Reading this made me think a lot about "Brave New World". The beginning of the book triumphantly describes the conditioning of newborns to optimize economic contribution. A really good but dark read.
However, the idea of making the state responsible for reproduction and child-rearing is promising, considering how awful so many parents are, and the fact that economically comfortable people generally don't have enough kids to maintain the population.
I've seen some out-there political opinions on HN, but I never thought I'd see someone calling a totalitarian eugenics program "promising".
And that's not hyperbole. "Making the state responsible for reproduction" necessarily means them deciding who can and can't reproduce, which is literally eugenics.
The only alternative plan I can think of is to hope that anti-aging treatments advance enough so that people live much, much longer lives, thus greatly reducing the need for replacement people (instead of increasing the birth rate, decrease the death rate). But this is just sci-fi at this point.
As a hypothetical situation, imagine that, for some strange reason, all immigration between countries was suddenly stopped magically, so they had to either come up with some new solution to get people to have more kids, or face population decline and the economic problems that come with that. What's your solution to this? Forcing citizens to have more children at gunpoint sounds a lot worse than having the state create and raise children (which, BTW, does not necessarily mean that private individuals/couples are prevented from having their own children; I never advocated preventing people from reproducing).
In the US, the population is only growing because of immigration, not from Catholics. To be fair, they're a big contributor, so the demographics are shifting in their favor, but if it weren't for immigration, our population would not be growing I'm pretty sure. And Mormons, while they have a bunch of kids, are still a very small portion of the overall population.
If they keep having a bunch of kids, and the rest of America doesn’t, they won’t stay a very small portion of the overall population forever.
Also, I've worked with and known Mormons, and I've never known them to be huge kid-producers, so I'm questioning this assumption. They have more kids than the current white American average AFAICT, but not hugely so. They tend to be higher income and put a lot of energy and resources into their kids; you can't do that and have 10 kids. In general, it's low-education people who have tons of kids. Mormons are not like this; they're generally very well educated.
I don't have one; just the principle that the government deciding who can reproduce is wrong. There are many problems that could be solved by killing or imprisoning large swarthes of the population, but we don't do that, because it's wrong on principle.
>state create and raise children (which, BTW, does not necessarily mean that private individuals/couples are prevented from having their own children; I never advocated preventing people from reproducing)
OK, between saying "considering how awful so many parents are" and "economically comfortable people generally don't have enough kids", it really sounded like you were saying "the poors shouldn't be able to reproduce". I'm sorry if that's not the case. But still, how do you "create children"? We can't grow them in vats, so it would necessarily mean the state selecting people to carry them, and again, that selection would be eugenics.