ho would have thought that not having children would be best the way to prevent
America from turning socialist?
For years people have been accusing childless baby boomers of selfishness. They're too caught up in materialism, it was said, to bother having children. Now we know the truth: they were protecting us from socialism.
We can't blame the millennials for liking Bernie Sanders. When you're young it's in your interest to demand free stuff. If you're stuck in a run-down apartment with no job prospects it sounds like a good idea for the government to force rich people to give you some of their money and force companies to give you a job. Maybe it would be nice, too, to have a law that says you can't get fired and another law that says you have a right to free health care and free food. Why not?
Back in the good old days, I was one of those kids who just sat in the back of class reading library books instead of paying attention. Back in ’nem days, the government tried, as they do today, to convince us they were a benevolent force. Some were skeptical, afraid of being sent to Vietnam. I thought (as I still do) there was a good case to make for Vietnam being a heroic war, part of our geostrategic struggle for liberty, but the other kids just called me a dorkface. They had picked up on what the news media were saying, and assumed it was normal.
Maybe the government was benevolent. If so it didn't help. Government is an immutable force, like gravity, that deforms everything in its path. Bungling is the natural state for government. As the commercial says, if you're a government, it's what you do. We'd be better off with less.
The great libertarian thinkers—Hayek, Nozick, Bastiat, von Mises, and Albert Jay Nock—all knew this. It was the federal government that turned the Great Depression from a glitch into a catastrophe. Now they're trashing our currency and fueling movements whose idea of progress is to murder cops. Thanks to the government, blacks and whites once again mistrust each other. And we have stagdeflation, just like Japan.
The federal government was never supposed to interact with citizens at all. Its original purpose was to resolve disputes between the states and to deal with foreigners. But only 70 years after the Constitution was ratified the Feds were powerful enough to fight a war against half the states. They've gotten even stronger since.
We were supposed to be independent states joined together in a loose federation, and the Feds' job was to keep them from fighting each other. We were supposed to be a cauldron whereby the states would compete with each other to see which combination of ideas would give us greater wealth and opportunity. Then the other states would copy those ideas and get rich.
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