China's One Child Policy is a great policy.

[mrstickball]

The_vagabond7 said:

Yes, ending welfare would regulate population growth in low income brackets....by making mortality rates sky rocket. Poor people don't have kids because they think "Well gaw-dam, I'll just shift the burden onto tax payers to subsoodize my love of babies!" they think "fuck condoms, I can't afford birth control pills, responsibility be damned" and then pop out kiddies.

In third world countries they die of malnutrition, or disease, but in first world countries we (or at least some demographics) find wagging our finger at parents of dying children and saying "Well maybe if you weren't so dumb, little timmy wouldn't be starving to death" to be distasteful.

As a society we have to ask ourselves "At what point are we willing to let our citizenry die slow painful deaths that we as a society can prevent by being mandated to sacrifice some of our excess". For some people, that threshold is alot lower than others. Ironically the demographics with the ideology that proclaim undeserved kindess, forgiveness, and grace seem to also have a disproportionately large overlap with the group that says "It's my money, go tell your own family why you're diseased and starving. Hint: It's because you're stupid and lazy." But honestly, I see that as a result of politics and culture, rather than a result of religious belief. And that's a whole different topic.

 

Either way, removing welfare, and letting nature run it's course may be a pragmatic solution to overpopulation, however also a morally abhorrent one. Regulating child birth is unpalatable, but millions of dead, diseased, or starving children is drastically more so. Hard decisions have to be made at some point, and how we as a species handle this is going to speak volumes about how far we've come.

Just remember....I talking about government welfare. Not ending charity wholesale.

My argument is that government one-size-fits-all, top-down welfare is causing the problem, not helping the poor. Helping the poor needs to be done on an individual, private, case-by-case basis. If and when that happens, customized care can help those that are needy and are truly deserving of assistance, rather than the metric simply being set at a certain level of income multiplied by the number of children you have.

If you put it in the hands of individuals and charities that can........*gasp* discriminate against abusers of the system, you will have less people popping kids out for welfare, which will correlate to lower birth rates, and other benefits to the system.