There's No Such Thing as a "Free" Marriage

From an article in Maclean's written by the daughter of a former student:

When 151 women gathered in Madhya Pradesh state in central India last month, they were preparing for a celebration; all were to be married in a state-run mass wedding in the city of Shahdol. ...

The mass wedding was part of a new state-wide scheme to provide free marriages to the poor. Traditionally, women in India’s tribal regions have difficulty finding spouses, since they can’t afford costly weddings and lavish dowries. The new program not only lets them tie the knot for free, it provides them with gifts worth about 6,500 rupees ($153).

But as the title of this posting says, "there's no such thing as a 'free' marriage". And that's the case for two reasons:

1. First the economics perspective: There are opportunity costs involved with using scarce resources for these weddings. The wedding ceremony may have seemed free to many of the participants, but the inputs used to put on the wedding have an alternative use which must be foregone when the weddings are "produced". This is just one of zillions of examples of opportunity costs involved with gubmnt programmes.
2. The second cost is more nefarious. When the gubmnt provides something, it usually adds its own controls, monitors, intrusions, etc. As the article states,

   ...But they weren’t expecting what came next: being shepherded into a line, and then subjected to an official “virginity test.”...

   But a “virginity test” was never part of the deal. And according to reports, the women weren’t told about the test until they arrived. “At first I refused to go through the test,” said one tribal girl who was among the Shahdol brides. “But an officer told me I would not be allowed inside the marriage hall unless the gynecologist declared me eligible.”

   Officials deny that validating virginity was the goal, instead claiming they were performing a simple pregnancy test to weed out already married women who were only there for the cash payout. “The test was a precautionary measure,” said a Shahdol district commissioner. “Last year one of the brides delivered a baby even as the marriage ceremony was on.” The test found 14 women to be pregnant, and they were prevented from taking part in the ceremony.

And of course all this gubmnt intrusion involves further opportunity costs as well.