CHINA'S POPULATION CONTROLS BRUTAL, ILLOGICAL

by Thomas Sowell

 

A chilling story out of China shows the grim and brutal consequences

of grand ideological visions. In addition to the general communist

vision of a government-controlled economy and society, the so-called

People's Republic of China has also become determined to control the

number of children each family has.

One couple was fined more than they earn in a year for having two

"unauthorized" births above the officially allotted one-per-family,

according to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal.

Moreover, local communist officials stand to have their pay cut if

people under their jurisdiction have more children than the government

allows. Under these conditions, the pressures against women who want to

have more children are unrelenting.

Providing "access" to birth-control information or devices is not

the issue in China (or in most other countries). China has what

birth-control pushers really want - the ability to propagandize and

pressure people into doing what the anointed have decided needs doing.

In China, people can be furloughed from their jobs, or their pay can

be cut, for having more than the government-allotted number of children.

Dossiers are kept on every couple, and women's individual menstrual

cycles are charted in these government dossiers. Not only is Big Brother

watching you; big sister is watching even more closely. Female officials

"conduct spot checks in the home to make sure intrauterine devices are

still in place."

Ugly as all this is, it is the logical consequence of the vision of

the anointed. Once you buy the notion that the intellectually superior

and the morally anointed should take "leadership" in "public service" and

"make a difference" by using government power to force others into a

preconceived pattern, this is where that road leads.

Some may not have the stomach to follow the road that far, but this

is where it leads. Where power and glory are to be had from following

the logic of the vision, it is only a matter of time before those who are

squeamish are replaced by those who are not squeamish.

The great irony is that the anointed themselves often have no solid

basis for the draconian policies they impose on the masses. Often their

basis is nothing more than fashionable speculation mixed with ideological

fervor and blind self-righteousness. The dogma that "overpopulation"

causes poverty is a classic example.

There are sparsely populated and prosperous countries like the

United States, but Ethiopia has almost the identical number of people per

square mile as the United States and is desperately poor.

China is more densely populated and poor, but Japan and West Germany

are even more densely populated and very prosperous. Anyone who takes

the trouble to look up the statistics can find almost any population

density among either rich countries or poor countries.

It is not population but productivity that determines whether

nations are rich or poor. If there were only three people on the whole

planet, and they produced just enough for two to live on, they would be

in big trouble.

By the same token, if there were 10 times as many people as there

are today, and they produced 20 times the output, their standard of

living would be twice as high as ours. History shows that our standard

of living is far higher than people enjoyed in past ages, when the

world's population was only a fraction of what it is now.

Brutal birth-control methods, such as those in China, do not produce

as low birth-rates as those in the United States or Western Europe, where

people are free to do as they wish. But brutal methods, and the sense of

desperate urgency on which they are based, all enhance the power and the

egos of the anointed.

Even the reporter for The Wall Street Journal got sucked into the

notion that the Chinese communists are fighting some desperate battle

against "overpopulation." The predictions of "some international

demographers" are cited, along with the statistic that China had to

import about 15 million tons of grain last year.

A book could easily be filled with the history of grossly wrong

predictions by demographers. Half a century ago, the big hysteria was

that population growth in the West was so slow that economic decline

would set in - all this on the eve of a baby boom and an economic boom.

More recently Paul Ehrlich's book, "The Population Bomb," spread the

opposite hysteria of overpopulation - at a time when birth rates in the

United States were dropping so sharply that obstetricians, gynecologists

and toy manufacturers were all suffering an economic pinch.

As for importing grain, that has often happened in communist

countries whose stifling control of agriculture hurts productivity, even

when these countries have far less population density than China. But

the mindset that stifles agriculture is all too ready to believe that the

answer to its bad consequences is to stifle people.

The vision of the anointed extends far beyond communist countries,

though in other countries it has to contend with other visions, and even

its own devotees are inhibited by such things as the Judeo-Christian

tradition, in which the individual has both responsibility and rights.

But, to the extent that the vision of the anointed is pervasive - as

it is among intellectuals - we are moving further in the direction of

government control of more and more of our lives. What is happening in

China is the logical end of that process.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford

University and a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.

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