America’s birth rate is too low, just like the rest of the West. And now we’re being told the solution to all of this is — you won’t believe it — more government involvement.
It is true that America’s birth rate is too low. We are well below the replacement rate in the United States. We’re doing better than most of Europe, but it’s still too low. The birth rate of virtually all industrialized countries is below the replacement rate, with one exception: Israel.
Because we are not producing enough children, we have a migration crisis, a consequence of needing people to fill jobs and pay the taxes that fund our future obligations. We are also headed toward national bankruptcy.
We spent all of the money borrowing on a future that doesn’t exist, and then we imported entire swaths of humans from other parts of the world where they don’t have fertility rate problems.
How do we reverse that trend? According to many people on both the Right and the Left, the answer is the government. Never mind that government policies have exacerbated the problems of family non-formation and the lack of childbearing at virtually every step imaginable.
The federal government has promoted birth control and abortion, disincentivized marriage, and at every turn removed all economic benefits of being involved in social fabric-building activities like church. Government policies have torn apart the systems that cause people to have children.
Yet the answer to people not having babies, according to these folks, is for the government to pay you to have more babies.
The New York Times reported:
The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions. The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children.
Where is the money coming from? Apparently, they’re going to use an HHS fund created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford childcare so they can go to work or school.
Let’s agree that we need more married couples having more babies in America.
Then we should ask a couple of questions. Is it the government’s role to promote this? Will this policy actually work?
Let’s start with the basics. Not all forms of government are the same. The jobs of the federal government and your local government are not the same.
Everyone likes to ignore this. The Constitution is written the way that it is for a reason. Every amendment to the Constitution is a restriction on the power of the federal government; it doesn’t have to do with state government.
For example, the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. It says nothing about what state or local governments can do; it says only what Congress cannot do, because the Founders understood Montesquieu, and they understood that there’s a lot you can do at the local community level that they shouldn’t be doing at the federal level.
That is why criminal law is typically local. If you commit a murder, you will be prosecuted by the state, not by the federal government, because it’s not the job of the federal government to be involved.
Different levels of government do different things, which is important when it comes to policies like this one. So if you, in your neighborhood, want to facilitate the common good by voting for subsidies to new moms, I don’t see any problem with that at all. I know a lot of communities that do this sort of stuff, even on a private level, just as my own Jewish community does. Some cities have a quasi-tax as part of synagogue membership that subsidizes childhood education. That’s all consensual. It makes perfect sense. People are buying into it.
But local governments and communities are not the same as the federal government. The federal government was designed in order to protect particular rights and prevent particular abuses.
It is a government of enumerated powers and limited jurisdiction. It was never instituted for the purpose of generally promoting “the common good.”
That’s because the bigger the polity gets, the bigger the area and population you’re governing, the less agreement there is on what the common good actually constitutes, which is why the federal government, traditionally speaking, has handled things like border policy, federal defense policy, and national debt issues. Those were things the federal government was designed to do.
But when it came to local stuff, you could have much more intrusive government at the local level. You just didn’t need it as much.
This is the paradox of government. Where social fabric is high, government is more appropriate because there’s broader agreement, but government is also significantly less necessary because everybody agrees on the standard without government involvement.
The more you abstract up the chain, the higher the level of government, the less agreement there is. Thus, the heavier the hand of government necessary to promote a particular vision of the common good, the less legitimate that vision is, because fewer people agree.
Some politicians seem to think the federal government has the generalized capacity to promote the common good. The problem is that there is no limiting principle in a democracy once you say that the federal government is here to promote the common good without defining the common good.
The Left is promoting its version of the common good with the gigantic government gun.
Furthermore, many of the people pushing this policy are making a category error. They think that people not having babies can be fixed by material circumstances, that if they point the government gun at you or the money hose of the government, this will make things better.
But the problem, as religious people should know, is not a lack of government subsidies.
It is a lack of social fabric, patriotism, and spiritual preparedness for having kids. That is the reason people are having kids in religious communities. Religious Catholics are still having tons of kids; Mormons are having tons of kids; Orthodox Jews are having tons of kids; evangelical Protestants are having a lot of kids.
The problem will not be solved by throwing money at people.
There is an argument being made that this is the best we can do, that we’re not going to be able to dismantle the welfare state. Thus, we should use the power of the ring for our own good. It is a gift. We should wield it.
What’s funny about this is that many of the same people promoting pragmatism in government here are utterly unpragmatic about how government actually works and where the votes are right now. They are also utterly unpragmatic about the fact that when you maximize the size and scope of government, eventually you will lose, and all the people you hate will control that government.
They think it’s a good idea. But it isn’t actually a good idea, because when you expand the size and scope of the federal government, if you think that you can wield the ring of power, usually the next one to wield it is Gollum.
This takes us to the second question: Will this policy work? Government, historically, has done a terrible job of incentivizing childbearing. Government policies have radically undermined the kinship network. One of the things that allows you to have lots of kids, as in my own personal life, is having family, grandparents, and a lot of friends nearby.
If my nieces and nephews step out of line, I’ll tell them to cut it out. The same is true of my kids with their uncles and aunts, and certainly of my parents and my wife’s parents.
All of the government’s policies have been designed to eviscerate that kinship network in favor of the government doing the job, and the government can’t do the job. Grandparents used to move in with the kids as they aged. The purpose wasn’t just to take care of grandpa and grandma. It was also because grandpa and grandma helped take care of the grandkids.
Social Security basically took that away. So now grandma and grandpa have money from the government, and mom and dad, because they didn’t feel the need to take care of grandma and grandpa, shuttled them off to a retirement community or retirement home. And so the entire kinship network breaks down.
Welfare undermined marriage. The entire welfare state was designed to alleviate the consequences of making poor life decisions. If you got pregnant out of wedlock — we’re not talking about cases of rape or something like that — large-scale welfare was designed to alleviate the consequences of single motherhood.
People had babies because the economic consequences of having a baby weren’t as dire. Subsidies for things like college and birth control delayed both marriage and childbearing. Government subsidies for things like childcare drove childcare costs up.
There is a magic formula for not having babies.
Reason #1: High use of birth control. Birth control is the one medical intervention that has achieved many Leftist goals because the birth control pill was designed to separate sex from childbearing.
This is not to say that no one should ever use the birth control pill, or that people should never be on birth control; that’s your business. We live in a free country.
But the birth control pill, which separated sex from childbearing, which meant sex and marriage were no longer connected, separated all this stuff. So now people could have fun, and there would be no consequences.
You can say that’s a good thing, but one consequence was fewer marriages and fewer kids. In the 1940s, when people were having lots of seven-month babies, they’d get married. I understand everybody now pretends that was a horrible, terrible thing. But that’s how pretty much all human society worked for several thousand years, and it wasn’t the end of the world.
Reason #2: High levels of economic development. As societies get richer, kids move from being an asset class to an economic drain.
If you lived in a poor society in America 150 years ago and were on a farm, your kids came home and worked. Many stories describe 17-year-olds entering the workforce to help support the family. The idea was to have lots of kids, because some of them would die when they were young, and the ones who were left over were going to help work the farm.
But now children are not actually contributing to your household, economically speaking.
They’re now a net cost. Kids are very expensive; it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise your kids. They go from being a net economic benefit to a net economic cost that changes the economic structure.
Reason #3: Finally and most importantly, there has been a decline in religion and civic nationalism.
When people believe that there is a religious duty to have kids, they have kids. When people believe part of their patriotic duty is to provide a next generation of patriots, they have kids.
Now notice something common to all these factors and why people who used to have kids no longer have kids. You used to have kids because you needed labor, and you used to have kids because God said so, and because your country needed it. Those were all necessities.
And then we got rid of the necessities, and people decided not to have kids.
People don’t have kids because they don’t have to have kids.
Which is why a revival of faith and patriotism is a necessary prerequisite for our survival.
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