Gotta love HN comment section on a story such as this. People here solving math problems more than questioning the power of a government to tell people how many children they are ALLOWED to have.
I wonder if you also question the power of a government to forcibly take money from the people with no or few children and give the money to those with many children.
This (allocation per child) is a policy very frequently encountered in a large number of countries.
It is also frequent in those countries to raise the level of the allocation per child immediately before elections, which leads to quite an inflated level after many election cycles.
Unlike with China's population control policy, I have not seen any questioning of these allocation per child policies from other countries, even if in that case the state also intrudes in the individual rights by extracting money from them.
That policy also results in some kind of reverse eugenics, because the more responsible people delay having more children until having the financial means to raise them, but because they are forced to pay higher taxes they must delay even more, while some of the least responsible people choose to have as many children as possible, with the hope of sustaining the family only or mainly from the state aid.
In my opinion all kinds of potential abuse from a government must be questioned, not only those for which there exists a tradition to be criticized.
Human rights are irrelevant when they are having a drastic impact on the environment. Human reproduction is one of the most detrimental things there is for the environment.
The planet has a problem with human overpopulation. We must self-regulate as a species. Governments are good at making and enforcing regulations. China's government oversees one of the largest sectors of the human population.
We have to give some praise to China for being forward-thinking. They have recognized their role and responsibility in stopping the rampant breeding that plagues our planet. All governments need to take the same steps that China has, or the planet won't be inhabitable for much longer.
>Robert Hinrichs Bates argues that the state itself has no violent power; rather, the people hold all the power of coercion to ensure that order and other equilibriums hold up.
Ok, seems like you'd like no birth controls. Would you be willing to support the excess births in China with your own money then? As a US citizen? Because the excess births are going to put a burden on China's infrastructure and you're pushing for no birth controls.
The state (just about anywhere) can use its powers to take your property, lock you in a cage, or send you or your children off to fight and die thousands of miles from home. What's the difference?
But perhaps it would have been the right thing to do for governments to limit population growth and not let us breed our way to destruction so fast, unsustainably stripping the earth of its resources and accelerating climate change.
Personally, a one-child limit a few decades ago would have been much more tolerable than face being told in the near future that we can no longer eat meat, drive a car, or travel internationally, amongst other things.
Or maybe, perhaps there are other ways to decrease birth rates to a more sustainable level besides forced abortions and infanticide? There is not a single in country in the EU with a fertility rate above 2 (the average in 2019 was 1.54) it's higher in the US but this is mostly a result of external immigration (either directly or immigrants having more children). At least in Europe this is going to cause huge issues in the upcoming decades due to huge increases in social and healthcare expenditures coupled with a shrinking workforce.
