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The best argument I can think of is that someone needs to pay for the kid. The state will do whatever possible to avoid taking that task. Partly due to the economic expense, partly for the sake of the kid. If the state starts paying child support, odds are the state will also want a say in how the child should be raised. I believe having such a large faceless entity be directly responsible for any individual leaves a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. So while it is unjust to demand child support while denying a paternity test, there is a decent argument it is helpful to the kid.
As for why it is not the woman who pays, that is tradition. The law has not caught up to gender equality in the labor market, and I imagine feminist activists will work hard to keep things that way, considering this is something that disproportionately benefits women to the detriment of men.
I also think it is partly due to cheap DNA testing being a relatively new thing. It has not been that long since sequencing was an expensive, time consuming task mostly done as academic research. While mandatory DNA testing may well be a reasonable demand today, 20 years ago it would have been ridiculous.
The primary custodial parent receives child support this is usually but not always the woman and in general is determined by who was the child's primary caretaker during the marriage. A stay at home dad would be extremely likely to receive primary custody and child support.
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Its fascinating to me that the state paying for other people, such as the sick and the elderly, is accepted, but paying for our children is somehow a bridge too far. Why? Its not like the government begins to regulate the behavior of old people to my knowledge, or prevents life saving healthcare, etc. I don't see a problem with them paying for the kid, but leaving how they are raised up to parents. Thats not even getting into the fact that we already have entities like CPS and the education system that play some part in how children are raised.
No surprise, kids can't vote. If we banned elderly from voting entitlements like social security would be among the first things to be cut.
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The state already takes a strong view about how any child is raised, most notably via the education system.
Well yeah. That and the adoption system is pretty good evidence in my eyes that giving the state more power over children is not a good thing.
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How about Bill Gates? He's wealthy, and was just as involved in the kid's creation.
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I agree with almost all of this, but I think the major exception is load-bearing:
If you type 60wpm, it took you 17 seconds to write this sentence and a half, over which period of time the federal government disperses an average of $2.2M in transfer payments, $250k of which are specifically for families and individuals facing economic hardship. Taking on that sort of task is something that the state already does, on such a massive scale that adding another hundred thousand kids' child support payments would literally be within rounding error on the commonly reported figures. Since our chief remaining worry is indeed
then we want that kid's expenses to be at least backstopped by the almost-incomprehensibly rich state, which is guaranteed to pay, not by some random guy who might delay or evade payment. Once that's assured, our remaining concerns are much less pressing: justice vs deadbeat parents, and well-being for innocent taxpayers. We can fix both concerns by finding the biological father and getting him to pay, but can we improve either by squeezing a non-father?
Justice vs deadbeat parents can't be improved by punishing a non-deadbeat non-parent.
Well-being for innocent taxpayers you might think can be improved by getting some poor sucker to pay instead of them, but that poor sucker is in the set of innocent potential taxpayers, and the marginal utility of money decreases. A priori most people would probably prefer a certainty of paying a tiny amount over a tiny chance of being unjustly pushed into paying a much larger amount. And that's just considering the financial aspects; someone who's been cheated on in this way is paying to have those extracted finances managed by their victimizer, which is definitely negative-sum in well-being.
There is a more subtle problem with just letting the state pay in these cases: doing so removes all incentives the mother might have to help the state track down the biological father. That wouldn't necessarily be a new problem, though (why bother tracking down biodad if the guy you tricked is already paying?), just a still-unsolved one.
This has been my mental response to the idea of the state's motivations being a primary driver. It's still irrational and immoral. We're already using children as a vehicle for UBI at an astonishing scale - making fathers slightly less likely to be financially cucked is the easy button nobody will push.
At the end of the day it's difficult to chalk it up to anything beyond "Women are Wonderful"
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But why not the biological father?
(And if he’s dead/incapable, maybe the state has to pay, but that’s the case when somebody isn’t tricked. Or that can be an exception, since the adoptive father would have less reason to envy him, although I still think it’s bad)
You don't know who the biological father is, so you would have to find him first. You don't know how wealthy he is, so there is no guarantee he is even capable of paying child support in the first place. You will have to take him to court to find out. During this process as you locate and sue the bio dad, who pays for the kid? And what if he is just too poor to pay anything? It seems to me that the incentives, at least in the short term, favor the assumption that the boyfriend/husband is also that goes out the window if you do a test and find out it isn't the case.
That sad, I personally still believe the injustice of paying for another man's kid when doing so is easily avoidable is too great an injustice to be justified by this. But it is the best explanation I can come up with, and I do think it is logically coherent.
Why not Elon? Or Bill Gates? Well, we think that’s wrong because that would be stealing.
So why are we forcing it on the chump who got played and his world destroyed (kid isn’t yours but you have to pay for the kid nonetheless).
But that's the trick right there. Without DNA tests or another man to claim fatherhood, there is no way to conclusively prove you did get played. With the test being unavailable, we maintain the convenient narrative that the "chump" is in fact the father, and should take responsibility as such.
A shame, because those exist? That's like claiming that we wouldn't need speed limits on the interstate highway if motor vehicles didn't exist. They do.
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