The story is contained in ‘New Zealand’s Remarkable Reforms’ The fifth IEA Annual Hayek Memorial Lecture by Donald T Brash 1996 (56 pages)published by the IEA who hopefully will make it available again as a PDF download.

I don’t think the Conservatives have got the stomach for it but UKIP might. Perhaps Mr Redwood should make a move?

The failure (and yes it is failure) of marriage is that the state is not up front about what divorce involves. People take marriage too lightly. If they knew what divorce is they would be less like to get married. I believe you need to do some tests to look for potential issues before you get married. 40% of people fail at marriage. It would be better to get the failure rate up to below 20% before you start advocating it.

At the moment most men (I work on a trading floor) are strong advised by their older peers and fathers not to get married. Traders work long hours. Millionaires are 60% likely to get divorced and the law courts will take 75%+ of their assets that they have sweated for because the court believes they can build their assets back again. So why would a friend not say that all that hard work they are doing could be taken away from them – because they are working hard. Men aren’t getting married because the contract sucks. The result is women’s biological drives mean that have children with an insecure partner in their 30s when they get desperate rather than with a husband in a secure relationship.

There is a lot of academic work done into understanding why marriages fail. You may think it is nannying to advise people on the probablity of their marriage failing, but I would welcome a diagnosis of potenital problems up front. When you get married you are in love and often ignore the problems. Imagine signing a contract to buy a beautiful car that you have fallen in love with and not being told what the contract is?

The “marriage contract” should not be hidden from young couples. It needs to be writ large. There needs to be a legal document published every year telling you quite what your spouse can get away with. Couples should be given profiles and warned about potential issues. This is not nannying this is good advice for you to take or leave.

For example the day after you get married your spouse can sit on their hands and spend all your money and have many affairs and you are still obliged to then give them half your house and savings and they can even claim spousal maintenance – so you have to look after them for the rest of your life. In fact it gets worst because the better you treat them and lazier they are then that will be what the courts say that is what they should expect.

You complain about rewarding failure well in that case you should not agree with marriage law. Because it rewards laziness – simply because as you do progressively less you will get progressively more than the amount you put into the marriage.

You honestly can’t expect to have a punitive damages to discourage divorce and not give best advice to those getting married? Marriage is to a large part a finanical contract and you never get to read the contract. You can lose hundreds of thousands of pounds even though you have tried your hardest and done nothing wrong. Family law is by and large secret. Cases are not published. Tell me of any other contract where this applies?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124500992205413331.html

I can’t get over the idea that this is a deliberate trap being shamelessly laid by Labour, using peoples lives as pawns in their own desperation to extend their careers.

It will start to bite in the third quarter and price increases plus incresed interest rates will have people screaming blue murder by Christmas and through 2010.

This will be the final straw which will destroy Nu Labour and will go some way to bringing President Obama back to reality. Neither Brown nor Obama can blame anyone but themselves for wrecking their own currencies through the foolish policy of printing money.

The trouble is that people who live together but are not married are much more likely to bunk off when the going gets tough, which it will any any relationship. That rips the kids apart, as well as causing major pain for the couple involved.

By the way, he’s not quite right about the marriage figures either. The statistics are here http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=322

As you can see the decline really only set in in around 1990. Until then, the figures were roughly stable with a blip upwards in around 1970. Also, the decline does appear to be levelling off. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves what happened in 1990 to trigger off this decline?