1.

To be free, we have to ask political leaders and the wealthiest among us to derive their legal authority and entitlement to wealth from, and condition it on, a showing of how they are measurably empowering into equity each child / new member of our democracies. We can’t get to justice from injustice and universally deconstitutive language that omits how we benefit from a system of inequitable growth that is harming infants and animals. We can’t ensure obligations to ourselves from others by violating the duties we owe to the most vulnerable in our societies.

What does that violation look like? An extreme example would be animal rights organizations claiming to benefit animals with downstream decoy tactics, while quietly choosing to back inequitable growth that easily undoes the good they claim to do. That requires manufacturing metrics to discount future persons, especially persons of color, and animals.

If we do not require deriving and conditioning, we start all we do from a position of contradicting our own objective values – values like enjoying moderate temperatures and access to food – by benefiting at deadly cost to others.

That’s political equity fraud, and at a fundamentally objective level, that overrides any political or legal authority to define it otherwise. That said, we can use existing legal systems to address it, by urging existing law enforcement agencies to track the impacts on all of our capacities to self-determine as children enter the world each day, contrasting those facts with value and impact claims being made by influential entities—the ones exploiting growth, birth positionality, and illegal levels of influence—in that jurisdiction.

This tracking informs our right to self-defense against undemocratic concentrations of power, those who drive violence by allowing states to use it without having legitimated themselves via child-rights based creation norms first.

2.

Not doing this – and consistently using an illegal assessment and reporting standard that avoids it – does more harm than we do good because it degrades the capacity of the earth to support human health, while treating children of color as deserving less resources and more risk, while politically disenfranchising the average person.

 

3.

Admitting the use of that illegal standard in our work to date and structuring changes in reproductive rights to incentivize, and fund the assurance, that no child is born below the threshold of conditions that comply with their rights and equity is the most just and effective thing we can do today. Practically, we get there by parental readiness and delay entitlements, which move us towards the qualitative optimality envisioned by those (in more quantitative and less qualitative/normative terms) by Dr. Chris Tucker and Sir Partha Dasguta.

If we do not admit failure, and disclose how much of the value we claimed to add to the world has been undone by political inequity, we cannot be included among those who are constituting legitimate / inclusive obligations and a just future. We are continuing a family law system of getting people to think they’re democratic ends when they’re actually being treated as economic means, then getting them to do that to the next generation. We will be decrying this politician or that leader, and dealing with the symptom and not the existential cause.

 

4.

If we don’t start with measurable equity for children as they enter the world, and for the animals with whom they will interact, we start with injustice that illegally shifts costs onto and punches down on the most vulnerable.

Without Fair Start reforms, we are operating in a fantasy world where our obligations to others don’t arise from the actual creation of our power relations with them. Instead, they are just dictated from abstract, top-down positions that create the sort of moral inaccuracy that caused the climate crisis.

What does that punching down look like? Coca-Cola and Fairlife LLC do it. In many more legal filings to come, Fair Start will allege they manufacture numbers in their cost/benefit analysis that discount the value of vulnerable entities, who under various laws cannot be discounted.

5.

It is physically impossible to be free, as in self-determining, if we don’t use accurately obligatory language to assure that persons are created, developed, and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation. If we do not invest enough in children to offset their capacity to influence relative to zero, then political representatives and officials are not representative at all, and constituents are not being empowered equally to control the rules under which they must live.

The creation and entry of others does and should fundamentally shift our obligations and freedoms. Without Telling the Truth, without this inversion of obligation in our language, those entering the world are either not empowered, or we all have no choice but to be subjected to their power and influence – including the degradation of the environment around us.

 

6.

The solution includes using rules to ensure accurate commercial language to slowly democratize and reconstitute what has become an essentially commercialized political system. This can be achieved through a preemptive standard for interpreting domestic constitutions and laws, as well as human rights obligations under instruments like International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to ensure actual and measurable self-determination, through the accurate use of obligatory language ensuring that persons are created, developed, and emancipated in ways that offset equally their capacity to influence political systems equally, relative to a neutral position or objective standard for evaluation.

TAKE ACTION: FOR ANYONE CLAIMING TO DO GOOD IN THE WORLD, ASK THEM THESE QUESTIONS: 

How were you accounting for your work being undone, each day, by violations of children’s birthrights as they entered the world? Would you be willing to derive wealth and authority back, and condition it on, ensuring such birthrights? If you could go back and make that change in our political systems, decades ago, to save millions of lives, would you do it? If you claimed to create value that was being undone by basic inequity, would you not be eager to reform that system and align with your claimed values?

 

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