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.
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.
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.
For more info, see http://www.vhemt.org/.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
>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.
Should we be discussing this?
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.
*https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00199/defa...