A good part of a person’s success in the game of life is a product of nature and nurture – his genes and the parenting he received. People who were unlucky enough to receive bad genes, or bad parenting, or both, tend to be unsuccessful.
Tragically for America, these people who are unsuccessful at life are the very people who are disproportionately successful at having babies. Those babies tend to inherit their parents’ bad genes and learn their bad parenting.
When those babies grow up (or, often, just partially grow up) they, like their parents, are unsuccessful at life but disproportionately successful at having babies. Those babies, in turn, wind up short-changed by both nature and nurturing.
What I’ve just described already takes us through three generations. In the end, there’s no end. We’ve set up a vicious and expanding cascade of poverty and failure.
The effect is a policy of survival – and propagation – of the un-fittest. Charles Darwin would predict adverse consequences for our species.
Before you take offense, I hasten to add that general rules often are riddled with exceptions. I grew up in in a family of six with modest means. We all turned out OK. But the fact that it sometimes rains in the desert doesn’t disprove the general rule that deserts are dry.
The welfare state makes it all the worse. This was recognized as early as 1965 by intellectuals such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future Democrat Senator from New York back when the Democratic Party sometimes produced rigorous thinking rather than identity politics. Moynihan’s work focused on poor Black families but it’s not a Black issue per se; it’s a poverty issue.
Moynihan criticized social welfare policies where we pay unsuccessful people to have unsuccessful babies to propagate their failure at life, thereby amplifying this vicious cascade of poverty.
The more babies they have, the more money we pay them. Then their babies have babies, and we’re off to the races.
Perhaps our policy should be exactly the opposite. Perhaps we should discourage unsuccessful people from having unsuccessful babies.
A smart start to getting out of this hole would be to stop digging. We should stop paying unsuccessful people to propagate. To that end, eliminate the $3,000 child tax credit.
Then go a step further. Pay people not to have babies. A simple way to accomplish that would be to pay them to undergo sterilization.
That sounds cruel, but is it really? If “my body my choice” justifies people aborting unborn babies because they’re inconvenient, then surely it justifies people accepting money to prevent the babies’ conception. For gosh sakes, the manufacturers of condoms accept money to prevent the conception of babies.
Moreover, many if not most of the babies these people have are utterly unplanned. If it’s cruel to prevent unwanted pregnancies, then why haven’t we outlawed those condoms – along with birth control pills, the rhythm method, premature withdrawal, abstinence and chastity?
I recognize that courts are wary of government measures that produce sterilization. Courts might view a system where the government pays people taxpayer money conditioned on them being sterilized as tantamount to the government sterilizing them involuntarily.
So don’t do it through the government. Let foundations and philanthropists administer the system with private funds. A foundation or a rich guy (Elon, do you hear me?) could say, “Here’s $3,000 for anyone under 50 who wants to get sterilized. And we’ll pay the medical bills, too.”
The people that we want not to have babies would find that offer tempting, because $3,000 is a lot of money to those people. But the people we want to have babies would not find that offer tempting, because that’s not a lot of money to them.
Over time, we just might reduce the population of undesirables (not to be confused with deplorables).
You might ask, what about America’s fertility crisis? Yes, it’s a fact that American (and European) birthrates are less than what’s required to maintain the current populations. And so, the argument goes, we should provide incentives for people to procreate.
That argument is premised on the notion that when it comes to people, the more the better. I question that notion, especially when I’m forced to endure crowded freeways, crowded hiking trails, and crowded crowds.
We have eight billion of us. Is that not enough? I don’t know about you, but I rarely think, “Gee, I wish there were more people here.”
From a pure financial perspective, it’s true that an ever-increasing population is necessary to continue our Ponzi scheme called Social Security, where we need more and more workers to support more and more retirees who live longer and longer (though the effects of rationed medical care – which seems inevitable and already encroaching upon us – will partially solve that problem).
I submit that the way to fix the Ponzi scheme of Social Security is not to produce infinitely expanded pools of young suckers to support it, but to phase out the scheme. Like all Ponzi schemes, it’s unsustainable. We cannot increase our population forever to produce an ever-increasing pool of hard-working suckers to support an ever-increasing number of long-lived retirees. At some point, we run out of space, resources and suckers.
Even if the number of suckers we breed to support the burgeoning population of retirees is sufficient in quantity, they are apt to be insufficient in quality. How many generations of bad nature and nurture can a society withstand?
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