We can take that power back, because every child’s right to the things they need – like having a voice that matters and is heard in their democracies – comes first, and overrides any authority those above us claim.
Funding every child’s right to a fair start in life – over competing rights – is the most just and effective solution to the many crises we face today.
Any day that any person or organization does not start their work by shifting wealth to its obligation to fund a fair start in life for every child is a day we undo our work.
The same poor family planning modeling that ensured mass child abuse and neglect, an endless gap between rich and poor, and the ecological crises we face today also diluted each citizen’s role in their political system. Over time that modeling replaced empowered citizens with disempowered consumers. This influential primer spells out how each of our voices matters less as overcrowding worsens.
Current and near universal systems of family planning make no connection between the creation of persons, and their democratic empowerment. This is not necessarily about population, in the traditional sense.
Fact: If the legitimacy of governance derives from the people governed, then consensual governance requires family reforms that would allow the intergenerational and constructive consent of those born, account for how growth reduces the ability of each person to consent to governance by others, and protect an ecological baseline premised on the absence of human power – thereby enabling consent.
At this point, in many democracies, the average individual voice and vote have been diluted to meaningless by growth. In many democracies, like the United States, it is so crowded that it’s actually irrational to vote.
Here is a recent study on the issue. Imagine trying to assemble a constitutional convention in the United States today. Our size alone would preclude a functional system, and yet the legitimacy of our political system is premised on that capacity. One of the best attempts to refute the rule that democracy is inverse to population size proved the rule because the authors had to define democracy so narrowly (as the reduced chance of a faction taking power) to the point of undercutting its fundamental value to try to even make the argument.
Fact: Each member’s role in a democracy is, cetus paribus, inverse to the size of that democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract 50-51 (Donald A. Cress ed. & trans., Hackett 1987) (1762);
Our current family planning policies, which encourage economic growth irrespective of individual levels of child welfare, fair starts in life, and environmental consequences, have made things worse. The United States is a largely unrepresentative democracy where family planning policies are designed to create large future populations of consumers, workers, and taxpayers, rather than a sustainable number citizens capable of collective self rule. They create people for shopping malls, not town halls.
Fact: To bring the United States representative ratio in line with that which existed at the country’s founding, the House of Representatives would need to balloon to a whopping 5,697 members, or nearly double that of the largest national legislature in the world: China’s National People’s Congress, with 2,980 members. DeSilver, D. (2018).
Is there a solution?
Functional democracies require highly developed citizens, which requires improving birth conditions and seriously investing time, love, and resources into every child born.
There is no way around this. The Children’s Rights Convention was designed to protect human rights that are specific to children, and ensure children’s development. But there have been no serious efforts to link the Convention to better family planning, and actually ensure the Convention’s intended outcomes. We do not apply the Convention upstream, to ensure children are born in sufficient conditions. Because we never never accounted for the role poor family planning plays in creating massive inequality and differences in opportunities in life, we failed to ensure human rights and minimum standards of welfare and equality for children. And as a result, we never ensured that adults become sufficiently developed to engage in the self-rule of true democracy. Without the requisite safeguard of ensuring serious childhood development, world population has exploded and created a negative feedback loop making it harder and harder to create systems of human rights and democracy. Today the average individual has little or no power over the government, their voices are lost in the crowd, and wealthy persons and corporations have significant control over our lives.
We can fix these mistakes.
We can apply serious child welfare requirements, like the Convention, to family planning systems by making those systems more cooperative, with parents working with their communities to bring children into the best conditions possible. That sort of working together embodies a real social contract, one that brings reasonable people on the left and right together, and ensures every child gets a fair start in life and a chance to become an empowered and accountable citizen. This is a social contract that eliminates unearned benefits and undemocratic influence, which reasonable people on both sides should oppose.
By starting at the source, and using Fair Start family planning to decentralize concentrations of power, including governments, large corporations, and wealthy families and individuals, we can shift resources to empower and free future children.
Our being free and equal persons involves whether we first treat the capacity for each person’s self-determination as directly inverse to population growth to the addition of other equally empowered people, relative to a neutral baseline such as the nonhuman world. In other words, while many would reasonably trade off the relative self-determination of living alone in the wilds and accept societies with growing populations because of the benefits they bring, they would only do so up to point, rather than losing one’s role in the democratic control of their society. Free people will always act to preserve their equal role, their mattering politically, in the process. In such a dynamic, each person is politically empowered, and empowered equally, such that all groups are arcing down towards optimal and ecocentric population sizes. If people are empowered equally and thus matter politically this direct inversion, relative to neutral position that makes the concept of self-determination coherent, is inevitable. This inversion is crucial, and consistent with the need to invest equitably in each child so that they are empowered parts of functional democracies.
The first reason persons would be obligated to follow laws is if the legal system intentionally includes, and reflects the will, of its constituents. This test determines whether systems are doing that.
Wealthy and powerful thought leaders support growth because they also know their power is not going to be offset by the addition of new empowered citizens who matter equally. If anything, the average person born today is likely to simply become a consumer, worker, taxpayer, soldier, etc. in systems over which they have no democratic control, and which mostly benefit others. These top-down economic systems are backed by the coercive power of the state, the threat of violence, that defends state-created property rights. Under our test above such people are not living freely and equally, because they are not politically empowered.
Many in leadership at public interest organizations face a unique conflict of interest.
They will be interacting with funders who want the organizations to undercut their missions by ignoring growth and inequity, and the exponentially greater impact children entering the world without the necessary resources on any given day have on the organizations’ claims and missions than the organizations’ individual efforts have.
The organizations can undercut their own work by making choices that exacerbate child inequity, and through impact fraud, i.e. making of claims of ogress that ignore the key context. It can also do much greater harm.
Climate and related reparations have to be paid out relative to metric or baseline that measures the damages, and in some cases specifies how the funds are to be used. The baseline commonly used today is the same one that caused the climate crisis, elevating the freedom of current generations over future ones. Moving to a new baseline will save countless innocent lives.
But it requires an accurate picture of costs and benefits. Impact fraud, like claiming to benefit children while backing policies that ensure more children are born into insufficient conditions than the charity actually benefits, clouds the picture.
Ignoring key context, in claims and in organizational programming, creates legal liability. The climate crisis is driven by large environmental organizations that for decades engaged in this fraud, and now millions are dying from the standards the fraud hid and the misconduct it encouraged. Many of those in leadership carry serious liability.
Why the Entry of Children Into the World Matters Most
Systems ensuring children entering the world as such – without share equity entitlements – degraded your ecological and social self-determination, and that of the children born, because the systems are using the children for economic growth rather than treating them as the constituents of democracy.
Nations cannot legitimately assign entitlements without continuously constituting themselves in way the measurably empowers each citizen. It’s called share equity – which again is like equity in a company, where you have a measurably equal and influential role in outcomes.But right now most nations treat their constituents as economic inputs, consumers and workers designed for growth, rather than citizens with an equal and effective voice in their political systems. Governments take a share of wealth in the form of taxes, rather than justly entitling it first to ensuring the entry threshold for children.
Many involved in Fair Start work were paid by their employers to omit from public statements how growth was undoing the claimed benefits, and enriching mostly white children at deadly cost to black children.
These employers were often funded by interests that benefitted from growth.
Because leaders at the organizations have the unique ability to conceal this undercutting, because they benefit substantially more than the least compensated employees, as well as the volunteers, of the organization, and because they will control the funding being offered, leaders face a special conflict of interest.
Those at the bottom of the hierarchy , who do not face this conflict and are truly aligned with the mission, have a responsibility to police those at the top of the hierarchy. This is an ongoing process that currently involves whistleblowers at several organizations based in the United States, including several facing retaliation for attempts to unionize and be formally empowered to avoid the fraud. Those continuing the fundamental deceit that created the climate crisis are a threat to all of our futures.
Is it worth the effort to remove corrupt leadership in order to ensure organizational integrity, impact and to save countless lives by ensuring legal entitlements? Many think so.
TAKE ACTION: If you see impact fraud at an organization you are affiliated with, contact Info@fairstartmovement.org and we will refer you to competent legal counsel.
Reason One: Extreme concentrations of wealth and power were made at cost to your, and your kids’, freedom – as well as our national security.
How? That money was made mostly through unsustainable growth policies that filled the world with dangerous people in order to make money on them, people who came from dysfunctional homes and never got what they needed growing up because we never had to assure their rights as children. More people, who did not trust one another, meant bigger government and less of a say for each.
A nation is not some abstract idea – it is first and foremost the quantity and quality of those in it. And free people will only follow laws in systems in which they were empowered with political control, with a meaningful voice in making the laws. Many disregard the authority of politicians for the same good reason they disregard the authority of bosses in large companies – because those at the top represent so many, and with such different interests, they do not and cannot really represent you.
Why is your right to bear arms – your freedom to own a gun – threatened? Mass shootings mean the average American cannot be trusted with guns. Where did these shooters come from? If you cant trust those around you with guns why would you trust them with your democracy?
Why does the average American have a vote that is pretty much worthless, diluted by growth? Why is your access to places like national parks so regulated and threatened, as you wait hours in line? Where does immigration originate from?
If we can do these things, we can be a people with a certain idea of America, of certain unalienable rights, to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle us. But we cannot be a nation, conceived in liberty, without a land in which nature thrives.
Those at the border do not fall from the sky – and the best research treats growth as the key driver of threats to national security. These same growth policies have been used abroad to create those coming to the United States. Billions were made by creating billions of people, who now threaten our future – and your kids’ future – at home and abroad.
Many in the generations that came before died to defend democracy – town halls where we trusted one another. They did not die to ensure economic growth for a nation of consumers in shopping malls, run by far off boards and bureaucrats who leech the wealth.
To the extent wealth made can be used to rebuild democracy – long run – by funding responsible parenting, we deserve to take and use it as such. Doing so is defending freedom – just in a more complex way than we are used to. For truly free persons who wish to orient their lives based on a system of being empowered with share equity rather than living under extreme wealth entitlements made via inequity, backed by state violence that cannot be justified, there is no obligation that comes before ensuring the thresholds for being and development, described below. Doing so constitutes freedom at the first border of power, a border that overrides and precedes national borders. We owe our first obligations to the governed, and the future majority, and never the government which has no inherent authority – especially not to protect concentrations of wealth and power, and those that lie for them.
Need a more concrete reason to act?
Reason Two: One of those costs is horrific child neglect and abuse, and we can end it.
Guess who really suffers from growth policies based on not ensuring good homes for all kids? Five children die, often tortured to death, and the hands of their parents in the United States each day,
Child abuse and neglect are common. At least one in seven children experienced child abuse or neglect in the past year in the United States. This is likely an underestimate because many cases are unreported. In 2021, 1,820 children died of abuse and neglect in the United States.
Children living in poverty experience more abuse and neglect. Experiencing poverty can place a lot of stress on families, which may increase the risk for child abuse and neglect. Rates of child abuse and neglect are five times higher for children in families with low socioeconomic status compared to families with a higher socioeconomic status.
Child maltreatment is costly. In the United States, the total lifetime economic burden associated with child abuse and neglect was about $592 billion in 2018.5 This economic burden rivals the cost of other high-profile public health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes.
Photo by JPagetRF Photos/BigStock
No child should be born to parents who are not ready to do a good job. And we can ensure that, through things like financial incentives that pay would-be parents to wait, and show readiness. It works – and we know where those who should fund it live. Why would we not make the wealthy, who benefitted from poor family planning policies and growth, not pay to end it? Why should kids suffer to enrich a few? Halting the torture of children justifies action.
TAKE ACTION: There is a move before the United Nations to make national sovereignty and authority fully contingent on making each citizen a sovereign, or self-determining, using measurable outcomes. This is the core of freedom and democracy, and it would authorize targeting concentrations of extreme wealth for the freedom they took from us, and our kids. Back that move by sharing the link above, and demanding the UN act.
A phrase like “false premise” sounds like philosophy talk, and hardly relevant to our day to day life. But all it really means is that someone is making an argument, or doing something, which they would justify by referring to something that is not true.
The premise we all live under is that we are obligated do certain things, like follow the law because we are included in legitimate systems of governance that empower each of us. The premise is that there is a legitimate/obligatory “we” (one that creates oughtness) from which we all think and act.
It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” from which to live our lives until we change these facts because without a change we start by exploiting and thereby harming, rather than empowering in a way that is measurable with clear benchmarks, others. It is a false premise that there is a obligatory “we” if we start with zero actual protections for infants and animals, and zero actual protections is the case in our legal system today, almost universally.
Ask anyone what policy they are using to functionally protect children as they would enter the world – using a metric like equity for example, and thus indirectly protect the animals humans would otherwise consume. They will have no real answer because to ensure that protection would require obligating would-be parents to plan in specific ways, something that is widely considered forbidden because of an obscure policy mistake by the United Nations between 1948 and 1968.
Fact: The contributions of those who ignore their false premise, like many academics working on population ethics, began with them being born into a coercive legal system of entitlements from which they benefitted at deadly cost to others. That system, the dominant system controlling our actions because it alone is meant to be inclusive and reflective of its subjects, never was because of the falsity described here.
Actual inclusion and empowerment is what creates value and choices in the world. Growth, without minimum levels for those born with nothing, only benefits those who want cheap labor, lots of consumer demand, and a bigger tax base. There is no obligation without including those subject to the obligation, equitably, in the process. No reasonable person would start with that “ought” because constitutions do not start with the exploitation of their constituents, and the loss3 of self-determination. You can see this all around you. How much do you trust those with whom you share the world? And could that have been different had there been different family planning policies in place to give kids what they actually needed – the beginning of justice, where common good is aligned?
Instead governments could reverse this harm with one simple change at the United Nations – using child-rights as their basis for legitimacy, and funding birth equity level family planning entitlements as the priority climate reparations so that women have children at a time, place, and with resources that ensure those children thrive. A legitimate remise, an obligatory we, would start with minimum thresholds of personal welfare, expecting equal access to opportunities, participating in and adhering to political/legal systems that purported to represent the governed through birth and development conditions that ensure a role in making the law and and protecting the capacity for each to choose who has influence (including climatologically) or power over them, using and enjoying an environment relatively conducive to human and nonhuman health, enjoying a right to have a child in relatively safe conditions, etc. Consumers do not need to be emancipated in this way. Citizens do.
And what this means is that processes that would make us a “we” – like an AI managed system of social credit designed around prioritizing resource distribution for birth equity – override those that do not. That process would have more justification for leaning on holdouts than the government, which should become a function of this process, would have to block it. We might begin this process in the animal law/rights and children’s rights movements, where the false premise has had done the most harm and contradicted the things we said we value. Our generations can’t get the benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to target us for strict liability reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them.
What is an example of the #ImpactFraud mentioned above? Many animal or child welfare organizations claiming to do good start from a fundamental policy position with zero actual protections for infants and animals (the false premise), and in a way that undoes the values they claim to further. I was paid to omit the fundamental policies that were undoing the claims I made as an animal lawyer – and by those who wanted to take advantage of growth. I have lived the lies of people and institutions reacting to climate reparations liability by trying to hide that liability, deny their role, reduce the standard, etc.
Free people feel obligated to follow the law because their legal system first empowered them – through birth and development conditions, with with a role in making the law and and thus ensuring the capacity for each to choose who has influence (including climatologically) or power over them. That is the core of legitimacy, or the creation of fundamental power relations that look more like a town hall of citizens than a shopping mall of workers and consumers controlled by owners. By definition, freedom among equals first means birth and development against ecocentric or natural ecologies in conditions that ensure equity of opportunity and an influential voice in deciding – and thus legitimating – the rules under which one must live.
Such a change would ensure that we do not benefit from a system at deadly cost to others, a fact that have driven some to desperate acts.
And because being free in this sense is constitutive, or comes first, those women would have a claim to such resources that overrides the existing property rights to extreme wealth that was made at cost to future generations. The policies that would keep this wealth in place are illegitimate governance because our generations can’t get the benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to violently target us for reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them – starting with children’s rights. Expecting to benefit from others without paying the costs of freedom – truly investing in kids – is proceeding from a false premise.
If a young mother were charged with trespassing in making the demand for birth equity reparations, could she challenge it – and expect a jury to side with her – because the state cannot limit access to property without first empowering (actually or physically constituting) its people to be involved in the making of such property rules, i.e. empowering them through just the sort of constitutive discourse in which she seeks to engage? How do we every get to governance by the people without elevating her pre-political right above the process-based rule of trespass? Do we really choose to constitute our relations via top-down force in a system run by men, versus a system of bottom-up empowerment run by women, via the act of care? Her act would be fundamentally liberating, and the best explanation of political obligation, because free people will start by limiting and decentralizing the influence others have over them.
I recently had one wealthy, white funder tell me that “fair start” sounded like ensuring their grandchild would be born in hospital conditions like those in Kampala, rather than in Palo Alto, and they wanted to avoid that. They felt this way, even though they had made their wealth through a system that externalized its costs, and relied on family policies that fundamentally allowed that externalizing, with deadly impacts on Uganda and the children living there. This was the same cost-externalized wealth, and policy control, that had also ensured this funder’s daughter would be the executive director of their foundation.
The funder urged me to do “make work” and low impact window dressing, as other funders in nonprofits urge their employees to do, rather than see the fundamental issue. They insisted on framing the issue as “population” to avoid discussions of equity as equal and influential shares in a democracy – equal control, through law, to limit and thereby free us from those who would have influence – including climatologically or through irresponsible parenting – over us. They did this all while using that same money to decoy audiences away from equity with that same focus on overpopulation, and towards geoengineering solutions that would make them a savior in the climate crisis driven by policies that benefitted the funder at deadly cost to others.
This is an existential question. Who should we be? Persons that leave extreme wealth where it is, made at cost to future lives because the wealthy got the benefit of seemingly legitimate governance without actually paying the costs of children’s rights, or freedom fighters who move it and save countless lives? Many are already giving voluntarily in this way, leading the way for others.
What are we doing to ensure the conditions in which children are born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work we are promoting? What minimum protections for children and animals do we require for political systems to be legitimate? Can we admit that our failure to ensure such minimums through a correct system of entitlements, historically, is now killing millions of those least responsible for the climate catastrophe?
Here are two legal moves we can all make for truth and justice:
Back new Tell the Truth ESG reporting requirements geared around the actual harm the climate catastrophe is doing to the most vulnerable. Current ESG reporting requirements are designed to benefit rich white kids at cost to the global majority and nonhumans, and to minimize climate reparations – including by hiding the overriding right to ensure resources are prioritized for ecosocial birth equity. It’s called the ImpactScam: Many organizations raised money while making policy choices that benefitted their leadership at deadly cost to others, choices that – given the climate crisis – did more harm to the causes they promoted than they were doing good.
The Vatican has for decades urged family planning policies that attempted to grow the base of the church, and its income, in a way that destroyed our environment and now threatens to kill millions. Their policies enriched themselves at deadly costs to others.
The Vatican has roughly thirty-three billion dollars in net worth. It’s not about population. People are not numbers. It’s about the impossibility of separating values like welfare, equity, and nature from their creation.
The curve above represents the opportunity to promote values like child welfare, parental readiness, the restoration of nature, and democracies where each person plays a greater role, or to exploit people as consumers, workers, and taxpayers. We should choose the former, and arc down.
This divided social justice / public interest movements into less effective silos – like misperceptions of animal rights – that did not threaten the status quo the way birth-equity (equally empowering shares in your democratic system of voting) would have. This in turn undercut democracy, leading to the oligarchic threats the United States faces today.
This now means they – the disenfranchised – will suffer the brunt of a crisis for which they were least responsible, including violations of their right to have even one child in healthy and safe conditions. And because of basic vote dilution, voter suppression, and other factors, they will be unable to use democratic processes to protect themselves, and may rationally choose other measures. And in the face of all of this, many governments driven by industry are paying women to have more children with no easy safeguards like “survive and thrive” baby bonds in place, while wealthy families and foundations reliant on growth fund charities engaged in distractivism.
What are you doing to assure the conditions in which children born and raised, including their environment and role models, are being improved so as not to undo the benefits of the work you discuss?
In asking these question you are looking for the #Impactscam: A growing body of peer-reviewed research had shown the basis of deadly climate greenwashing – which is killing millions – originates with child welfare policies that illegitimate political systems because they ensure no minimum threshold of self-determination or freedom. These policies literally set inequitable standards killing millions of those least responsible for the crisis. And those backing them are choosing to benefit at deadly cost to others, when there are clear alternatives – like moving wealth through externalizing deadly costs into the hands of young women able to save many lives.
These policies illegitimate governance because our generations can’t get benefit of future generations’ political obligation, not to violently target us for reparations required by the deadly climate catastrophe for example, because we never met our obligations to them. At the very least young women demanding birth equity reparations would have greater right to use coercion to protect their children than the state would have to defend existing property rights that harm their children. That said, nonviolence is more effective in achieving justice
Instead of changing the policies many organizations are hiding them – aware that they face liability for greenwashing, where the growth they embraced historically did more harm to their causes than their efforts did good. Many of them are going out of their way to evade liability, and thereby – at least inadvertently – reduce the reparations victims would be awarded.
The most just and effective solution? There are legal actions pending before the United Nations and other agencies urging more inclusive legitimacy. Self-determination derives by definition from conditions of development that ensure the capacity for us to choose who has influence (including climatologically) or power over us – to be free. According to a growing body of research, there would be no legitimate political entity to assign wealth or incentives that precedes this obligation. Who we should be, the “ought” of Children’s Rights and the hard metrics of being a legal person as opposed to an economic person, logically always comes first – before what we should do, and the allocation of other entitlements.
But there are ways to move towards fulfilling this obligation, upstream, and we work downstream on more traditional projects.
Take Action: Work with the Fair Start movement to factcheck claims by nonprofits. Read more here.
Forget the easy categories of the New York Times being liberal or conservative.
Look at how the New York Times has for around the last decade, covered in their reporting and the opinions they chose to promote, family policy both in the United States and abroad.
Their reporting on family planning policy – what it was and what it should be – almost uniformly falls into the left side of this divide in the image below, rather than the right. They routinely backed Trump’s family policy – one based on economic growth rather that birth and developmental equity one that undercuts human rights and democracy based on a handful of clear metrics. They backed systems that fundamentally created consumers and workers for shopping malls, not influential citizens for town halls.
This now means they – the disenfranchised – will suffer the brunt of a crisis for which they were least responsible, including violations of their right to have even one child in healthy and safe conditions. And because of basic vote dilution, voter suppression, and other factors, they will be unable to use democratic processes to protect themselves, and may rationally choose other measures. And in the face of all of this, many governments driven by industry are paying women to have more children with no easy safeguards like “survive and thrive” baby bonds in place, while wealthy families and foundations reliant on growth fund charities engaged in distractivism.
The New York Times has never seriously covered the simple fact that all children deserve a fair start in life, understood as the capacity to control the influence others have over them.
