Steyn Rebutted: Are Children Really Our Future, And Should There Be A Tax On Screwing?

But It'll Cost Ya!

Mark Steyn is incapable of serious thought. He does, however, occasionally aim his toxic spew in the direction of real issues, even if he seldom correctly understands the nature of these issues.

For example, recently several academics have sounded a warning re climate change and population pressures. The short form of their argument is that climate change is difficult enough to combat, and will only become more difficult to combat given the pressures exerted by a larger and larger global population demanding a larger and larger portion of the planet's finite resource.

There are too many of us, in other words, and it is immoral to add to their number.

Some of these warnings have come off looking a bit extreme. For example, Australian Obstetrician Barry Walters has suggested that families pay a $5000 levy on the birth of a baby and then up to $800 annually in taxes to offset the child's greenhouse gas emissions(*). Even more radically, environmental activist Toni Vernelli has had herself sterilized so as to make it impossible to inflate her carbon footprint, an act which some have characterized as "selfless".

Such thinking makes Mr. Steyn uncomfortable, and indeed there are real issues with Ms. Vernelli's actions, which resemble a modern form of Flagellantism, of mortifying your flesh for the benefit of an angry Deity to demonstrate how sorry you are for your sins. More generally, however, Steyn writes:

A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have.

[...]

What's the "pro-choice" line? "Every child should be wanted"? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.

...which is furious blithering, but misses the point.

And seeing the point requires that we make a quick segue into the economics of global warming, especially into the concept of a discount rate. A discount rate is:

...a financial concept based on the future cash flow in lieu of the present value of the cash flow. The divisor in the discount rate formula is the resultant future value, including income.

In the context of climate change, the choice of a discount rate represents a value assigned by economists today to the lives of the unborn. Since most of the lousy results of Global Warming are decades down the road, a calculation as to what we should spend today to mitigate/adapt to the phenomenon involves deciding how well or badly off we feel comfortable leaving future generations. For example, it is a feature of The Stern Review that he sets his discount rate such that it treats the welfare of future generations as being as important as the welfare of this one. And it is a common criticism of his review that humans do not, as a matter of observed economic fact, treat the welfare of future generations in this manner.

As a matter of observed economic fact, we treat their welfare as being far less important than our own.

And, given all this, one can easily argue contra Steyn, who wants The West to breed like mad things so we have enough soldiers to fight his Culture War against dark skinned immigrants. Specifically, the argument is that, since it is quite possible we will end up doing little or nothing to adapt to/mitigate against global warming, it is indeed a good thing to refrain from having children. Having a child, deriving enjoyment from them, and then conveniently clocking out just as the environmental shit hits the fan, leaving them behind to deal with it, is immoral.

Now, Steyn himself is a denier. For him, its all a conspiracy of left-wing scientists and Al Gore to steal our precious freedoms etc. etc. And I suspect many of the Conservatives for whom he writes would agree with this position. But if Steyn or the movement ever wish to climb out of that particular intellectual ghetto, the ethics of rearing children in the teeth of a possible eco-catastrophe is a moral issue they will need to face up to.

(*) As an aside, the Barry Walters proposal noted above--that we should tax people for each child they bear--is in fact something I would approve of but for its relative inefficiency as a tax. Much more lucrative would be a simple charge on the act of fornication itself. Under my scheme every female in the population would be issued a coin-operated chastity belt, and unless the government was given its proper cut on each occasion, there would be no nookie. Monies from this tax could be in lieu of a carbon tax, and could be used for either mitigation or adaption purposes. This would be one practical method of funding that giant space mirror the geo-engineers have been talking about, and with dough left over we could probably build a stairway to Jupiter.

Because a perfect tax is a tax on something people will do anyway no matter how much you charge 'em.