The California Collection/TheCaliforniaCollection.cdr/his094/eugen_6.arj/EUGEN-6.TXT

Text File | 1989-07-01 | 5.8 KB | 110 lines

              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.

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Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University and a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service.