We Must Check Our Premises

A growing number of public officials are sounding the alarm that a decreasing birth rate in the United States could lead to a myriad of problems within a few decades. Their predictions will likely come true, unless we follow Ayn Rand’s advice and check our premises.

A senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies sums up the “problems” that will result if deaths exceed births:

Below-replacement fertility means closing schools, shrinking college enrollments, fewer workers and consumers, and not enough taxes to pay for entitlements. [bold added]

While he doesn’t explain why closing schools or lower college enrollments are something to be concerned about, he implies that this is bad. He does tell us that at some point fewer workers will mean that there isn’t enough money to pay for entitlements. This would indeed be a bad thing. But the solution isn’t public policies and programs to encourage individuals to have children. The solution is to check our premises.

The two largest entitlements—Social Security and Medicare—are massive Ponzi schemes. In a Ponzi scheme, money received from new investors is used to pay returns to earlier investors. Social Security and Medicare take money from current workers to pay benefits to earlier workers.

If we do not check our premises—question the morality and justice of Social Security and Medicare—any attempt to keep those programs solvent means enslaving future generations. It means having children for the purpose of taxing them to ensure that Social Security and Medicare remain solvent. Unless we check our premises, we will eventually hear a call to breed slaves.

We don’t need more workers to stave off this looming crisis. What we need is more freedom. We need the freedom to take responsibility for our own lives. We need the freedom to produce and trade as we judge best. We need energy freedom so energy producers can provide the cheap, abundant, and reliable energy that will be required by the machines that replace human labor. But for this to happen, we must first check our premises.