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Comment by huytersd | Hacker News Reader

It’s an authoritarian state. They could actually just effectively mandate that each woman has to have two kids if medically possible.

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I don't think it's that easy. To borrow a quote: "too simple, sometimes naive."

It is that easy. Why wouldn’t it be? It would be as simple as extra taxation if you don’t have two kids.

As a man, I'm not capable of having kids, so it seems a bit unfair to me.

Sure, the law accounts for medical problems in both parties. That’s just pedantic though.

There is no medical problem and there is no other party; as a man, I'm not capable of making children, no matter how much of a tax penalty you apply to me.

It applies to families obviously. Like the tax code for the one child policy, there’s precedent for this.

Well, if you want less family formation, then taxing it seems like a good start, but I think contrary to the goal here being discussed here.

I've kind of been down this thread a bit and I think heavy taxes on birth control might be the intervention that a pro-natalist authoritarian government might go for. Reading the article, it does sound like China is trying to tweak these levers. But at the end of the day, if you don't have a society that women are interested in raising children in, then I think it's just going to be very difficult.

That's the obvious thing they'd want to do, but the thing is.. we're talking about human beings here. What are the unintended consequences of this policy? Could this cause discontent that could threaten the existence of the CCP? etc etc

We can't forget that the only reason we're in this mess is because of the success of the one child policy, but could the CCP replicate this success when it comes to nudging families to have even more burdens? I don't think so.

The CCP really don't want another Tienanmen Square and bend to public opinion when necessary, e.g. the ending of lockdown. Given that a lot of Chinese women feel strongly about this, their government can still prod them a bit, but too much pressure would damage the broader legitimacy of the system.

Would it? In a society that heavily biases men and within which men outnumber women by a massive number? Surely more than enough dudes would think, even if they'd never sniff the possibility themselves, that such an act would be "setting things right". We see such an action from a distance with respect to "alpha male" social media content in the US, most guys consuming it won't come close to the opportunities it dangles at the end of the rainbow but that don't stop them from endorsing the implied ideas in such content.

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