The Ultimate Central Planning Nightmare: How Many Kids You Can Have

The Ultimate Central Planning Nightmare: How Many Kids You Can Have

By Lawrence W. Reed

God has implanted in mankind all that is necessary to enable it to accomplish its destinies. There is a providential social physiology, as well as a providential human physiology. The social organs are constituted so as to enable them to develop harmoniously in the grand air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, and their chains, and their hooks, and their pincers! Away with their artificial methods! Away with their social laboratories, their governmental whims, their centralization, their tariffs, their universities, their State religions, their inflationary or monopolizing banks, their limitations, their restrictions, their moralizations, and their equalization by taxation! And now, after having vainly inflicted upon the social body so many systems, let them end where they ought to have begun—reject all systems, and try liberty—liberty, which is an act of faith in God and in His work — Frederic Bastiat, in The Law.

Nearly half a century ago, Beijing’s central planners thought they had come up with a solution to China’s “problem” of over-population. They imposed upon families a “one-child” policy, enforced by fines, police-state intimidation and even forced sterilizations and compulsory abortions.

Of all the boneheaded delusions human beings have suffered through, perhaps the most preposterous is what economists call “central planning.”  It suggests that a small number of elitists with power (read: guns) can tell the rest of us how best to arrange our economic and social affairs. Confident in their arrogant fantasies, its quack practitioners disfigure whole economies and wreck lives and liberties in the process. China’s one-child policy was central planning on steroids.

The results? Not pretty. Though the policy was scaled back and eventually abolished almost a decade ago, China now faces a demographic catastrophe largely because of it. The fertility rate is far below the replacement rate required to sustain a population. Earlier this year, the United Nations projected that the number of Chinese by 2100 will decline by half—from the current 1.4 billion to something under 700 million. Other projections are even more dire for the country..

How will a dwindling number of young workers be able to afford a growing burden of huge numbers of old people? Where will innovation come from if those who innovate (primarily those in their 20s and 30s) are evaporating? See this article from the BBC for similar questions posed by the burgeoning demographic crisis: https://tinyurl.com/58nt6x4a.

In just the last two years, some 36,000 preschools across China have closed. Why? There are no longer enough children to attend them. See https://tinyurl.com/2p9m739y.

The macro statistics, alarming as they are, mask the unspeakable cruelties suffered by real people in the decades of the one-child policy’ enforcement. Nicholas D. Kristof, writing in the New York Review of Books (https://tinyurl.com/mxb5ew9k) offered this chilling assessment:

Perhaps no government policy anywhere in the world affected more people in a more intimate and brutal way than China’s one-child policy. In the West, there’s a tendency to approve of it as a necessary if overzealous effort to curb China’s population growth and overcome poverty. In fact, it was unnecessary and has led to a rapid aging of China’s population that may undermine the country’s economic prospects. The scholar Wang Feng has declared the one-child policy to be China’s worst policy mistake, worse even than the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward (which led to the worst famine in world history). The one-child policy broke up families and destroyed lives on an epic scale…

The staggering decline in population, which Newsweek says is “unprecedented in the absence of war, disease or famine,” may not have been planned, but it is certainly the result of central planning, and in more ways than one. The one-child policy massively and artificially suppressed birth rates. Premier Xi Jinping is desperately offering incentives and subsidies to encourage births, but under his increasingly authoritarian rule, the Chinese people see few reasons to either get married or have offspring. If you don’t believe the future shows promise, why bring children into the world?

The largely capitalist countries of the West have witnessed falling birth rates too, but nothing like China’s. Having fewer children is what naturally happens in freedom when standards of living rise high enough, and child mortality falls low enough, so that parents don’t have to have ten kids in the hope that maybe two or three of them will survive. Central planners in 1970s China put their confidence in their own schemes to order people around, however, instead of in free people to manage their own affairs. Now the whole country is on the verge of paying a terrible price.

Left-leaning idiots in the West embraced China’s one-child policy as a bright idea. One of them, New York Times columnist and state worshiper Thomas Friedman, expressed admiration for what dictators can accomplish when they attempt to regulate population size. See this shocking 2021 article by Jacob Sullum for more on that sad story: https://tinyurl.com/2vdussa7.

Long ago, Adam Smith wrote derisively of the central planner, the “man of systems” in his words:

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chessboard have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chessboard of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. 

China’s population crisis is a man-made, central planning nightmare. The country’s lunatic authoritarians have only themselves to blame. What a shame that so many innocent people must suffer for the mistakes of those so-called “planners.”

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(Lawrence W. Reed is President Emeritus, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow, and Ron Manners Global Ambassador for Liberty at the Foundation for Economic Education in Atlanta, Georgia. He blogs at www.lawrencewreed.com.)