Renegade

It is true that the government is not involved in the enforcement, however what the courts are enforcing is a contract which the government created by defining the set of obligations in marriage. Personally, I would support such a system. I'm not sure that it was created to accomodate gay couples as until the SC ruled, gay couples were not considered common-law married no matter how long they lived together. I believe this was put in place to accomodate women, who were in long-term live-in relationships. When those relationships broke up, those women were not entitled to the same support obligations as their married counterparts.

The CCRA cares not just that you claim individual benefits, but also whether you claim benefits normally available to married couples (such as spousal amount). This whole situation is brougth about because the government chooses to discriminate between married individuals and single individuals. Even if the goverment choose to perpetuate that discrimination, in my view it shouldn't be the CCRA's opinion that matters, it should be self-determination of status. It is also interesting to note that the tax law makes no provision for any pre-cohabitation agreement declaring that you are not married. This may lead to a situation where family law considers you unmarried, where as the CCRA would consider you married. A pre-cohabitation agreement which declared you are not married and don't intend to be considered married would be an interesting test in court. So far I am not aware of a test case which proves this would stand up. Meaning, if you act married, and would ordinarily be legal definition be considered married, would an agreement between yourselves override that? If you know of any precedent, I'd be interested to learn about it.

It does not seem to me to be reasonable to ask people to move out every year or two so that they avoid being labled as common-law. The fact that you would have to do this is exactly the point. The government has decided that it should be the custodian of the definition of who is married. What you are suggesting is that you should go through contortions to evade the definition. What I am suggesting is it that it should be completely up to you to decide whether you consider yourselves married or not, and not up to the government. BTW, it is far from clear what you are suggesting would even work. Even if you moved out for a period of time, if you intended to move back in, you would likely still be considered common-law married. How exactly do you agree that you are sharing an apartment but not cohabiting? Do you sign a contract that you won't have sex with each other? And what happens if you violate that contract? I can't speak to all government departments, but at least the CCRA considers you married if you are living together in a "conjugal" relationship. It determines whether it is a true "conjugal" relationship (as opposed to just incidental sex) based upon the frequency of sex, and if other aspects (such as meals) are shared. In my view this is an unwarranted intrusion of the government into personal affairs. It's also more than the government you need to convince you are not cohabiting. You need to also convince yourselves. What happens if you put on this facade of just sharing an apartment, but then you break up. She then sues you for spousal support claiming you were actually cohabiting, and in effect you are common-law married. What's your defence if you were putting on a sham?

There is nothing to prevent common-law couples from declaring that they are "married"; perhaps even signing a contract to that end. Then they should be treated as being married. Sure common-law couples can declare and sign a contract that they are married, but how does a couple who just want to just live together declare that they want to be considered "not married" They could sign a contract too... They could try however as far as I am aware, there is no provision in law for them to do so. The law views them as married. Any contract they sign to declare themselves "not married" would be as valid as a contract a healthy individual would sign declaring themselves disabled.

There is nothing to prevent common-law couples from declaring that they are "married"; perhaps even signing a contract to that end. Then they should be treated as being married. Sure common-law couples can declare and sign a contract that they are married, but how does a couple who just want to just live together declare that they want to be considered "not married"

Marriage confers a wide range of legal benefits and obligations that have nothing to do with tax policies or social programs. For example, your spouse is considered 'family' and is given legal standing if you die or are incapacitated. Furthermore, people who are married typically pool their economic resources which means there need to be rules to deal with the economic aspects marriage breakups. For these reasons alone, society needs a formal contract that people need to sign when they form a committed partnership.The fact that people pool the economic resources is the reason why most social programs look at family income instead of individual income when calculating benefits. It simply does not make sense to be handing out welfare to a stay at home parent with zero income who is living with someone making 100K/year. For this reason, there has to be some objective test to determine if someone is in a committed partnership. Some people have suggested that the gov't get out of the marriage business and call the equivalent legal concept a 'civil union' or a 'domestic partnership'. I think this is a waste of time because it would cost a lot of money to rewrite a bunch of laws and regulations that would change nothing of substance. The problem with Government defining marriage is not just that it defines the terms, but that it restricts who can partake in the contract. It would be fine if all the government did was define a default legal arrangment, but then left it up to participants to either accept the arrangment as-is or modiy it to suit their needs. Further government should allow any adult parties to enter into this arrangement or create their own multi-party arrangement. Marriage is such an important arrangement that you should have to explicitly choose this legal arrangement, that is why I am very much against defaulting couples who live together into common-law marriage.

I usually take offense when someone infers that my mother, sister, wife, cousins and every Native woman I know is a whore. Should I smile and wave Renegade? TS, you are right to take offense. I myself am offended. The right course of action is to report the post, not respond in kind.

The level of immaturity displayed in parts of this thread is stunning. Must you guys really stoop so low as to not just calling each other names, but resort to threats as well? This thread has gone completly off its original topic and in my opinion has no additional value.

Actually it is every bit as hard as I think. The fact that you need an employer to support your move is further proof that the choice is not unilateral. What about people who have no employer or who don't have an employer willing to put up with the headache, or even those people who don't have a university education? Should they be denied the choice of the tax regime because of their employment or educational circumstances? The choice which lets you pay nothing is called freehold. Unlike choosing a condo, I can't choose my tax regime except at enormous cost to myself. I would have to change house, change jobs, potentially change language, etc. It woudl be a different story if I could simply "designate" myself a resident of Alberta without actually having to move there. Highly doubtful. For example if the government needed land it could expropriate it unilaterally. If the condo board dedided it needed your condo to create a new common room, do you really think it could do the same? Yes I could have made those statemetns which would also prove the point that the government can and does radically shift the cost unequally as I claimed. You claimed that the government "would never be able to do that". Now that I have demonstrated that they can and do so, you are left justifying why they do so. You keep falling back to an argument that the system is progressive. So what if it is progressive? What entity dictated that progressive is right and evey other mechanism of cost distribution is wrong?

You paint a picture where I can freely move and choose to reside in any country and under any tax regime I choose. This is definitely not so. Have you every tried to emmigrate to the US? At the very minimium it would take you years. In addition your chances of being accepted by the host country are small. So I'm not clear what you mean by the statement above that you could move arround the world. Do you mean move and permanantly reside? If so I am curious to know which countries have such a liberal immigration policy and whether such a policy is applicable to everyone. It is precisely one of my points that the barriers to mobility are quite high, which means simply being able to choose your tax environment is not an option for many. In addition, there is a huge variation in condo fees. I lived in a condo which provided minimal service and charged $60/month. I have friends who live in condos with pools, weight rooms, and manicured gardens and they pay several hundred a month. So while all charge fees, there is a huge variation in what they charge. I would define fair different than the province, however it's the provinces definition which counts. Yes you are correct that the more expensive units pay more fees. Personally I don't consider that fair but the province does. My point is not that the provincial rules are "fair" but there is at least an overriding authority that I can appeal to. Yes. Condos could claim that smoking is a fire hazzard and the smoke drifts into the hallways and other apartments. Certainly a condo board can try and pass such a rule, but I doubt it woudl survive a challenge. linkYes I know the link is based upon California law, but I believe the same principle would apply here. Gov't would never be able to do that either so it is a red herring. As mentioned, condo fees are progressive in the sense that people who have more pay more. Well the Government certainly has the power to do so, and to a large extent they already do. Federal Personal Income Tax: Slicing the Pie

So would you agree that the more you pay the more you own? Or perhaps you should only have to pay to the extent you "own". Let's not glorify taxes. They are a necessary evil. If we could build and operate an infrastructure without any cost, that woudl be great, unfortunately we can't. Tax becomes how we allocate the cost-sharing burden. People accept that. What isn't accepted is the arbitrariness an percieved unfairness of the allocation.

Here we go again. Taxation is not theft. It is part of the contract required to live in a territory just like paying condo fees is part of the contract of condo ownership. You consented to this contract by choosing to live in the territory owned by the strata corporation. You may be frustrated because every livable piece of land on the globe is part of one of these super-strata corporations, however, that is not the fault of the corporations involved. Nor does it mean these corporations should be abolished. It is an interesting analogy but not accurate for the following reasons: 1. You explicitly choose to live in a condo and subject to the rules of the corporation. For most people they make no such explicit choice with the country they live and hence the taxation they are subject to. 2. If you deem the condo corporation to be levying unfair fees on you, you have a plethora of other choices. Freehold, renting, or co-op, or another condo. There are large but not insurmountable barriers to moving. Most other countries don't simply let you pick up and move there just becaue you like their taxation scheme, not to mention the much higher barriers to move. 3. The condo corporation is subject to the laws of the province which allows the condo corp to operate with some freedom but within a context where all the inhabatants are treated fairly. Any rules the condo passes are subservient to federal and provincial laws. If you feel a regulation a condo corp passes is unfair, you can take them to court. There is no such overriding governning body which ensures fair treatemetn with a government. Do you think a condo corp can pass a regulation which says no one smoke in there own condo? Do you think a condo corp can pass a regulation which says 49% of the condo owners should pay 100% of the condo fees? With a government such taxation is certainly possible.

All of the things that we call 'rights' are derived from the principal that 'you should not do things to other people that you would not want them to do to you'. Slavery is illegal because people don't want to be made slaves. Women are considered equal to men because 50%+ of the population are women who would not support a system that treats them unfairly. There was a time not long ago when women were not granted the right to have a say in the system, so it was irrevelant if they supported it or not. In the days of slavery, there wasn't a thought that slaves shoudl be free, because white men were afraid that slaves would "do unto them what they did to slaves". In the end slaves were freed because enough people thought it was the right thing to do. (ie they thought that everyone had the universal right to be free).

Yes, that is exactly how 'rights' work. TFB, I think most people and Amnesty International will disagree with you. Why do you think AI, and many civilized countries object when people are tortured or enslaved? If their society never gave them the right to be free or to have security of person, then according to you, they have no such right. So what justification does AI or western countries have, to claim that rights are being violated since, by your philosophy, those rights didn't exist.

If society has agreed that the farmer has the absolute right to obstruct the construction of the highway then society will also have the duty to protect that farmer from mob action, no matter how stupid or selfish that farmers actions are. Regardless of if the farmer understood the reercussions or not I would not consider it "stealing" if "society" paid at least a fair price for the land.

There are no 'inherent rights' anywhere (not to mention philosophers such as Proudhon and Marx seem to argue that there are no individual 'property rights') save what we choose to create, bestow and respect (and enforce). Would you agree then TFB, that in societies in which women are not granted the same rights as men, that the women don't in fact have those rights?

Riverwind, TFB, I disagree with both of you on this. Rights are not given to us by society but are inherent to our existance. Society merely acknowledges that those rights exist. Let's say the majority of people in some society decided that women should not have the right to security of their person or the right to marry whomever they choose. By your reasoning, they now don't have that right because society didn't grant it to them. The issues above are not because society grants people rights and can take them away or curtail them, it is because there are conflicting rights. Those of the collective conflict with those of the individual, and how do we mediate between them.

Well, it's the farmer's right to keep his property. But if the highway will provide "huge economic benefit either directly or indirectly to everyone", then perhaps the farmer will soon realize this, and desire to sell a portion of his land, if he gets a good deal for it. If a government uses force to solve a problem like this, property rights are downright trampled on. CW, in your response you admit that the only way in a completely Libertarian system is to wait for the farmer to be convinced he should voluntarily sell the land. That means one individual can stop the building of infrastructure for an entire community. In reality, people can be stubborn, not rational, have an emotional attachment to the property, or simply be greedy and hold out for an unreasonably high price. If there was no threat of expropriation, everyone who held property would hold out to be bought at an excessively high price. The net result is that in many cases it would be cost probhitive to build infrastructure so some infrastructure would not be built. Even if we assumed everyone were cooperative, the time it would take to secure everyone's voluntarily agreement would hugely slow down infrastructure creation. Looking at the big picture, one of the reasons we can be productive as a society is because of infrastructure which has been built. If the scenerio were to unfold as you describe, we would build much less infrastructure, or build it much more slowly and would cease to be competitive on the world market. This would be determental to everyone in our society. Personally I dont' agree that private enterprise should be allowed to expropriate land. Even when govenment expropriate property rules should be in place which both make it difficult for the government to do so, and compensate the owner a premium for the property expropriated. It is however, an unreasonable ask of society that no expropriation should ever be possible under any circumstance.

CW, I think you completely missed the point of my question. What I asked was how the highway was even built in the first place when Farmer A won't sell out.

You have a curious view of government. You seem to see it as a giant monolith capable of ignoring whether people pay their taxes or not. I don't see government that way at all.Free riders are at the heart of the problem government faces because they are at the heart of why a voluntary market cannot provide the good or service we would like to have. In a world without government, we would not have streetlights unless a wealthy benefactor decided to install one and accept to provide a free ride (or at least free light) to anyone using it. In my view the government cares far less about free riders, and cares far more if the funds it needs are collectable. It is far easier to collect tax on income than to meter usage of infrastructure. Similarily it is far easier, for the government, to hike a tax which is already in place then to create a new funding structure which minimizes free-riders. As long as it has overall funding for the initiative, there seems to be very little focus on whether the burden of cost is appropriately shared. If the government could get 1% of the popuation to pay for the infrasturcture that benefits everyone and 99% are free-riders, it is actually in the government's benefit, as it makes it more likely that the 99% will support the government in future. It doesn't really give a damn about the 1%. Hence my comment that the government doesn't care about free-riders. The ability to exclude someone from access to a good or service is the start down the road of solving the free rider problem. In esence, by metering water, we can define ownership and then charge for using something. Technology sometimes makes this possible.For example, I believe that in 50 years all cars will have GPS devices and you will pay for your road use according to where you drive and the time of day you drive. Collecting tolls, as is common in the US, is a similar idea but it is inexact and cumbersome. We want to charge people for the congestion they impose rather than the use of the road as such. But I agree with you Renegade. Governments must start to more like this. If you can believe it, at present, the city of Montreal does not meter for water use, and it has no metering system for garbage collection. To its credit, it has recently installed credit card parking meters. We are on the same page. I used to live in Montreal so I'm aware of the lack of water metering. I always note how much greener the lawns are in Montreal in August than they are in Toronto which does meter water. Much technology to implement pay-by-use exists today. What doesn't exist is wilingness from the government to impement such as system. I live in Mississauga, which I consider well run. The City of Mississauga provides many recreation programs but the user fees are not cheap and is reflective of the actual cost to run the programs. Programs run in the City of Toronto are dirt cheap by comparison because the city govenment subsidized them, despite the city constantly lacking funds. Everytime there is an increase to the user fees for the recreation programs, there are howls of protest. It seems the people are not very willing to give up the role as free riders. I would say that govenment has some of the characteristics of being its own entity as well as being a series of communial agreements. In a sense it is something like an incorporated company which is its own legal entity over and above being a set of agreements between shareholders. There are some important differences between marriage and government, even in the way you describe it. With marriage you spend years (or at least you are able to), understanding the other party so that you can make a reasonable assessment of the commitment you are undertaking. You do this because as you described you are buying a pig-in-a-poke, so you better be damn careful before you make the decision. You have no such opportunity with government. Leaving aside the people who immigrated here, the ones who were born here, made no such explicit decision to accept such a commitment. This is an important distinction as the situation as we have it today is people defaulting into commitmetns they nether agreed to, nor accepted, and one in which there are high barriers to exit.

ClearWest, but what you have not resolved is what happens when voluntary participation is not sufficient, does that scuttle that infrastructure? Let me take an example. A highway is required to link two cities. Because there is massive trade and population flow between the cities, the highway will provide huge economic benefit either directly or indirectly to everyone. Because of geographic constraints, there is only one choice for the route for the highway. Farmer A owns land which is along the route of the proposed highway. Everyone else who owns land has come to a voluntary agreement to sell the land for the highway. Farmer A, refuses to sell at any price, thus preventing the highway from being built. How does this get resolved voluntarily?

CBC Of course the blurb is biased. But the CBC didn't invent it. They just cut-n-pasted it from Alliance Atlantic (the distributor's) press release. link

Yes, I am describing price discrimmination, and I agree that the airline ticket is not a perfect example because the product is not exactly the same. The similarilty exiist because the airline, like the government, has to create and pay for a large an expensive infrastructure, in addition they have operating cost. They need a model for allocating the cost among the users. It is a rare case where the airline will allow free riders, and can only exist if people will voluntarily pay for their share of the infrastructure. To be honest, I doubt that the government cares about free riders. The people who care are tax payers who are forced to bear a higher cost. It's not just those who don't pay, its those who underpay who are free riders. In that sense, a large part of our population are free riders. Again you are assuming a self-reporting mechanism. What if I didn't rely on your declaration at all but instead relied on a mechanism to determine if you used the streetlight? Yes, yes, I know that it is not practial in all cases, but it is in many. Toll highways, electricity, water are all metered. It doesn't require you to truthfully report your usage in order to determine the cost you should bear for that infrastructure. Me either. Certainly not one that works in all cases. I wish is that society embrace the principle, and implement where it is practical. I can't see that society has even agreed in princple that things should work that way. The issue is that the relationship between an individual and the government is not a "marriage" of equal partners. The government can coerce the individual, but the individual can't really coerce the government. If the individual fits outside the norm, it is highly likely that government policy will clash with his interest. Imagine a two person marriage in which one person has all the physical, financial, and decision power. How beneficial is that marriage to the other individual? The other difference is that at least with marriage you have a choice on who you marry. With govenment you get no choice. You get whoever the collective picks. If you're lucky or fit into the profile of the collective, their pick may be the same as your pick, but it is never guaranteed.

No. Rather, you are accepting the unfortunate reality that your freedom is violated. If you do not have the strength to defend it (or you can not afford to emmigrate), it does not make your submission voluntary. If a slave is bound by a ball-and-chain or over-powered by a violent master, will you say the slave is voluntarily "accepting" his plight if he does not bother to fight back? Yes I agree with you. My question was not intended to state my postion as much as it was intended to elicit discussion. The whole argument that by a person by entering a community that persion is accepting to whatever taxation a community chooses to levy, is a false argument in my opinion. It might be more valid if there were no cost or regulatory barriers to movement between communities and if there were an infinite number of communities to choose from. In practice, there are relative high barriers to moving between communities, regardless if I define the community as my immediate neighbourhood, or my country. In addition, I may find that the choices a community may move to may match my need in certain areas (say public schools) but my not match my needs in others (say streetlights).

By agreeing to stay in Canada (and not emmigrate) are you not implicitly accepting a contract which subjects you to paying for infrastructure and programs the government deems necessary? In that sense isn't it voluntary?