The Marriage Contract

Read an article from slashdot about some predictions for the next 100 years. Notably #17 states that marriage will be come a contract that renews annually. I had thought of a similar idea in a previous post requiring renwal of the marriage license. The importent thing to notice is that this idea's main proponent wants it to become socially aceptable for two people to say "we think we can live happy lives for the next 5 years, but not sure about after that".  The annual contract may be far more practical than a 5-year term that I was envisioning.

The idea breaks with all thoughts of traditional marriage institution. It also makes it insanely difficult to rear children. If one would dare to imagine, socialized child-care. People are free to procede as they like with their marriage life. A part of their taxes goes toward a stable environment where children are cared for professionally. In such a system, one would never fear making a mistake in one's relationship, to impact children, who are the future of society. Such a system also promotes the healthy mixing of genetic material among all races, increasing human rate of evolution.

Additional benefits include accounting. It is far more difficult to enumerate the shared/non-shared properties in a 10-yr marriage that went sour in it's second year than to look at 2 years of income and purchases, and split the properties from only those two years. The renewal process requires an audit of all properties, tedious, I know, but still better than to do it at end of 10 years.

Child rearing is one issue that needs to be addressed more carefully...