My wife believes that there should be birth control in the water and a person would have to demonstrate competence to get the antidote to have a child. Kinda like passing drivers ed., except that child rearing is much more important than driving.
Perhaps it is my background and life path that makes me bristle at this issue but I cannot let some of these comments pass without venting my angst. I am half Irish, half Polish. In the last three hundred years both peoples suffered the genocide and ethic cleaning imposed from from foreign governments who felt we had reproduced far too much, especially as we were not really human beings, or at least not up to par with glorious virtues of our oppressors.
My wife is Qubecois and first peoples (native American, or (god help us) Indian). Both these peoples suffered under governments desiring their elimination. When pushing them off their land did not suffice, birth rates were suppressed largely through poor nutrition and lack of medical care resulting in high fetal and infant mortality rates.
If the present government in the United States had control of when you could reproduce you would need consent from your banker,(who would only say yes when you had accumulated sufficient debt to enslave you for life), your stock broker, (who would only consent after you invested in overpriced stocks and cds paying no interest), your local politician (who would only consent after you had sufficiently padded his or her campaign fund) and the NSA (who would never consent to a radical that frequented a site like this) before you would be allowed to conceive.
I understand the issue of over population. Forced compliance with the plan of some government is not the answer. It would be the equivalent of having the DMV decide who could reproduce. Education and voluntary limiting of family size is the only way to achieve the goal of reducing population.
JT
I was joking about birth control in the water. But I have to agree with climber99 that education and voluntary limiting won't work when there are financial incentives to do the opposite. As he said we need to "1. End child support and child subsidies. Penalize larger families through the tax code." Seems like an obvious first step.
Jtwalsh said:
Education and voluntary limiting of family size is the only way to achieve the goal of reducing population.Most people are probably not going to voluntarily limit their family size. My wife and I used birth control but still have many more children than most of you. That was by choice.
My perspective continues to be that too many people are focused only on rationing children. I think the focus should be on rationing resources. If families can only buy so much food then they are left having to produce their own to feed any extra mouths. That is not a route most families would take. I have taken it (I could not survive financially without producing much of my own food).
Climber99 said
2. Introduce energy rationing. [snip] Not so keen now, are you all ?I'm OK with this, but that is because I heat with wood and have solar panels, so I should be less affected than most people by this. An energy rationing system would also finally help me win my argument with my wife that we drive too much. I am trying to do my share by housing some oxen for a young hopeful farmer in return for them doing some of my tractor work.
I'm not trying to toot my own horn. I just get tired of people jumping immediately to the rationing of children. I also look at it this way. The US birth rate was barely at a replacement level last time I checked. So my large family was actually needed in this particular country. Other countries will have to deal with their situations in a manner consistent with their local ethos.
I was on a 32 acre property working with a friend on making it more accessible to people in general. Great property with great future potential. This is a friend who I would love to get to watch the Crash Course, he was one of the first friends I tried to have view it after I did several years ago. He still hasn't, but he does have some great world view ideas that match with a lot of the content here.
Anyway, aside from not getting my buddy, to prepare (He is one of my best friends, Arg) he shared with me a conversation he had with his step father, who is otherwise and intelligent, hardworking individual. Basically my buddy was home for the first time in several months and wanted to talk about some of the stuff in the news…make the point that things are changing rapidly, that buying organic or growing your own food is intelligent and safer. He and his step father started arguing and it got pretty heated. Nearly every point my friend made, his step father simply retorted that he was being alarmist, that his concern wasn't necessary, that the world and humanity are always doing better. Nothing is wrong…
I just wanted to add this on a couple of levels. First, I can't help but identify personal disappointment at not ever being able to get my friend to watch the Crash Course. He is going to be up here in Vermont for the next month, so maybe now is the time to shove a beer in his hand, tell him to sit on the couch, and ask him to take the red pill.
Second, I share my friends shock at not being able to get his step father to even buy into at least one common sense perspective about a world in trouble. Like, he would buy into nothing. It was sad. I think this is much of the frustration we feel about knowing a lot of the details in front of us, but not getting the mainstream to catch on and take interest.
It really is a shame. Sometimes, smart people just don't want to listen when their belief system is being challenged.
Going to continue to work on my buddy, though.
Jason
I wasn't advocating ethnic cleansing just people volunteering for sterilization based on a their personality deformity. They wouldn't be forced into sterilization, they would just miss out on free beer, if they chose not to. I think it's perfect. My only concern would be a possibility that drowning traits like impulsivity, recklessness and being a self serving yahoo in the gene pool, might inadvertently remove some necessary genes that code for spontaneous expression. It's a scientific conundrum, not a moral one.
Funny you should mention eugenics AP. (No, I am not going to go on some nostril flaring outrage.)
In his book "The madness of Adam and Eve" Horrobin recounts that before eugenics got a bad rap it was considered morally sound. To that end they made up a list of all the families in England who would be offered free lifetime support if they submitted to sterilization. The criteria was schizophrenia. Families with the condition were offered this choice.
The project was abandoned when it was discovered that there was a strong correlation between schizophrenia and genius. Lose one, lose both.
So now we have reverted to traditional methods of eugenics. We let the womenfolk decide who gets to breed and loses out.
Oliveoilguy: No need to apologize. I just needed to get my libertarian point across that government is probably not the best arbiter of how to resolve these issues. I agree that there should be no governmental incentives for having children (like the income tax credit) but I am not willing to go so far as to say that government should be able to impose sanctions or negative economic consequences for having more than the proscribed number of children.
Once a child is here we are faced with a completely different problem. Do we leave parents who cannot support their children to the vicissitudes of the marketplace or do we assist in providing food, health care and education to the child, in the hope that he or she will grow to be a productive and participating citizen. A much more difficult question.
efarmerny: I fully agree that no one, especially not the government, should be rationing children, as you described it. You also state that the United States was just barely at replacement level in its birth rate. I do not have statistics at hand but my reading indicates that many European countries are well below replacement birth rates. It appears that education and economic reality have caused a reversal of centuries old beliefs of the more children the better. I will amend my original statement to say that education, and economic reality (without artificial incentives from government) is the only practical way to approach this issue. Any forced regime would by definition entail a massive curtailing of human rights.
Thanks for the discussion. It forces my old and sedentary brain to open new neurons and rethink some of my positions. JT
No nostril flaring outrage! Too bad, but your interesting comment makes up for it! I have a schizophrenic sibling and a genius sibling. Genius sibling and I both decided not to have kids…too risky. For me opting out of the gene pool was no problem. Is Horrobin the man who wrote about the role excess consumption of wheat may have played as a trigger in populations making them more susceptible to the illness?
Does it even make sense to aim for replacement population? More automation, fewer jobs, deteriorating environment. How could one make an argument for keeping the population static. Granted, there may be fewer tatoo parlours and baristas. So many jobs are so superfluous, unnecessary, polluting, encouraging insane amounts of inane diversionary consumption. It's undignified to have to be involved in any way in a silly society with silly people buying a bunch of dorky stuff.
Wait, isn't that what the flouride is for?
Is Horrobin the man who wrote about the role excess consumption of wheat may have played as a trigger in populations making them more susceptible to the illness?No he thought that he had found the link between prostaglandins and Schizophrenia.
While working as an academic investigator, in Africa and later, Horrobin developed a theory implicating altered fatty acid metabolism in schizophrenia.He thought that the fact that Schizophrenics did not blush when injected subcataneously with niacin was further evidence of the role of hydrolipids' role in the condition.
He earned condemnation of Giant Pharma for actually curing the "disease". Millions of dollars were at stake. (The condition is a dis-ease if it makes the person effected not "at ease". The effect on the bystanders is their problem. If they are not at ease let them take weird and powerful neuroleptics. And pay Big Pharma for them.)
Genius is worth the price of schizophrenia. Einstein's son was Schizophrenic. We cannot have one without the other.
I feel very protective towards Schizophrenics. My beautiful cousin and my daughter was and is. My cousin was Prof of Music. He did things no normal person could even contemplate. The medical professions killed him. He made them feel uncomfortable so he had to be killed.
For a clear understanding of the situation read "Mad in America" by Witaker
More here http://www.madinamerica.com/
It is a loss that you have chosen not to breed.
Let's hit the wall first. This is the only way humanity will be forced to reduce its size and birth rate without politicians, bankers and NSA involved in the way described above (Well, not exactly true… They will be involved in a different way… A way we don't like, anyway).
After that, if ignorance don't pick-up, then we may have a chance to control the size of humanity according to available resources. Otherwise, we are simply doomed to oscillate around an overall descending trend.
Personally, lowering my standard of life doesn't scare me. Leaving in a world dominated by violence and ignorance is another story. A very uncomfortable one.
For now, as we are very conscious of what's ahead, each of us will concentrate on his personal plan and hope to leave a durable footprint of helpful wisdom. Better to leave at least one child (and may be one friend too) continue the work we started than doing nothing.
w[quote=Chris]
By 2080 when this is supposed to take place, the entire world will be past the peak of all known sources of energy. And Phosphate. And soil. And fresh water. And oceanic fish biomass. And who knows what else. And yet the CBO blithely assumes that US, all on its own, will be producing and consuming 100% of what the entire world does today.
[/quote]
Implying that 1) the U.S. Population will be as large as the world population is today, or 2) we each have 3 1/2 times as much as we do today, or some combination of the two.
Even if we could pull it off, that is a very scary picture. I'm sorry to say that I'm already swimming in stuff. I'm working hard right now to get rid of some of it.
We would also have to eat three times as much. Every parking lot would have to be handicapped.
[quote=Chris]
Hollywood visions and SciFi fantasies aside (where humans live in sealed capsules and subsist entirely on man-made foods), humans are 100% utterly dependent on the natural world for their survival.
[/quote]
That is pure fantasy. Look up Biosphere II. We do not have the know how to create a closed contained environment yet.
Consider this a motivational piece.
http://blog.milesfranklin.com/fact-or-fiction
Jill works in the mortgage market and Jack works for a bank so they both know this news doesn’t really add up, the discussion morphs into “are they really telling us the truth”?Then, something starts to happen at the front of the restaurant. It looks like four or five couples are all arguing with the owner and the discussion is becoming heated. You see, their credit cards are not working, none of them!
agitating prop: I have no issue with the population declining from its present levels. Most of my life has been spent watching the village centered southern New England of my childhood be paved over with housing developments and endless malls full of the same big box stores and chain restaurants. I often long for a time when there were far fewer folks occupying this small piece of earth.
I just am not in favor of government forcing the issue through mandatory birth control, eugenics, forced euthanasia, unnecessary war, etc.
JT
Aloha! I agree with the comments that there needs to be a more cohesive education of our youth and an even more concerted effort to educate the adults! Who here has ever even visited a mine, one in operation, not one abandoned? Unless your parents have a geology degree I doubt few Americans have even seen a mining operation. Even fewer have ever seen an exploration team looking for the metals we need every day to survive at our current rate of consumption. Out of all the industries in the world perhaps the hardest is mining. It is highly time consuming and very labor intensive and quite a costly enterprise as well.
The baby graphic with the statistics I posted prior is backed by the USGS and the EIA. Is it accurate that every American born in America needs 3.11mil pounds of minerals to live until 80?
Here is a link to the MEC and their attempt to educate kids. Here is a MEC power point presentation for teachers to plan a study on mining. Now, who here knows who the MEC is? Who here remembers studying anything about mining in school? Who here have kids who have had any classroom time spent on mining?
Perhaps the old saying "out of sight - out of mind" would explain how it is Americans are per capita the largest consumers in the world yet are also the least conscious of commodities. Let me explain further. The last time the USA was a net exporter of oil was the 1930s prior to WW2. If you were alive back then living in California then a visit to a popular California beach looked like this …
I used to surf these waves back in the 1970s. Imagine today if Americans saw this everywhere they went. We do not have to worry about these unsightly pollution ridden vistas any more. Instead, being a good Empire, we consume voraciously making sure the rest of the Third World suffers the consequences. Isn't that how Empire has always worked?
Here is a beach in Nigeria today. Notice the similarities?
Empire and corruption are synonymous, always have been!
Does $60 or $120 per barrel of oil really cover the total cost of human and ecological suffering? I think the price of oil should be jacked up to $200 per barrel and the price of gasoline in America should be at $9 per gallon. Then you will see "voluntary" cuts in consumption by Americans. In stats for 2014 the price of gasoline in Norway is already at $9 and Germany is close to $7. Germany is not exactly the worst economy on Earth yet they can sustain their economy on $7 a gallon! Imagine what American citizens would say about US oil companies if the pump suddenly hit $7 for regular!! How else do you cut consumption across the board if not by price? Let us not forget also that a huge chunk of what we pay at the pump is government taxes.
Can we trust markets? Can we trust supply and demand mechanisms that seem to be influenced by governments and banks? Can we trust a Goldman Sachs Commodity Index when it is always subject to "rebalancing"? Can we trust that the government actually has the strategic oil reserves it says it has? Can we trust that those two entities will use those market intervention tools for the good of the people? If we go by track record then the answer is … NO! Any time we see politics and banking come into any equation then corruption leads the way.
Distil any corrupt government or bank down to its source and it is always the "money". The US Treasury spent $2.9TRIL in net outlays so far for FY2015 and issued $328BIL in net debt and collected around $1.5TRIL in net taxes to pay for it. When such huge sums of money flows through government and not the private sector can there really be an honest government? Whenever and wherever huge sums of money exist can the human condition be trusted? Then what sort of monetary system allows for nearly unchecked and unlimited money flows globally? Quality of debt comes into question and as two of America's largest cities go into bankruptcy with more to follow how can we say there is any sort of economic recovery unless we allow government to redefine economic prosperity to include bankruptcy. Talk about denial …
Yes, in the first world west population growth numbers are barely at replacement. But then you have to factor in immigration…
Economists are s…t scared of zero population growth because they know it's massively correlated with stagnant economic growth, once productivity increases are factored out.
People from relative 3rd world hellholes will of course want to move! I would and so would you(probably). Immigration is problematic and emotive. In Britain, I'm against it, 100%. The British Isles is 40% sufficient in food production with some of the most intensive farming techniques in the world, therefore population growth is lunacy. An effective blockade means starvation in no time. It almost happened in WW1, when the population was much lower!
Again we can argue about consumption, but we have to face the fact that we live in democracies in the first world, none but a small minority will ever vote for a lower standard of living and asking people to reduce consumption is exactly that. Therefore, it's never going to happen and it's pointless even talking about it. Our choice is coercive population control with the endpoint of a stable, sustainable reasonable standard of living or ecological Armageddon. I can't see a third option ,can you? Because it won't happen if we leave it to the people to choose, you'll always have the Duggars( reductio ad absurdam, I know…)…
Awareness is helpful and may build common consensus, no thanks to the corporate media.
The real problem lies with a global economic paradigm namely Supply Side Economics and Global Neoliberalism. The whole world economy is a form of reverse engineering of self determination by banking and monopoly transnationals.
Sadly the people have no say what type of economic system we have, it's an academic model forced on everyone leading to austerity for all but a few.
So, getting out of this is virtually impossible without the elite wanting a change. I'm afraid they're stuck in a thanatosian view of en-ending war with a flirting eye toward the BIG One.
They have gutted economy under the guise of unending growth. We have been winding down, only the people living outside the basic risk/reward rules of capitalism are growing by leaps and bounds, so they win only because they have the benefits of the military and bank manipulation.
In the meantime we want to wage war with Russia and China accusing them of land-grabbers while we continue unending war to re-make the world into a glorified trade zone with no real nation-states. The little folks get entertained by their show pony elections where they get to vote for their non-existent teams.
We have become the world destabilizers and want to drive the nail in the coffin. In the meantime the natural world is being devastated.
How about a forward reproductive rate of 0.5 (1 child per adult pair), voluntary, with heavy financial and social disincentives for more than one offspring? Not talking about anything draconian (sorry TPTB, not really into the "master cleanse")…just your financial and community life are going will get exponentially more difficult the more kids you have. Make the "subsequent offspring tax" a significant percentage of the families net worth (no loopholes! Now how to get rid of that pesky corporate veil…). The fees go directly to the local community (to help offset the local 3E impact). People seem to already be cringing at large families anyway (IMO this is not a personal ding at the members of a large family, simply a reflection of the number of offspring and the associated 3E load).
And if we actually had a culture worth half a you-know-what, maybe our kids wouldn't be so bummed about not having siblings for a few generations…if they were given the opportunity to develop real, meaningful relationships with others and nature.
The population doesn't need to stabilize, it needs to come down. Way down. One way or the other it is going to.
Nature is at the plate with her Louisville Slugger. How may times do we really want to see her swing?