Since I've previously advocated that divorce be made illegal, so tacky and unnecessary is government intervention in the termination of relationships, may I take pleasure to noting in 2009 that the current decline in personal assets discourages divorcing. People sharing a house don't want to be forced to sell in a soft market, while it's hard to claim alimony from someone unemployed. On Bloomberg radio here, I heard one NYC matrimonial attorney complain that his biz was down a whopping 50%. Good bye, with good riddance.

When a contractual marriage ends, may I repeat, simply move out and move on. Most, if not all, resulting problems can be resolved by the participants talking to each other, sometimes under the watch of a disinterested third party. “The children” is no excuse for government intervention for a problem that can, instead, be resolved economically. They never should be.

No state can eliminate individual failure, whether in love or in business, whether in nutrition or self-destructive behavior, and most efforts to do so result in further failures.