China’s one-child policy: Unintended consequences on a grand scale

By David McElroy · July 12, 2011

Some people oppose the state because of the evil intentions of the people with power. I’m worried about something far worse and far more common. I’m worried about the unintended consequences of those with good intentions.

In the ’70s, pretty much everyone agreed that overpopulation was one of the top problems in the world, especially for fast-growing poor nations such as China. Trendy U.S. environmentalists such as Paul Ehrlich were saying alarming things about the inevitable mass starvation coming just any day now. In his book, “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich made predictions which were staggeringly wrong, including this:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….

Although Ehrlich and his apologists remain unrepentant about his repeated wrong predictions, one group of people who listened to the same argument and decided to act. The communist government of mainland China enacted a draconian law to slow down population growth — complete with propaganda posters such as the one above, exhorting the people to “implement the basic national policy.” (If you’d like to know more about “experts” such as Ehrlich and why their predictions, I recommend Dan Gardner’s book, “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail — and Why We Believe Them Anyway.”)

China’s leaders weren’t worried about the environmental effects of having more children. They were simply worried that their socialist economy wouldn’t be able to keep feeding more people. It’s interesting to note that the slow turn toward some forms of a market economy started at the same time the one-child policy did. The market reforms weren’t because the benevolent communist government wanted to give the people more economic freedom. Instead, they worried that a continuation of their socialist economic system would bring starvation and drive them from power. (You can read much more about the history and effects of China’s child policy here.)

So if you don’t allow people choice in family size — taking babies from mothers and forcing sterilizations for those who resisted — you’re going to cut the number of children being born. But what China’s dictators didn’t take into account was that this shrinking young population was going to become a nightmare as the existing population started aging. All over the developing world today — whether in China or in places that didn’t enact its draconian policies — we’re seeing a graying population and declining birthrate.

There was a massive human rights cost to the policy, but we’re now starting to see the unintended economic consequences. China is facing a worsening labor shortage, which is ironic since the government went to such great lengths 20 to 30 years ago to make sure the workers needed today were not born.

You can read about the Chinese labor shortage here, here, here or here, among many sources. The news is all over the place.

So does this just say we need better and smarter planners? No. It says that we have to fear the good intentions of central planners. The central fallacy of the state is the notion that someone at the top can control things better than the aggregate result of people making decisions for themselves. My favorite quote from F.A. Hayek sums up what he had learned of what planning was capable of achieving for societies:

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

(I got the quote from economist Russ Roberts of the EconTalk podcast, who quotes it frequently. I highly suggest you subscribe and listen to this informative and entertaining weekly podcast.)

Some people are terrified of the alleged secret plots of the “Bilderbergers” and others who have a conspiracy for a “new world order” where the little people are rounded up into FEMA camps and foreign troops roam the United States and black helicopters from the UN patrol our skies. I don’t believe in any of that. I think it’s completely without foundation.

But whether you believe in conspiracies from wealthy European families or little green men coming down from the Mothership to enslave us, all you have to know is that top-down planning is doomed to fail. In a contest between a controlled system and a free system — in which people are allowed to make their own decisions and benefit from those decisions — the free system is going to win in the long run.

I don’t think we have much to fear from people with truly evil motives. I fear the people with good intentions who believe that if we will simply hand power to them — through a majoritarian process — they will “fix everything.” It can’t work. It’s never going to work.

We need an alternative. The state is going to collapse. It’s time to prepare for a post-statist world. It’s coming.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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