I agree that the main reason why fertility rates decline is government interventionism. Here's
what I recently wrote on another BBS:
I could be wrong. Fertility rates are a difficult thing to influence, but here's a list of small reasons why I believe a freer society is likely to have higher fertility rates. Please address the ones you disagree with:
- The "king of my castle" psychology. People seem to be more interested in having children if they can have more control over them, and raise them to be obedient and respectful of their parents. Accomplishing this is made a lot more difficult by the over-socialization children experience in government-controlled schools: when you throw a bunch of kids together, the worst behaviors proliferate. In addition to that you have all the subtly-expressed yet very psychologically significant pressures that parents are made to feel from their government overseers: school social workers and other bureaucrats scrutinizing every detail of their parenting technique. Parenting is becoming ever-less rewarding and ever-more stressful! Children are becoming ever-less like a continuation of their parents and ever-more like little snitches for the state!
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- Absence of government-enforced feminism. I do believe that women should be 100% equal to men in their Natural Rights, but the physical and hormonal differences between the genders make some level of specialization necessary. Sure, it is possible for a woman to be a better CEO than a man, or for a man to be a better stay-at-home parent, but those cases are the exception rather than the rule. Socialist indoctrination (ex. in public schools) starts out with a noble intention to empower women, but fails to keep the realities of gender differences in perspectives. The result is a culture that believes a woman is a failure as a person if she gets married and has a large family instead of a career. Government force is further used to regulate the job market in a woman's favor.
- More efficient free market education. The one-size-fits-all government monopoly over child education wastes the children's time on an environment where they aren't really learning, and then spits them out into a world for which they were ill prepared. I've wasted the best years of my life in a part-time prison they call a school, and then I had to waste further years "unlearning" (i.e. trying to overcome all the negativity I've experienced) and then relearning everything I need to know through self-education. If instead of being forced to go to a crummy school I had spent my childhood learning in a goal-oriented self-study environment instead, not only would have my education been much cheaper but also more effective and less time-consuming as well. I'm probably not alone in this, and more efficient methods of child education that the free market would bring would result in people starting to work sooner, making more money, learning responsibility earlier and life, and, as a consequence, being ready to get married and start families a few years sooner, which would give them more time and more resources to have more children.
- More flexibility of family arrangements. In every society there tends to be more women who are interested in a stable family then men: women are less likely to choose a homosexual or uncommitted lifestyle, they tend to become interested in marriage sooner, they live longer, and so on. It is therefore natural that a society would achieve greater reproductive efficiency by tolerating occasional polygamy, where the most desirable men fill the gap by taking more than one wife. I see government-enforced monogamy as nothing more than reproductive socialism which harms the most competent to appease the jealousy of the mob! Replacing government-regulated marriage with total freedom of contract would also result in "gay marriage", surrogate mothers, multi-family communes, and other arrangements that can facilitate commitment between people and encourage raising children.
- Less anti-natalist FUD. Although for most of human history there was a strong tribal incentive to encourage people to have as many children as possible (i.e. cannon fodder), the modern-day Socialism 2.0 is now interested in culling the herd in order to make it easier to control. Ongoing population growth would naturally result in market pressures toward the discovery of new ways to acquire necessary resources, and there's a very big universe out there from which humanity can fill those needs, but that would make the population less centralized and thus less dependent on the state. Larger families also means stronger family bonds, with ever-more people belonging to new clans of economic inter-dependence that weaken the need for the state. This is why the new religions pushed by pro-government forces encourage people to only have 1 child, or to be gay, or to spend so much time worrying about their children drowning in Global Hoaxing that they never allow those children to be born in the first place.
- More room to grow. With the recent improvements in telecommunications infrastructure, and the transportation improvements like flying cars that would have been commonplace by now in absence of government interventionism in the marketplace (artificial limits to a free market in energy, trillion-dollar wars for oil, etc) the need for people to live crammed together around densely populated urban centers continues to decline. Cities have always been a government-driven phenomenon, reflecting the centralization imposed through government force, from the royal courts of the past to the urban subsidies and zoning laws of the modern day. Given a 100% free market-driven growth in transportation and land use, a lot more people would choose to live in less densely populated areas, with more privacy, more family-oriented culture, and more room for children to play and grow.
But simply getting the government out of the way does not guarantee the restoration of family values, the damage is already done. Furthermore, there's also the dysgenic effect: a civilization where people like Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Ian Freeman, Dale Everett, Gardner Goldsmith, and the like had or are intent on having 0 children while some Saudi polygamist can have 70 is not a civilization that will maintain a culture of liberty for long!
Simply reducing the cost and the psychological barriers to having children is not enough, children must be seen as an asset that enriches a person's life in specific and tangible ways. What we are discovering now is that our understanding of Natural Rights is flawed, because while correctly recognizing the need to encourage individuals to pull their materialistic weight (i.e. property rights), it fails to recognize the need to sufficiently encourage them to pull their demographic weight, which is what the concept of Parents' Rights is all about!