Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

It seems that treating the American people like adults is not in vogue, on the right or left.  The Right is quickly shedding its classical liberal credentials, the ideas that animated our founding fathers, Coolidge and Reagan, and are embedded in our founding documents.  The Left is on a march to establish government as the Promethean social engineer par excellence.  Either outlook has us mired in a hell of a mess.

Take this interview with Kari Lake, Arizona Republican Senate candidate, as she panders to the mental adolescents in the Republican primary.  Two issues stand out in this foreplay of mental immaturity: Ukraine and the debt/deficit.

The debt/deficit is something that, when prompted, people express deep concern, but to be honest, nobody seems willing to do anything about it.  Republicans, led by Trump and others like Lake, are frightened away from doing anything to reform the biggest component of the federal budget, Social Security and Medicare, which by all measures is pushing the federal budget over the fiscal cliff.  Surely, Democrats salivate at the prospect of demagoguing the issue.  A reporter recently asked whether Lake agreed with Trump in opposing changes to the monster entitlements (see #1 below).  Lake answered, “I do not think we should touch them.”  Then, she goes on a hackneyed recitation of why we ought not do anything.  The “Thema and Louise” scene of the two women driving their car off the cliff keeps coming to mind.

She proposes thinking “creative” (?) and meanders on over to onshoring manufacturing jobs in the U.S. without showing much cognizance of the reasons for the flight of businesses in the first place.  Manufacturers, or anybody with a payroll for that matter, face the maw of our unions’ and politicians’ class war machine.  They’ll encounter crushing taxation, with the promise of more to come (“wealth taxes”), regulations and mandates galore, and a greenie pummeling.  What’s there not to like, eh?

We’re left mystified by the connection between a careening debt and this pandering to the AFL-CIO.  Similar befuddlement will arise when she, like much of the Trump right, dumps Ukraine into the mixing bowl with the border crisis.  What are we left to conclude?  Let Putin have Ukraine as we grapple, or fail to grapple, with our southern border?  Apparently, the world’s premiere superpower can’t simultaneously walk and chew gum, or rebuild our defense industrial base, while supporting a small country under a Putin invasion.

Okay, here’s a question for Kari Lake and her ilk: what are the consequences of a Putin conquest of Ukraine?  Wargame it, think about it beyond the half-witted musings of Candace Owens.  Don’t complain about Biden’s Kabul catastrophe when the Right is prepared to imitate him on the continent of Europe.  The previous four-century history of European autocrats, dictators, and totalitarians rampaging across the continent is not encouraging.  Of course, we could revert back to the 18th century and let the world go to hell in a handbasket, us locked away behind our oceans, and watch a chunk of our prosperity and security go down the drain as we do it.  The logic is stuck in the age of sailing ships and far removed from this era of hypersonics.

This is an age of demagogues and panderers for we are treated as children.  It is assumed that we can’t handle hard truths.  One of the most fundamental and irritating truths is, as the philosopher Richard Weaver put it, “ideas have consequences”.  He wrote an entire philosophical work on it (see #2 below).  The upshot is that we are limited by realities; there can be no “year zero”, and remake ourselves into whatever we want to be.  Misery is the result.  Adults must know this to be true, or they’re not adults, despite the age on their driver’s license.

We actually believe that we can afford something we can’t (Social Security and Medicare as currently constructed for instance).  Much of the nonsense frequently begins in the bubble of academia, or the broader chattering classes, and infects the downstream culture.  A rationale is concocted that works to keep us in our childlike status.

Right now, a move is afoot to treat pregnancy as a disease (see #3 below) so young people can remain enslaved to their youthful desires with no consequences.  Aldous Huxley wrote about it decades ago in Brave New World.  No need for responsibilities or meeting social expectations in this agenda.  The authors of a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics lay out the suicidal logic:

“We can compare pregnancy with measles.  Measles is uncontroversially regarded as a disease and treated as such by public health authorities and health professionals.  Measles is harmful to nearly all of those who catch it.  However, most patients will survive.  Very few will die, and only a small proportion will go on to experience longer term impacts on their health. [Like pregnancy.]”

Pregnancy – or ironically how the authors and everybody else got here to bag on it – is a parallel experience to measles, and should be treated like it.  How does that work, unless you’re a complete nincompoop?  All of us were a product of the “disease”.  Nothing about the biological cycle of life to see here. It’s lunacy on stilts.

Personally, I think that the writers are retroactively justifying our current efforts to birth-control ourselves to death.  No doubt about it, marriage and fertility rates are cratering (see #5 below).  Fewer people are filling the pews at the same time as fewer are heading to the altar to take their vows.  Religious observance appears to have a direct relationship with marriage and childbearing.  They follow each other in tandem.

That’s no problem to a population reared on the doctrines of the Malthusian death cult (as in Thomas Malthus, the foolish late 19th century cleric and amateur futurist).  It’s the chant of too many people, too many people, . . ..  It only makes sense at an adolescent level.  The great innovative productivity of our farms, factories, investments, and our dynamic brains, is beyond most people’s stunted comprehension, let alone a kid’s.  We are what we’ve been told over and over again, the spiel of the Malthusian death cult.  Underneath it all, though, is the blandishment to believe that marriage and children impinge on our desire to have more fun and stuff.

It’s no surprise that marriage is on the rocks; we’ve bastardized it so.  Marriage has been turned into something as binding as a handshake, or the Boy Scout oath.  What was once, by definition, a special institution for heterosexual couplings, the only kind capable of procreation, was elasticized to encompass pairings that can never, by definition, accomplish that feat.  This is different from heterosexual infertility.  Sorry, sodomy and oral sex can’t produce a child.  Do we really need to be told that?

Instead, we shift from merely the impossible to the grotesque, and H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau.  People with medical degrees can inject us with chemicals and mutilate our sexual organs in order to contradict the chromosomes throughout our body.  Think about it: an ex-man – actually a man due to chromosomes – with an artificial womb.  I’m back to Weaver’s thesis.  Are there any limiting principles to our desires?  Can reality be endlessly and radically bent with no adverse consequences?

What of the kids?  What kids?  Marriage is certainly no longer about the kids.  It’s about the adults.  Marriage of the kind that procreates is no longer a preferred component in life’s journey.  It’s an option like color in an Amazon order.  Those kids that managed to survive the gauntlet of the abortionist’s suction tube and made it to adulthood won the lottery of unending teenage wish fulfillment.  They don’t have kids either.

It shows in the numbers.  The current U.S. fertility rate hovers between 1.6 to 1.7, below the estimated 2.1 replacement rate.  The birth rate measured per thousand collapsed from 51.8 in 2007 to 37.8 last year (see #5 below).  All such numbers point in the same direction – down.  It’s a calamity in waiting.  Who’s going to be around to be taxed to bankroll the safety net?  Who’s going to be around to change the bed pans and feeding tubes?  Don’t expect the global poor to be your nursery. Importing them imports other problems.  Chief among them, the taxation of the low wages of the imported global poor is a net negative when compared to the forgone potential of higher incomes of the homegrown, leaving aside the rising costs of subsidizing the imported poor.  You just piled a fiscal problem onto a demographic one.

Reversing the trend is like stopping a descending 100-railcar freight train.  It can be done but it’s going to take a long while.  Government interventions in the realm of demography are not encouraging.  Centrally planned demography doesn’t work any better than centrally planned economics.  China’s CCP commanded a one-child policy in the late 1970s and 80s and set in motion the unintended: a lopsided population pyramid of males.  Now, as China demands to be recognized among the ranks of the international big boys, it has fewer girls to be the mothers of the next generation.  They’re in a demographic death spiral. It’s baked into the population cake unless they jump into the oven to rejigger the batter.  Good luck with that, as they try to do it.

The CCP’s answer is more centrally-planned demography to replace the now failing centrally-planned demography.  They’ve cashiered the population commissariat and abortion goon squads in every village and city and are wildly bribing the remaining female population into fertility.  In the meantime, they’re stuck with a declining population, fewer workers, and too few mothers.  How long will it be before China reverts back to its status of a failed state?

Europe is experiencing a similar demographic death spiral.  Government policies in the form of goodies and subsidies (bribes) produce lackluster results at best.  France for decades has tried through policies to reverse its death spiral (see #6 below).  Still, its birthrates hover below replacement at between 1.7 to 1.9.  The country’s fertility is better than most of Europe but they have yet to break the 2.1 threshold.  Hungary has taken the same approach and only arrested its fall.

This is not a problem conducive to remediation by government ministries.  Once attitudes and lifestyles become entrenched, the problem lies in the culture and is amazingly resistant to more spending in a few budgetary line items.  Adults have to become adults, and come to find fulfillment in a marital union of sexual compatibility (heterosexual) and family.  Today, it’s “he who dies with the most stuff wins”.

Of all people, Elon Musk may have set the record straight.  At a Wall Street Journal event he said (see #8 below), “There are not enough people.  I can’t emphasize this enough, there are not enough people.” He further added, “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble.  Mark my words.”

Could a broad immaturity, now culturally rooted, be at the core of much of what ails us?  Turning around the situation begins with the realization that there is no “something for nothing”, and that there are limits and consequences to our actions.  At one time, we were helped along the way by the traditional institutions of church, family and marriage, and free markets.  Until they are returned to their time-honored place, we are doomed to an endless cycle of failure and mediocrity, and Musk’s warning.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Kari Lake Talks ‘Difficult’ Deficit Math”, Audrey Fahlberg, National Review, 3/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kari-lake-talks-difficult-deficit-math/
2. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver, 1948 edition, Expanded edition, Kindle edition, can be acquired on Amazon, et al.
3. “Is pregnancy a disease? A normative approach”, Anna Smajdor and Joona Rasanen, Journal of Medical Ethics, at https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2024/01/28/jme-2023-109651
4. Thanks to Wesley J. Smith for bringing the issue of pregnancy as a disease to my attention: “Bioethics Journal Article: Pregnancy Equivalent to Catching the Measles”, National Review, 2/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bioethics-journal-article-pregnancy-equivalent-to-catching-the-measles/
5. “Natalism Is Not Enough”, Partick T. Brown, Ethics and Public Policy Center, in National Review Magazine, 1/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/03/natalism-is-not-enough/
6. “Fertility and Family Policies in France”, Marie-Thérèse Letablier, Journal of Population and Social Security (Population), Supplement to Volume 1, at https://www.ipss.go.jp/webj-ad/WebJournal.files/population/2003_6/9.Letablier.pdf
7. “Number of children born per woman in France from 2005 to 2020”, statista, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/746549/fertility-rate-france/#:~:text=The%20fertility%20rate%20is%20the%20average%20number%20of,children.%20This%20value%20was%20the%20lowest%20since%202005.
8. “Elon Musk says ‘civilization is going to crumble’ if people don’t have more children”, Sam Shead, CNBC, 12/7/2021, at https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-civilization-will-crumble-if-we-dont-have-more-children.html