Prosperity in Procreation; F. A. Harper

The baby prosperity argument goes like this: A click [66 ] every twelve seconds on a machine in the Washington Census Bureau announces the birth of another consumer for the market in America. As every storekeeper knows, new consumers mean new business, and new business means prosperity. Stock which the merchant has sold must be replaced. This sets in motion a new wave of business all the way back to the manufacturer and the producer of raw materials-not overlooking all the related services. Or, to express the idea another way: The national in come this year is said to be about $1,750 per person. Since there would have been no demand and no national income without any population, this amount is what the average person added to the market demand. Every new born baby, then, adds $1,750 (plus or minus) to the na tional income; he is precious not only to his parents but also to the general economy.

This concept that babies give birth to prosperity calls to mind the traditional Chamber of Commerce program of enticing new businesses and more people to come to the town. In promoting these programs, it is often im plied that if the population of the town can be doubled, everyone will be twice as prosperous-well, much more prosperous at least. But since one town's gain is another's loss, the claim can be made that babies bring prosperity without provinciality and selfishness. The stork doesn't use any moving van and disadvantage some other town; everybody gains. That is the idea in brief.·The article already mentioned concludes with this beautiful economic rainbow: "The [67 ] blueprint for tomorrow is clear-the Children's Decade is unquestionably America's wealthiest asset for a depres sion-proof future." The Appeal to Patriotism The idea of baby prosperity adds another appeal to the natural emotional urge toward parenthood. Every procreator a patriotl The prospective sire of even a moron can believe that in adding another child he is adding umpteen dollars to the national income. All countrymen should tender to him their thanks. The sleep of long suffering parents may be disturbed in the process, but that sacrifice is for the national welfare.

It is perhaps not an accident that a popular theory of baby. prosperity came just at this time. It came in the wake of a gloomy business forecast which threw quite a scare into business circles a few months ago. Dr. Colin Clark, the noted Australian and British economist, flatly predicted that the United States faced a major economic setback. Coming from such a source, it frightened the fearsome and most of their complacent cousins. Its in fluence as a gloomy forecast was so great that it received the distinction of inducing a counterprediction from Washington. But even that was not enough to allay eco nomic fears in a nation that has come to treat the Statue of Liberty as though it were a symbol of Mammon. More persuasive than the official pronouncements of business health, I believe, has been the growing faith in baby prosperity. Its power lies in its plaUSibility, since [68 ] it is so much easier to understand than the complex curves and depression curatives usually found in the economist's kit.

In self-defense against misguided business advice, it behooves us to take a critical look at the theory. I do not believe that the baby boom and increasing population as sures prosperity. We may have prosperity during a period of increasing population, but without the one being the cause of the other. In challenging the theory I do not mean to predict, either, that an increasing population will bring a depres sion. I am merely saying that to predict the business future one must consult sources other than the stork and the mortician. In challenging the theory of baby prosperity I am not presuming to advise parents about having offspring. That is for them to decide on their own responsibility. I only suggest they omit this national welfare buncombe from their precalculations , leaving it entirely to the socialists for use as one of their political nostrums. If the theory of baby prosperity were correct, why do we not find China among the most prosperous nations of the world? And India? They have a plenitude of off spring. They have great concentrations of population per square mile. If these make welfare in a nation, it should be rampant in such places. Yet they are among the least prosperous in the world. By looking at the matter in this way-simple observation and deductive reasoning-the theory is exposed as not only false, but false with a vengeance.

[69 ] A Matter of Production I ts falseness, if we look beneath this surface evidence, lies in the simple fact that low production per person is what really causes the low level of living in any nation. Another baby does not raise the production per person automatically. After the baby has grown to a productive age, special conditions might result in increased produc tion per person; but these conditions do not prevail in any nation already rather fully populated where more babies will almost certainly have the effect of reducing the level of living. Every baby is born full of wants, and this adds to the pile of wants within the nation, to be sure. But it is pro duction and not these wants which makes economic wel fare. I have never known a person whose wants as a whole seemed to have any limit. One's want for a thing like salt is limited, but not his total wants for everything, including vacation trips and services and the like. If wants alone assured prosperity, there could never have been anything but unlimited prosperity anywhere in the world.

So the error in the theory of baby prosperity really lies in confusing wants with the things which satisfy these wants; in confusion between wants and effective market demand, or the means of buying. You and I want things but cannot have them unless we produce them, or pro duce the means of buying them, or have them given to us by someone who has produced them. The level of living we now enjoy in the United States [70 ] is in large degree due to the increased production made possible by the use of tools operated by electrical and other nonhuman sources of power. These tools have been accumulated for our use by persons who have saved and invested in them. I would say that perhaps 95 per cent of our level of living in the United States is due to the aid they have given to human hands. If we lacked most of these tools, as does the person in China or India, we would be producing little if any more-per person-than he does.

Baby Brings No Tool Kit The newborn baby has neither goods nor real buying power attached to him when he comes. We are all born nude, economically as well as physically. And neither does he bring with him a kit of tools like those making possible some 95 per cent of what we are able to produce. So when he attains a productive age, others must share with him the use of tools already there. Everyone then has fewer tools to use and less can be produced-per person. The result is that the level of living must go down, not up. Let us presume that the population were to double, due to a friendly invasion from Mars. If the Martians brought with them no tools and we were to share our tools· with them, the production and level of living of those already here would have to decline by half, plus or minus. Our economic weHare would go down. When the population increases faster than the tools [71 ] with which to work, the use of tools will have to be spread thinner and thinner. And since tools give produc tive leverage to hand and brawn, there would then be less production and a lower level of living, as surely as four divided by two is two.

He who projects his business plans on a false premise, such as the assumption that more babies assure pros perity, will some day come out of his economic stupor on the sheriff's doorstep, broke. But a false basis for predicting business prospects is not the only danger in the idea of baby prosperity. The concept is dangerously close to denying the right of man to be free, and that is perhaps its most serious aspect. The idea that babies are valuable is not new. In the Homeric period of ancient Greece parents sometimes sold their children into slavery. Like goats, children had.a price in the market place. Anyone trying to promote Planned Parenthood in that day would have been laughed out of home and goat-yard alike. The Dignity of Man Then a new idea came to dominate people's thinking. It was the belief in the dignity of each individual under God, under rights and responsibilities of self-ownership.

The child was not for sale, nor was he thought of as an economic asset of any other person or any collective of persons, like a nation. He was not a digit of national wealth or income, for the calculations of some bureau crat. So it came to pass that a child, in growing up to be [72 ] a freeman, was considered free from the day he was born and this new theological concept came to dominate the economic practices of mankind. And child slavery faded. Over the intervening centuries the dominant culture of the Western world left the matter of the birth rate to the family, where it belongs-no longer weighing its chil drenas economic assets. To do so has become a sacrilege. We love them, and that is that. An Old Concept Reappears And now the reactionary concept that babies are eco nomic assets is again rearing its ugly head. To say that a baby is worth something to the market of America is dangerously close to saying that a baby has worth in the market as a direct object of sale. For a thing of worth is an asset, and an asset is saleable in the market.

The concept which made child slavery tolerable to ancient Greece is thus reappearing in respected intellec tual circles, in the form of this idea of baby prosperity. It is a symptom of the collectivized thinking embodied in modern socialist-communist doctrine. We first accept the idea that our economic welfare is the responsibility of government rather than ourselves. Then we discover that babies are national economic assets, assuring prosperity. It is a perfectly logical derivative of this to say that the government may claim control of the means of welfare for which it has been acclaimed responsible. And the government then becomes the logical manager [73 ] of procreativity-perhaps, one day, under a new Depart ment of Genopropagation empowered to select for you your mate and to control all your family affairs. The gov ernment in its new role, of course, must make the chil dren work and produce when they are old enough.

Such steps into collectivism do not entail any dis harmony of logic, and in that sense may not be as fan tastic as they may at first appear. Children need not be auctioned off in a market place, as in ancient Greece. Enslavement to government is as truly servitude as if children are sold to private owners on the auction block. It is never too early to destroy seed-thoughts which can grow into colossal destroyers of human dignity and free dom, like belief in baby prosperity. [74 ] WANTED: More Millionaires Tms country may need a good, five-cent cigar; but it could better use a hundred or so new millionaires modem Edisons, Carnegies, Hills, Fords, Wanamakers. We need men of vision who'll build and produce-not little men who wish to divide and equalize. In this age of the so-called "common man," we desperately need a few uncommon men. For the past 50 years, we common men have been in creasingly using our majority votes to penalize and ham string the uncommon men of the marketplace, the persons who have the ability and ambition to become wealthy by offering the rest of us a desired product or service at an agreeable price. Spurred on by the dema gogues who are trying to control us by pretending to take care of us, we're rejecting the original American idea of rewarding each person according to his merit as de termined by the voluntary decisions of consumers who use their own money in a free market economy. Instead, we're demanding more government ownership and more government controls.