Working people and population control

 


Comment I made on "The Silent Victims of the GOP Health-Care Proposal," The Atlantic Monthly, March 20th, 2017: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/the-880-billion-question/520155/

 "💬💬💬: Nice point as far as it goes; I've been objecting to overpopulation on various blog threads ever since I joined Disqus. But the main reason for needy American proletarians having children is because they are proletarians, with proletarian cultural and mental habits. In this country, that means deep-seated anti-intellectualism, low- and middlebrow shallowness and lack of curiosity, and too much exposure to mass-media and advertising, which constantly praises the conventional family to the skies. These are hard-working people and they generate hundreds of billions in profits a year for their employers, a fair share of which they haven't received in at least 40 years. All the same, they're not fiscally or politically savvy, and this makes them a dead weight on our social-service system: they don't pay enough into it because they are too busy subsidizing their bosses' pool guys with all their underpaid labor; and they don't take care of it either with their time or their votes because they don't think things through enough to realize that medical care, for instance, or fresh farm-stand produce, come from enormous investments in time, effort, natural resources, and money and have to be provided for somehow. Medicaid doesn't just fall from the sky, and someone has to show them that.

"When wild young student activists like Danny "the Red" Cohn-Bendit began teaching these lessons to their European followers in the 1960's (Danny majored in sociology and read Marx), the young poor (along with their better-off compatriots) drove their fertility rates to such rock-bottom lows that soon their governments began instituting cushy family-welfare supports to get the young women to start reproducing again -- garnering a very tepid response. The boys and girls had learned their lessons almost too well; the French fertility rate has only recently rebounded to two kids per couple. But that just shows how far we and our old-country cousins have moved from each other; in those countries, the proletariat had actually developed a very well-functioning intellectual tradition of its own and therefore been in the habit of reading, thinking, and talking things over.

"And connecting the dots."

Posted by Jennifer A. Nolan


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