Fair Start Movement

Category: Political Equality

The Scam of the Century, and Who to Target for Payback

Who has the most at stake when we have children? The children, given the impact on their lives. One would think, then, that in designing family planning systems our governments – which undertook that task in the mid-20th Century – would make them child-centric. They did not – largely because that would have entailed investing heavily in each child, and cooperatively giving each child a fair start in life, or things like minimum levels of well-being, equity relative to other children, an effective voice in their democracies, and a natural world.

Instead governments, and the interests that control them, lied and intentionally misinterpreted Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – the right to have children. They treated the act of having children as something self-determining for the parents, rather than other-determining, for the children we have. They did so, employing the concept of privacy, not to protect people but to protect their concentrations of wealth from collective obligations to invest in all children.

Governments and special interests opted to ignore basic values and the needs of future generations, and embrace a strategy that would ensure population-based economic growth, exploiting children as consumers, workers, and other forms of economic input. They used people to create profits. The move converted politically empowered citizens into consumers, workers, and taxpayers with almost no influence over the systems they are subject to. These concentrations of power used people against people, filling the word with uneducated and vulnerable followers wiling to give up values, like democracy, for higher incomes. These concentrations did not produce actual and objective value as much as they exploited patriarchal policies mass producing people in violation of human rights, including the right to participatory systems from which we could reasonably asses values, costs, and benefits. Every crisis we face today, from the population-driven climate crisis, to the overcrowding and poor public health that causes pandemics, to massive political and economic inequity, flow from this maneuver, or the scam one Nobel Laureate recently described.

Empirically, the most just and effective response to these crises is to target the growth-based concentrations of power, and their modern adherents and beneficiaries, to limit and decentralize their power into future generations, through Fair Start distributions of wealth as ecosocially equitable family planning incentives and entitlements. We can go into a future ridden by climate and other crises with more and more unprepared and unequal people, or with fewer and highly prepared people. There is no real choice to make here.

How can do we we proceed? How can we bend this arc of growth?

We all grew up with the myth that we were abstractly “constituted” in nation states by founding fathers in the past. That is inaccurate. For human rights and democracy to make any sense, it is more accurate to say we are constantly and physically constituting, as new generations join the dynamic “We the People” of us. For those things to make sense, we have to correct the self v. other determining lie, discussed above. Again, think a switch to child-centric and values-based family planning, or physically constituting through a just creation (or re-creation) norm – the norm which no other norm can precede.

Think getting past the systems of coercion and incentive that the scam described above maintains, the systems by which we are determined by others. Instead, imagine reaching the self-determination/actualization of democracy where our voice matters and we trust the people around us. In this process we find a binary distinction between those free people sufficiently other-regarding to constitute democracy through child-centric collective family planning, and those who are not – people who in the end we we would reasonably exclude from constituting, or precons. A classic example would be those who reject the values above and who see people as a resource, rather than an end in themselves. If the creation of persons represent the truest border of human power – to follow a “one border” thesis – we can envision precons on one side, and free people on the other. And whether someone or some group embraces child-centric and fair family planning is the test.

If we don’t approach it that way, consensual governance – and political freedom – become impossible. We are left without a way of maintaining relative self-determination, and freedom from others.

Government and its rules derive from people, who derive from their creation. A just creation norm is the ultimate obligation, and there are no just systems without it. Put another way, to be free people we have to first orient the formation of power relations around the justice of child-centric and fair family planning, over the inevitable resistance of the precons described above.

That makes Fair Start, or intergenerationally constituting groups of free and equal people, the first and overriding human right (or the ongoing first election by which we choose the people from whom government derives), overriding the government-issued property claims that protect concentrations of wealth and power, and allowing us to free ourselves by all means effective. It means that if would-be parents are willing to embrace child-centric and collective planning, and step up and make demands to protect their children’s future, we can target for appropriate resources the people and concentrations of power to compensate us and future generations by passing over the power they gathered in violation of right to be free (or relatively self-determining, to be accurate).

This is not an abstract proposition. Imagine a group of people, in quantity and quality, you would need to host an effective constitutional convention. That is what a truly free and equal “We the People” means, and falling fertility rates globally signal a sea change in our species that makes a shift to a qualitative, people-not-population, and Fair Start revolution feasible. Bending the arc of growth around this change, towards values and equity, is an act of self-defense, defense of others, and liberation.

These facts are indisputable: 1) Many benefitted from the scam describe above by placing costs – ecological and social – on others, in violation of multiple universal human rights that allow us to constitute as free and equal people. 2) In order to most justly and effectively compensate future generations, who should be treated as a majority and whose rights matter, for those violations we have a fundamental right to target those most responsible and who benefitted the most from blocking the process of constituting. They hold power over us and future generations because people with guns defend the status quo, and not because it is just. 3) We best do that by taking and using portions of their concentrated power and wealth, measured against the relevant fundamental baseline, to constitute free and equal groups of future people via the effective vehicle of Fair Start incentives/entitlements.

In other words these entities, like Exxon, should pay for the costs they externalized on others. And they must do so by complying with the first human right – Fair Start.

Take action: Fair Star will be urging the Biden Administration to issue an executive order that would require U.S. firms to disclose their past, present and future role in promoting that Ponzi demography and the harm it caused. Contact info@fairstartmovemeny.org to participate.

August 18, 2021
Democracy Before Economy: Tell the NYT the Difference Starts with Fair Start

Is it time to put democracy before economy?

Jesse Wegman asks the question on many minds given the political crises we in the U.S. now face: What about amending our constitution? But can we back out of that question and ask what he means by “us,” or the people who would do the amending? Given that government derives from the people, that is the key question. There is no such thing as human rights and democracy without accounting for the just and fair creation of the people who would comprise such systems.

That is where we have to start. And today’s populace was created to fill shopping malls – not town halls. We know this from the ubiquitous references to a “baby bust” in reaction to falling fertility rates. We are used to creating lots of people with the economic capacity to consume, work, and pay taxes, not fewer and highly developed people capable of collectively operating a democracy where each sovereign voice actually matters.

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.

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

Let’s first address the root questions of who we are and should be when we talk about amending the Constitution, and embrace reforms that will enable future generations to take the idea of amending more seriously.

TAKE ACTION: Urge the NYT editor @ @deanbaquet to take human rights and democracy seriously, and embrace Fair Start as the fundament of justice.

August 16, 2021
The Constitutive Fallacy: We Cannot Achieve justice and the Freedom It Brings After Power Relations Have Already Formed

Systems of governance and their laws derive from people, who derive from their creation. Justice (distributive, procedural, retributive, ecological, intergenerational, etc.) and the rule law therefore begin in the dynamic formation of our first relations, or ideally, as we physically and constantly reconstitute democratic communities through forward looking child-centric family planning reforms under Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We scam ourselves and others out of justice by pretending to do it downstream, after the fact of the formation of our power relations, and usually because we personally benefit from doing so. That scamming is rampant in civil society and politics, where those purporting to protect animals, the environment, children and other vulnerable categories of persons utterly fail to do so – and mislead – because they embrace inequity in creation, and the resulting power differentials that make formal and downstream law ineffective. This is especially so for the most vulnerable, like animals, for whom formal law offers little protection.

Why focus on our creation? It is not fortune, or the will of a god, that some are born poor and others rich or in other inequitable positions of power. The belief in fortune is part of a myth meant to preserve power structures, and to justify our using future generations as unequal economic inputs who will concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few. The core of that myth is the isolating idea that having children is matter of personal privacy, and that such privacy protects parents. If we really care about people we will be collectively focused on the wellbeing of future children, who have more at stake than their parents, and future generations more generally, who vastly outnumber persons alive today. Our failure to focus forward in this way fundamentally created the ecosocial crises we face today, like the climate crisis, as we avoided ensuring ecological justice in our creation and instead opted for downstream – and now utterly failed – corrective environmental interventions. Environmental groups curried favor with concentrations of power that rely on population growth, despite the risk – now a reality – that their conservation programs would eventually be undone by that growth and the climate crisis it created.

Evading the constitutive fallacy allows us to avoid the lie of seeing ourselves as constituted into nation states – where we have little role over public affair and are hardly self-determining – by god-like founders in the past. First deriving justice and rules from that ancient process would require ignoring the formation of the power relations that justice is designed to shape. Committing that mistake or fallacy means denying people the relative self-determination, or fairness, of constituting just communities where their voice actually matters, and ignoring the drivers of our daily experience in favor of the abstraction of celebrities and politicians, divorced from the creation and reality of the lives of the people with whom we share the world. The verb form, constituting, instead empowers people, and focuses us linguistically on relative self-determination rather than being determined by others.

To constitute means first and always accounting for the future generations impacted by our lives and ensuring that their creation is just, via Fair Start reforms or comparable modeling that uses the entitlements future children deserve as a correlative incentive to ensure – universally – small, sustainable and well-planned families. This includes ensuring minimum levels of welfare, a move towards birth equity, restorative environmentalism or rewilding, and physically constituting participatory democratic communities along the physical borders of human power. If we don’t do this, we are relying on and furthering an illegitimate system that undemocratically exploits the most numerous and vulnerable category of entities – future generations – in a way that retards freedom, or relative self-determination, for all. The freedom that comes from our existential role as sovereigns in a democracy precedes and enables the personal freedom and empowerment we experience, as workers, consumers or otherwise, in that democracy.

What’s an example of moving past the constitutive fallacy? Consider what rules for containing Covid-19 are most just, balancing public health, personal choice, and the maintenance of one’s livelihood? To answer this question we would have to be constituted into relatively self-determining groups or democratic communities capable of answering the question, and our having first done that would have likely evaded the overcrowding, poor public health, destruction of nature, etc. that drove the pandemic. The same revision in thinking would apply to the climate crisis, and dozens of other problems.

Practically we can do this – as free and equal people – by limiting and decentralizing existing concentrations of private and public power, taking the resources the people in those concentrations hoarded by externalizing costs, and instead investing them in Fair Start reforms as the entitlements/incentives described above. We may do so because the act of constituting overrides downstream rules, like property entitlements. This will happen over the opposition of preconstitutional people, or precons, who simply block justice. We can test the progress of this process – the ongoing first and fundamental election – by looking for its application in the pronouns in our language, and to see whether we are constituting together the persons those pronouns explicitly and implicitly refer to.

July 27, 2021
Relative Freedom From the Power of Others As a Baseline to Assess Cost

How do we know what counts as a cost or benefit in a particular transaction? Enter the idea of normative baselines, or the theoretical states of affairs by which we can answer the question.

But is there an antecedent question nesting in the above-linked list of possible states of affairs we might use, from human rights to process-based positive law? From what justifiable social organization, of free and equal people, are we orienting when we assess the states of affairs? Perhaps we first have to be, existentially, a group of self-determining people capable of democratically deciding what’s a cost and what’s a benefit?

We can think of this in another way. John Rawls is famous for articulating the basic framework of a just and free society. But what rule precedes the existence of the actual people who will eventually comprise Rawlsian systems? Is the rule that determines their creation the first issue that must be decided? How will the quantity of persons, the civic qualities of its members, and their initial relative positioning to their ecology and each other – the conditions of their early development – be determined? What creates the first relations of these people, whom Rawls wished to assure would be free and equal? How, in accounting for those relations, do we account for the dynamic or intergenerational nature of such a group, i.e. that they would die, and others would replace them?

As a new peer-reviewed article on fair start family planning argues, the most basic criteria for assessing costs and benefits has to be the ideal creation (or procreation) norm, or the norm that first creates the people – and their relations, power differentials, relation to their ecology, etc. – who are making the assessment. Moreover, as the article argues, using such initial criteria to assess what counts as a cost or benefit is actually practicable, given what we know about intergenerational justice, optimal world population ranges, and the need for very specific policies, like education, to ensure relative self-determination or what we commonly call freedom. This differs from the intergenerational justice work of Rawls and others who have asked what we owe, or what we might save for, future generations. Here the question is whether the dynamic “we” – any grouping of people from which we might consider these questions – is a justifiable group of people, in terms of the assuring each member the correct relative degree of self-determination. That difference matters, because the latter approach – or Fair Start reforms – trigger the override of competing norms, very specific criteria for behavior change, and other implications. They would fulfill what might have been the Rawlsian answer to the background question – we must create people in a way that makes them free and equal.

As part of revisiting the baseline issue for policy reforms, Fair Start is working with IAMECON on the development of further research, specifically around the role of the nonhuman world as an ideal in ecological restoration. Per a lead on the project:

“In this [forthcoming] paper, we study the relationship between human actions and the wilderness using a static game theoretical framework, and determine the parameter space that manages the gap between the payoff functions required for sustainable action vs payoff functions that leads to unsustainable actions observed in the last two centuries. When agents are not impacted at all from the harm wilderness suffers (as a result of human actions), i.e. zero empathy for the wilderness case, lack of environmental awareness, we find that unsustainable actions are always a dominant strategy for all individuals. When agents are somewhat impacted by the harm the wilderness suffers, i.e. flexible awareness case, we find that the benefit an individual gets from her unsustainable actions should be outweighed by the pressure to conform (to society) plus the negative consequences of the harm wilderness suffers on the individual herself, in order to arrive uniformly sustainable action as nash equilibrium.”

Fair Start and other more comprehensive baseline approaches can be practiced by targeting concentrations of power, and redistributing their resources to future generations through a “constituting” discourse that limits and decentralizes human power via the simple recognition that every child’s right to a fair start in life, ecologically and socially, overrides the post hoc property rights and entitlements issued by governments whose legitimacy stems from fair and intergenerational social contracting.

Under such an assessment for redistribution of resources and the power that comes with them, we can start by measuring the impact of the climate crisis on maternal, fetal, and neonatal health as a cost relative to a normative state of affairs in which such children would be free from the impacts, or relatively self-determining, rather than having their lives determined by those industries most responsible for the crisis. We can extend the analysis beyond the impact on ecological birth conditions to also assess how those industries benefited from a pronatal and economic growth-based family planning/creation norm that required no minimum levels of wellbeing, economic equality, or an empowering role on one’s democracy, for the children born and thereby impacted, as well as the harms to the parents of the children.

This is one way to fundamentally assess costs and benefits, by orienting from the most basic notion of a justifiable, or relatively self-determining, social organization constantly recreated through Fair Start family planning.

What is the upshot of all of this? If Fair Start is the first and overriding human right we have the right to implement it, over all other obligations – like property rights – by all means effective.

Here is one way to start that process, a discourse, and following that many ways to actualize Fair Start, legally, institutionally, and culturally.

July 7, 2021
Why Is Congress Making the Climate Crisis Worse, and Reinforcing Economic Inequity?

Congress Could Have Recognized Children’s Right to a Fair Start in Life. Instead It’s Treating Them as Cheap Future Labor.

The Senate’s debate of stimulus legislation that includes significant child-care and tax changes is an opportunity for the United States to recognize every child’s right to a Fair Start in life, ecologically and socially, and radically transform the way we plan families.

Instead, per the New York Times and Forbes, the Senate is pushing what one Nobel Laureate called a population growth Ponzi scheme. The legislation does not eliminate the massive wealth gap between black and white families or encourage sustainable family planning that does not severely exacerbate the climate and other ecological crises. Smaller families can have 20 times the impact on the climate crisis as other measures.

Fair Start, the better approach, would pivot to:
• Cut all benefits for wealthy families and dramatically expand them for poor families, making the rich pay to offset the unearned privileges their children enjoy in life.
• Incentivize better family planning, and smaller and more sustainable families for everyone, through things like delaying childbirth until parents are really ready.
• This is key: These moves can make the legislation antiracist and regenerative and can lay the groundwork to eliminate child abuse and recognize our fundamental human right to nature.

We can do better than pushing women to have kids. Let’s restore nature and level the playing field at birth for all kids. That’s how we create a legitimate society. It’s called Fair Start. It’s the first and overriding human right, and as such, we may achieve it by all means effective. Here is an example of that type of better approach, one that Sen. Cory Booker can easily promote as the Senate debates. We should use funding to fundamentally change the way we plan families to maximize investments in future generations and to compensate them for the harm we have caused.

Sen. Mitt Romney, a Mormon with five wealthy children, is using the excuse of child poverty to push population growth as means of creating cheap future labor, increased consumption, and a bigger tax base that will benefit his privileged kids. It’s similar to the Ivanka Trump approach to families and the future.

The current proposals do nothing to ensure all children some minimum level of well-being, equal opportunities in life, a safe and natural environment, and an effective voice in democracies or systems of self-rule. The proposals further the exclusion of people from their own governance, rather than inclusion, and are setting the stage for further political violence in the future as the gap between rich and poor, in a degraded environment, worsens.

What You Can Do Today

Call Kamala Harris and these four key senators today, and make your case for every child’s right to a Fair Start in life:

·       Cory Booker
·       Elizabeth Warren
·       Amy Klobuchar
·       Bernie Sanders

And donate here to promote every child’s right to a Fair Start in life, the most effective way to protect our shared future.

March 9, 2021
The Fair Start Revolution: Taking Power From the Top to Empower Future Generations

Elon’s Musk’s Starlink satellites are creating massive sky pollution and ruining stargazing; his commercial interests are creating “space graffiti” in the night sky and obstructing astronomers’ observations. Can we solve this problem in a way that could apply to other scenarios — such as the climate crisis — in which the uber-wealthy and dysfunctional governments work together to destroy nature and threaten our kids’ futures? These incursions into nature interfere with our being free from others’ power, and their subtlety does not make them any less wrong than more obvious forms of oppression. It’s more proof that Musk, who recently doubled down on his assertion that women must have kids in order to support the economy, is not an environmentalist as much as he is a car and space tourism manufacturer.

At the most fundamental level, this process of propping up the world economy involves a population pyramid in which a few people exploit population growth, fueled by poor family planning, as an engine to convert nature and the nonhuman world into their own wealth. One fundamental solution involves simply reversing that stream: We should agree that two correlative human rights — everyone’s right to nature and children’s right to a fair start in life — supersede the property rights of wealthy people like Musk. The solution involves seeing the right to be born into the world as a free and equal person as the first human right. And it requires using that foundational right to rebase our constitutions on people, not property.

As we constantly reconstitute societies through the act of having kids, we have a right and an obligation to recycle the resources at the top, and the raw power over others they represent, to constantly generate nature, equity, and democracy where each voice matters. And there now exist clear policy ideas — like Fair Start baby bonds — to ensure that mankind most effectively uses those resources to empower future generations. The few at the top, who are literally hiding the stars from our view, can’t have power over us if we don’t give it to them.

Take action: Urge Musk to support Fair Start family planning reforms.

A vision for comprehensive family planning reforms

November 27, 2020
Biden vs. Trump? Here’s a Better Way Forward

Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

So why are we focused on two men fighting for a presidency, as if the idea of controlling our future were like some kind of football game?

We tend to see politics this way because of mistakes that were made in the design of our constitutions and political systems, and because of cognitive dissonances we humans are prone to, like confusing symbols with the real things those symbols refer to. Instead of seeing “We the people” as an inherently complex, dynamic and intergenerational concept, we tend to focus on the static symbols that purport to represent a nation of hundreds of millions of people – like the presidency. And instead of empowering future generations through real family planning policies, our leadership has exploited population growth and those cognitive dissonances, vesting more and more power in themselves. As the United States population has ballooned from 3 million to well over 300 million, people have remained focused on distracting icons like the presidency, or the one person meant to to “represent” all of us, rather than focusing on empowering one another as effective citizens through good parenting. Driven by poor family planning, representative democracy replaced the possibility of real democracy, where each person has meaningful control over political outcomes.

For example, we focus on Biden or Trump as a symbol for what we want in terms of climate policy, when in reality, the population of the country – the thing driving the climate crisis and also the ultimate source of political authority – continues to grow, diluting the impact each person could have in mitigating the crisis. We are decoyed by these two men, who in the end will simply enforce, through violence, their own views on a populace they do not and cannot represent. This is iconarchy, not democracy.

Another example: We are told we live in a country that recognizes us as free and equal people. But our family planning policies carry forward historic injustices, such that our birth position places us in a hierarchy of power where some – like white families with ten times the wealth of black families – are entitled to have more freedom of opportunity and influence than others. Our traditional view of family planning dismisses our birth position as the work of god, rather than structural inequity we choose to tolerate.

Our mostly male political leaders, working with business interests, intentionally accelerated the centralizing of their power by encouraging growth and inequity, and failing to require systems that would equitably develop each person to help co-lead true democracies. In other words, they used crowding to disempower individuals. That constant growth and alienation from one another has ensured reliance upon strong, top-down, leaders. Today, many want to continue to exacerbate this process in order to use families as a means of driving economic growth. They exploit an archaic legal system that does not protect a right to nature, but defends completely irresponsible procreation as matter of right because of the population growth it creates. Yes, our archaic legal systems generally protect the right to procreate an unlimited number of children into abusive conditions and state institutions, but no right to be free in nature. This is the antithesis of freedom, and represents those at the top of our systems using everyday people to oppress one another.

To people who care about democracy, or a system that allows all people to control the rules under which they live, this is offensive. We have a right to an effective role – not diluted by hundreds of millions of people – in the political systems that impact our lives. Is it time to tear down the icons and to stop the constant political swing from left to right? Can we disempower the symbolic, meaning the leadership at the top of both the public and private sectors, and empower the real — the people themselves — from the bottom up?

The best way to do that, and the most effective way to directly address the crises we now face, irrespective of our “representatives,” is to correct the fundamental mistakes and build our family planning systems around the idea of cooperative self-determination. Instead of thinking of democracies as constituted in the past, we can instead think about having and investing more in kids as a way to constitute the democracies we want, and deserve, in the future.

Understand this: The constitution is not what you might think it is, We were not constituted by god-like men in the past, and subjected to a system over which we have almost no influence, We are constantly constituting legitimate communities or deconstituting into illegitimate forms with each child born, depending on how we plan our families. If power and legitimacy ultimately comes from the people, it necessarily first derives from their creation, and we constitute legitimate societies by limiting our power over future generations and decentralizing the power we do hold into the children we will have.

We can start by ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life, which is the first and overriding human right, and using that right to decentralize and limit human power. If we truly believe in government for and by the people, this is the only way to achieve it – through actual people. We may engage in this process – of physically constituting democratic communities where each person matters – by taking resources from concentrations of power, and using those resources to incentive smaller families that fully develop their children.

Ready to make real change? Joe Biden is doing the same thing Trump and others have done to promote population growth over investing more in children, and building smaller and more sustainable democracies where each person’s voice matters. What’s a better idea? Let’s use the child tax credit program to create a progressively scaled family planning incentive system that promotes parental readiness, smaller families, and a fair start in life for every child. Nothing would go further in fundamentally solving our social and ecological crises.

Urge Biden’s kids to support this alternative, and to help offset the unearned privileges they have received in life. Learn about them here, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/a33661848/joe-biden-children-grandchildren/. You can find ways to contact them online.

Here are several other actions you can take.

September 20, 2020
Biden vs. Trump? Here’s a Better Way Forward
Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.”

So why are we focused on two men fighting for a presidency as if the idea of controlling our future were like some kind of football game?

We tend to see it this way because mistakes were made in the way we designed our constitutions and political system, and because of cognitive dissonances we humans are prone to, like confusing symbols with the real things those symbols refer to. Instead of seeing “We the people” as an inherently dynamic and intergenerational concept and instead of empowering future generations, past leadership vested the power in themselves. And as the United States population ballooned from 3 million to well over 300 million, people remained focused on distracting icons like the presidency, or one person who is supposed to “represent” all of us, rather than focusing on empowering one another. Representative democracy replaced real democracy where each person has real control over outcomes.
- For example, we focus on Biden or Trump as a symbol for what we want in terms of climate policy, when in reality, the underlying population of the country – the thing driving the climate crisis and the ultimate source of political authority – continues to grow and become less equal, so that the average person has less and less of an impact on national policy. We are decoyed by these two men, who in the end will simply enforce through violence their own views on a populace they do not and cannot represent, while the fundamental state of democracy and freedom degrades. This is iconarchy, not democracy.
In fact, our leaders, working with business interests, intentionally accelerated the process of centralizing their power by encouraging population growth and failing to require systems that would equitably develop each person to help co-lead true democracies, ensuring chaos, and with it our reliance upon strong leaders instead of one another. Today, many want to exacerbate this problem in the name of creating economic growth. They exploit an archaic legal system that does not clearly protect a right to nature, but defends completely irresponsible procreation because of the population growth it creates. This is emblematic of our history of trading self-determination and freedom for chaos, greed and consumption, and the exploitation of future generations.

To people who care about democracy, or a system that allows all people to control the rules under which they live, this is offensive. We have a right to an effective role – not diluted by hundreds of millions of people – in the political systems that impact our lives. Is it time to tear down the icons and to stop the constant political swing from left to right? Can we disempower the symbolic, meaning the leadership at the top of both the public and private sectors, and then empower the real — the people themselves — from the bottom up?

The best way to do that, and the most effective way to directly address the crises we now face, irrespective of our “representatives,” is to correct these mistakes and build our systems around the idea of cooperative self-determination. Instead of thinking of democracies as constituted in the past, we must instead think about having kids as a way to constitute the democracies we want and deserve in the future. We can do so by ensuring every child’s right to a fair start in life, which is the first and overriding human right, and using that right to decentralize and limit human power. If we truly believe in government for and by the people, that is the only way to achieve it.

At Having Kids, we are trying to move systems in that direction by decentralizing the power at the top of what Nobel Laureate Steven Chu called a population pyramid and investing that power in future generations.

Ready to make real change? Here are several actions you can take to join the fight to give the people control of their own futures.
August 21, 2020
Is WaPo Promoting Nationalism Over Democracy?

In a recent news analysis article, not an editorial, a Washington Post writer lamented the recent drop in U.S. fertility rate:

“Rather, the pandemic left a permanent mark on American families, with many having fewer children than they would have otherwise, leaving tens of thousands of future American citizens permanently unborn.” The author, Christopher Ingraham, went on:

Of course, at the individual level, the fertility cost is literally incalculable. How does a parent put a price tag on a child that was never had? What is the loss to an only child who will never have siblings to play with? The discussion is a reminder that even after the pandemic is behind us, it is likely to leave a deep scar on society for years to come.
— Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post, June 17, 2020

Does this rhetoric — the assertion that birthing fewer children exacts a toll on society — sound familiar? It might, because this has been a talking point of nationalist leaders across the globe. Recently, Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro recently called on women in the country to have more kids to “let the homeland grow.” U.S. President Donald Trump chimed in as well, approving a barely noticed tax tweak that pays people even more money to have kids.

This policy promotes nationalism over democracy because it pushes society away from improving birth conditions for every child; giving kids a fair start in life; ensuring that children grow up in a natural, healthy, and safe environment; and allowing everyone to exercise meaningful voices in their democracies that won’t get lost in the chaotic crowd.

The problem with this reasoning is that the state and other institutions are artifice: Democracy and legitimate societies derive power from the individual, not the other way around. We should not have children for the state or the economy. Instead, we should cooperatively plan to have kids in ways that empower them to comprise a better future and build real democracies, not bloated nation-states and economies that demand more bodies — even in the middle of ecological and social crises.

More crowding and poor family planning exacerbates the spread and threat of pandemics, is the worst way to exacerbate the climate crisis, and expands the inequity tearing our communities apart.

TAKE ACTION: The Washingtion Post holds itself up as a champion of democracy, but it is promoting nationalistic policies. Because family planning is truly constitutional in nature and because the right to a fair start in life is the first and most fundamental human right, we can engage people (and especially wealthy people) pushing women to have kids to instead help pay for sustainable family planning, and for every kid to get a fair start in life. Write the Post editor Marty Baron @PostBaron, or engage him in person, and urge him to reconsider what democracy means and to pay his share to support better family planning.

June 17, 2020