and in particular for the use of violence in the resolution of disputes. The moment that you enter into a marriage that produces common property, you force the state into your marriage because only the state can resolve conflicts over property.

Anyone can form a corporation. A ship captain, a priest, or certain state officials. The formation’s not a state matter. It’s just an exchange like any other exchange. But the state must break it. And if the state must break it then it must of necessity develop criteria for doing so in order to apply a decision that meets the standard of consistent “law” rather than arbitrary judicial decision.

However, there is no reason that the state must be the arbiter or such disputes. There is no reason churches cannot perform divorces, in which the assets divisions have the force of law. Unfortunately this wold produce two canons of law, and leave the state responsible for resolving appeals, so it would simply result in the state centralizing decision making power again.

THE OPTION TO MAINTAIN PRIVATE PROPERTY

However, an easier solution is that if when we marry we do NOT create a corporation and place ourselves and all our assets into it, but instead, maintain each individual’s property separately, and specifically state ownership percentages on anything else that is split now or future, then the only legal issue is the power of attorney to act as one another in financial matters, and to act as primary kin in the event one is incapacitated.

HISTORY

The civic and political problem is only that our laws developed as monopolies under control of the state – and even then, largely because the church did not perform divorces and the state wished to intercede in the civil space in order to advance the interests of the feminist political movement on the one hand, and react to the reality that women were becoming active in the work force, earning income, and acquiring real property in sufficient numbers that they required legal peerage to protect them from abuse by rent-seeking males.

So there is no reason that we must have a monopoly of marriage terms. And there is only one reason that the state should be involved in dissolutions: common property. That is, property of the corporation called the marriage being distributed to various parties in the event of a disbandment of the corporation.

CRITERIA FOR THREE TYPES OF MARRIAGE

Further, there is no reason marriages cannot consist of multiple forms, regardless of who makes them.

1) Corporate Property and Power of Kin

2) Several property and Power of Kin

3) Corporate Property without power of kin

Several Property without power of kin is the normal state of human beings. So that’s the definition of not being married. But one can be in a state of marriage as long as one has either the power of kin (genetic assets) or power of common property (material assets).

ITS ALL ABOUT PROPERTY

Love and romance have nothing to do with marriage. You may get married BECAUSE of love and romance and all the other factors. But marriage is a change in control of property – including the self – by authorizing non-kin to act as Kin, and to either pool property or not.

That it is hard to see the binding power of a marriage having any meaning whatsoever without the pooling of assets is enough of a logical constraint that we can define marriage as a property institution, and nothing more.

That fact may be painful to admit to ourselves. But marriage is a contract over of property rights, with one of the assets being each other. It is, and always will be. ‘Cause nothing else makes much sense. ‘Cause nothing else enforces fidelity like the loss property.

Humbling. I know.

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