You got 5 offers in increasing order of pay. A, B, C, D, E. Governments wants to force you to pick C.
What would government do? Tell you to do C?
No.
Governments need only to prohibit D and E. Then government would say, no body force you to do C. You can still do A and B.
Then government will say that D and E is so bad anyway nobody would want it anyway. How the hell we know that nobody wants D and E if both are illegal? We can measure it by the amount of money people are willing to bribe to be allowed to do D and E. And that’s the issue is. The more government prohibit, the bigger the tax or bribe.
The most obvious sample is marriage. We can think of A as abstinence, B as homosexual relationship, C as marriage, D as prostitution, and E as intercontinental prostitution.
Many women prefer to be prostitute than getting married. Many women in poor country prefer to go to richer countries for higher paying mates. To force people to get married, governments simply prohibit prostitution and intercontinental prostitution.
Government will say, “No body force you to get married. You are still free to commit suicide, commit abortion, commit seppuku, or embracing abstinence.”
In a sense, government is right. There are many ways to circumvent this anyway. The best way to enforce contract is to split it into pieces.
Rather than paying her, it makes sense to just buy her flower and chocolates and see if you get laid after that. She stop humping, you stop paying. However, this doesn’t really accommodate more complex contract but should be good enough.
When you want to have children, things get more complicated.
Government doesn’t even have to prohibit D and E. Governments only need to whack the market price.
Say the price of carrot is $7/kg. Say governments want to prohibit carrot. It’s easy. Government will either set minimum price of $50/kg or maximum price of $1/kg.
Now there will be over supply and over demand.
We see this in many areas.
You can donate organ but you cannot sell it. That means maximum price of organ is 0. Hence there are very few organ donors.
Say governments want to prohibit women from picking the rich. Government does not have to explicitly say that. Government can institute a maximum wage of 0 for sex workers. Government can demand exorbitant child support from richer males.
Governments decide the amount of child support a man should pay to his mate. The women do not decide that. That effectively prohibits women from picking richer males to breed.
Also governments do not have to prohibit things totally when switching strategy is rare.
Most governments recoqnize freedom of religion. Well, those who choose their religions are heretics and apostates. Hence, to force people to adopt a certain religion, governments can easily prohibit apostasy.
In fact, all that matter is not what religion you believe in. All that matter is you do what your slave owners want you to do. Hence, government can easily claim that all religions tell you to pay higher tax and tolerate rulers extravagant spending. Governments then claim that religions that believe in different opinions as heretics.
Indonesian governments use this strategy to force people to get married. They want to criminalize all cohabitation agreement. Then governments claim that all religions prohibit sex outside marriage. If someone raises an opinion that even popes have concubines they are called heretics.