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Feb. 13, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:21
644 Fertility and the State

As the State grows, the birthrate falls...

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's 5.30 on the 13th of February 2006.
I took a day, maybe a day and a bit off, from podcasting.
And I was going to take a little bit more time off, but I was having a look at an article this afternoon on the Mises Institute website, which is posted on the Freedom Main Radio board, if you'd like to dig in and have a look at it.
And it sort of got me to thinking...
And through getting me thinking, it sort of got me interested in having a chat about a rather deep and complicated topic, which is the topic of fertility.
And not verbal fertility, because in that sense I may be considered diuretic.
But really just in the realm of children and families and so on.
And so I wanted to sort of chat a little bit about that.
I've had and have, although a little bit less now than in the past, very deeply ambivalent relationships to the idea of having children or a deeply ambivalent relationship to the idea of having children.
And I wanted to sort of put my ideas out there and start a dialogue going in this area because I know that I'm not alone in this.
The fertility rate for the Western socialized or increasingly socialized and fascistic countries is pitiful.
And it's pitiful. It is far below reproduction rate.
I read an article on the Mises website where they're talking about how, like, what, a century ago it was five kids per family, now it's like 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and 2.0 in the U.S., but declining.
And one of the ideas or the arguments that was put forward by the writer of the article, I'm sorry, I can't remember his name, was that people have fewer children when there are old age pensions.
People have fewer children when there are old age pensions.
And this was sort of the central aspect of his article, and he touched on other issues, but this was the correlationary or the causal factor that he felt was essential in declining birth rates.
I just don't find that very satisfying.
I really, really don't find that very satisfying.
He's saying, well, you need to have children...
Because when you get old, the boomerang caretaking happens or kicks in, and your children then take care of you in the same way that you took care of them in the past, and blah, blah, blah.
I find this a deeply dissatisfying and non-causal answer, and I'll sort of share with no access to statistics, but just going through some of the reasoning, I thought I'd share it, and you can let me know what you think.
The need to have somebody take care of you when you get older, I don't view as a primary reason for having children unless you're sort of in a subsistence economy.
Or you're in an economy where it's impossible to keep your wealth and there's very little wealth to begin with.
Simply because children are very expensive, right?
So if you take the money that you would have spent on having children, all the medical bills, the clothing, the food, the schooling, all this kind of stuff, if you took all of that money And you invested it, you would end up with far more money than your children would likely be able to provide for you in your old age.
So I really don't believe that having children is some sort of hedge against the problems of old age.
So I'd like to sort of put that one to one side and look at some other reasonings or thoughts that might be relevant to this area.
So... If it's not old age and the need to take care of yourself in old age, which can be outsourced and paid for and so on, and of course you want people who are close to you when you're getting older, but basically what you need is nurses and medical care, medical care professionals and so on when you get older, and investing all this money in your children in the hopes that they're going to want to take care of you when you get older and not be subject to some sort of cats in the cradle nightmare where non-reciprocity is the order of the day seems a pretty non-winning kind of strategy.
Now, if you're in an environment where you're heavily taxed and you can't keep your money or you're not sure or there's no stock market to invest in and so on, well then sure, I can see how you would invest in children rather than investing in We're good to go.
I don't see that as the saving mechanisms for old age, the stock market instruments and so on that are available, the bonds, the debentures, all of this, I don't see since it's become so much easier to save for one's own old age.
I don't see how children remain any sort of significant or intelligent hedge.
If you put your money in the bank, it's almost for sure, I mean, all other things being equal, no economic catastrophes or whatever, all other things being equal, it's pretty much for sure you're going to have lots of money to retire on if you put the amount of money you were going to spend on your kids into the bank instead.
So maybe kids like a forced saving, I don't know, but you have far less risk If you just invest the money rather than have kids.
And also, of course, if there is an economic catastrophe, it's going to affect your children equally and so on and so on and so on.
So I don't think it's because someone's going to give you money or transfer resources when you get older.
Maybe you want a place to live when you get older, but that's not so much the case anymore.
So I don't really think it's a hedge against poverty and old age that causes people to have children.
I just don't think that's a good argument. So I think it's related, but it's not causal.
So it certainly is the case that when you have a very large and generous social security or old age pension scheme, that you do get a correlationary rise in childlessness or a decline in reproduction statistics.
But I think it's relational.
It's correlated.
It's not causal. There's some other factor that has an effect on this other than, well, any place where you...
Like, if all other things being equal, if you just had a high pension rate and everything was sort of pushed off in terms of savings, like it was just debt or whatever, then I think that it would not be the case that people would just stop having children.
Now, I know a fair number of childless couples, or couples who've had only one child, and I don't know anyone who's had more than two children, so of course this is what's dragging down the statistics as a whole.
Definitely it was a prior generation that had children.
The capacity for a single income earner to be able to produce the wealth that was required to have more than two children, which I'm sure would be fun but seems a little bit beyond the pale for a fair degree of time and energy.
So, in the past, it was pretty possible, in the 50s and so on, during the baby boom, it was pretty possible, in fact, relatively easy to have, you know, a house and a car and some decent appliances and two or three kids and so on, and to have all of that in the absence of a two-parent household.
Two parents working households.
Now, that's very hard to achieve, not impossible, but it's very hard to achieve that.
So, for me, just sort of looking at my life as a whole, my sort of choices around children, my ambivalence around children, which has always been very great.
I love children to death.
I think they're a great deal of fun, and they're a pleasure and a joy and an excitement to be around.
But a family life, as I see it, or as I've observed it, in the West, in Canada, and also in England, and a little bit in Africa, and to a smaller degree in the United States, well, family life just kind of sucks, from the outside, at least for me.
So, for me, if you want to have...
a decent home and one or two cars and the capacity to have vacations from time to time in some reasonable manner, you have to have two people working unless you've inherited a lot of money or unless you can find some other way of doing it.
I mean, Christine and I just went through our finances last night to sort of prepare ourselves for the great leap forward of Freedom Aid Radio.
And I mean, it's savage just how much money is getting hauled away in taxes and other kind of nonsense.
Up here it's ridiculous, right?
50% tax bracket, $4,300 a year in property taxes, taxes on just about everything else we touch.
I mean, it's lunatic, right?
So we get a pittance of what we make, and from that pittance, we have to pay an enormous amount of other taxes.
And so, overall, one person, as I talked about a fair long time back, I guess, in the podcast on feminism...
The mom works to pay for the state, and everything else is for the family, if you're lucky.
So, if you look at that kind of lifestyle, and if you've had the misfortune, or you could say the fortune, to see someone who's attempted or taken that kind of path, and I certainly have, my brother tried that, or did that when he was younger, then what you see when you look at family life is you kind of see the following, at least I did, and you can let me know what you think.
You see the bloatedness and unpleasantness of pregnancy, a painful childbirth, lack of sleep, lack of resources, lack of time, lack of money, and dragging yourself, and all of this being a very difficult and challenging environment to live in.
And if you are going to have two kids, you know, taking sort of the average of kids that are two years or two and a half years apart, then you're looking at five or six years of like the nightly wake up, exhausted, no time, no money, no sex, no hobbies, no time kind of gulag, right?
The baby gulag. And that, of course...
And there's very few people who would choose to have children if that was it, right?
Like, if your children got taken away from you when they were five, nobody would do it.
You just kind of... You get through that shit to get on, so to speak.
You get on with the fun stuff around parenting, which is when the kids get a little older and they can talk and you can teach them stuff and you can share ideas and all that kind of good stuff.
But at the beginning, they're just like...
Really inert and explosive puppies.
So I just don't think that is what most parents view as anything other than an investment into the more fun stuff to do with parenting, which comes later on.
But for most people, most parents in the West, that's it.
That's all you get. You get to stay home.
In Canada, we have a year maternity slash maternity leave.
So you get to stay home.
For the first six months, and of course in the U.S., it's like six or ten or eight or ten weeks.
So you get to stay home for the tough part, and let's say that you can manage it for the first little while, right?
Sort of financially, first year or two.
So you get to stay home for the toughest part and the least enjoyable part and the part where, yes, it's nice that they're cooing and blowing little spit bubbles and pooping and peeing on your forehead, but it's not really the fun stuff of parenting.
That stuff comes quite a bit later.
And that's sort of what you look for.
And then, lo and behold, you get to drag your sorry, exhausted ass off to work, right?
With shmegma and spittle and baby stuff thrown up on you and screaming babies that you hand off to a daycare worker or you hand off to someone else.
Or maybe you're lucky enough to have great-grandparents who don't mind raising kids again and raise your kids and so on.
But you get all of the exhausting, horrifying stuff of parenting and then you have to go back to work.
And you're both going back to work.
The day of a modern parent is like a slave, frankly.
I mean, you wake up, and when the kids are young, right, sort of preschool, five, six years old, you wake up at 6.30 or so, and you have to get yourself ready to go to work.
You have to get your kids ready, and of course, as somebody, since I worked in a daycare for a couple of years when I was a teenager, I know that it's like pushing string, getting kids to do stuff.
They're distracted, and they're not hurried, right?
They're not in a rush, and so, of course, the parents get stressed and aggressive, but you have to get your kids ready.
You have to feed them. You may have to bathe them.
You have, of course, an enormous amount of extra housework to do with kids around, the cleaning, the ironing, the washing, the Everything, you know, medical staff taking the finoculations and checkups and dentists and all this, right?
But anyway, just sort of the typical day of a parent, you get up at 6, 6.30 in the morning and you're kind of, you've got an hourglass, right?
Adults have hourglasses, children don't, right?
That's one of the big mismatches between working parents and kids.
For the working parents, everything is like, it's like a fuse going down in the Roadrunner cartoon.
Whereas kids are just like living in the now, right?
So one person is Donald Trump, the other person is some spaced out, drugged up Tibetan monk who's more than happy to watch his toenails grow.
And that lack of time pressure combined with an extremity of time pressure is what causes a lot of stress in families.
So you get your kids fed and then you've got to get them all bundled up, right?
And now up here in Canada, getting your kids out for half the year or more is quite the Halliburton long-term equipage of the soldiery kind of a problem.
You've got to find your shoes. You've got to find your gloves.
You've got to get the hats. You've got to dress the kids and then you've got to dress another kid.
But of course, if you dress the kids too much, they get cranky because they're too hot sitting and they're standing in their snowsuit by the radiator.
So it's a real juggle.
It's a real juggle and you've got to have everything ready.
Everything's got to be there. Everything's got to be good to go.
It's like launching a space shuttle, right?
You can't leave the helmet behind and get it later.
So then you get your kids into the car, and they're cranky, and you're cranky, and now nobody's having any fun, right?
Because this is like getting kids to go to a daycare or drop them off somewhere.
That's no fun at all. So then you barrel off to drop the kids off at 8 o'clock for daycare, and maybe it's a half-hour drive or a 20-minute drive or whatever.
And then you drop them off, and you can't just sort of, you know, there's no ejector seat that you send these little starfish, sort of spiraling starfish in snowsuits children out of the window.
Hey, kids, see you later.
And you've got to unbuckle them.
You've got to chat with them. They might be cranky.
They might be sad. They might have forgotten something.
They might be worried. They might be stressed.
They might be whatever, right?
So that you've got to disentangle and disengage yourself from your children when you drop them off at the daycare.
And then sort of heart hammering and hands trembling, you jump into the traffic to go and drive to your work, which might be an hour, right?
So then by the time you get to your job at 9 or 9.15, and there's almost no parents who get there at 9, right?
It's too many variables. You're already pretty shaken up.
You've had a stressful morning. You've been up for three hours or two and a half hours, and now you've got a full workday.
And you do that.
Maybe you can try and get in touch with your kids.
Probably not over lunch, as some of them have the nanny cams and so on.
But then what you do is, at the end of your workday, or close to the end of your workday, you've got all this stuff going on.
And people are phoning, emails are coming in, things that you've got to get done, and you face the time pressure of getting out, right?
Getting out, got to get to my kids.
And then you've got the stress of the traffic as you drive to the daycare, and the daycare people get upset if you're late, and your kids get cranky, and then you pick up your kids at like 6 o'clock.
So you drop them off at 8 and you pick them up at 6.
So there's a nice toasty 10 hours of not being around your children and not really having enjoyed them in the morning because you're on a mission.
You've got to get your kids dropped off somewhere.
And then you drive your kids home and you're trying to slow down from your day and you're panicking.
How was your day? And this and that.
And your kids might be happy. They might have had problems.
They might be cranky. They might be fine.
Who knows, right? But you get your kids home and then there's the great unloading and you have to unpack everything.
And you've got to get your kids into the house, and you've got to peel off all the layers, you've got to hang them up in the proper place to make sure that you don't lose them, and then your kid has lost something, left it in the car, so you go back and check the car, and then they burst into tears because they think they've left it at daycare, and you remember to check in the morning, but you've got to check at home, and all of this kind of stuff, right? This is just the natural detritus of moving kids around.
They get trailed by enormous amounts of stuff, especially in a cold climate like Canada's.
So then your kids are hungry, right?
Now it's 6.30 and your kids are starving.
And you're starving. Although maybe you, I don't know, keep a stash of muffins in the car or something.
Which in Canada is good because it's cold and they'll keep, right?
So then you've got to cook them dinner, right?
And then you've got to cook them dinner, and they have questions, they have comments, they have issues, they have problems, they fight, then you're trying to get dinner, right?
Your wife comes home, your husband comes home, and he'll take the kids for a while while you cook dinner.
So one of them has to, especially if the kids are young, one of you has to take the kids and do something with them, and so many parents, of course, will just plop the kids down in front of a video or something, TV, the great babysitter, the electric eye that irradiates your children's souls.
Not because TV's bad, it's just you haven't seen them all day, right?
But that's the great temptation.
Video games or whatever.
So then, you have no time to get caught up with your spouse.
You've got to feed your kids, and then you've got to clean up dinner and so on.
By 7.30 or 8 o'clock, you've done all of that sort of stuff.
And then what? Well, then kids have to be bathed and all this kind of stuff.
They might have some homework if they're getting older, but let's just say they're young.
They've got to be bathed, so someone's got to do that, right?
And all of this is a mission, right?
You're just moving forward the pieces on the board that are resisting or being inert or moving back.
It really is like trying to push water uphill sometimes.
And all of this is a mission.
All of this is moving from one damn thing to the next.
One damn thing to the next.
And you're not enjoying your children.
You're hurting them. You're like somebody with livestock.
You've got to get them to do something or go somewhere or eat something or whatever the whole time.
And then 8.30, if you finish their bath, you've got to get them to bed.
But the children and you have not really interacted at any point during the day, other than go here, do this, wear your glove, which is not any fun, right?
There's no richness in that. There's no beauty in that.
There's no tenderness. There's just herding in that, herding with cattle prods of barbed statements.
And so then your kids don't want to go to bed and they're disconnected and they're, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So then you've got that whole hassle and maybe you get them to bed by sort of 8.30 or 9 o'clock.
And then you're done, right?
And you've got to tidy up mess.
You've got to, you know, whatever. Clean up the bathroom from the baths and all that kind of stuff.
And then your kids come out again.
And basically, because you've got to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning again, and most sane human beings need 6 or 7 hours at least to sleep, you've got like an hour or two.
Where you've also got to get them ready for the next day.
You've got to check everything's there for the next day.
You may have to make them their lunch.
You may have to do X, Y, and Z. There may be notes you have to read.
There's stuff you've got to plan to do with the kids, doctor's appointments and dentist appointments and all that kind of stuff.
And then you go to bed.
And the next day, the whole thing starts all over again.
Well, frankly, that's a complete nightmare for me.
And maybe I'm a cold-hearted, selfish guy, but that is not something that looks like any kind of fun to me.
That is not something that looks like any kind of fun for me.
Frankly, to me, to be perfectly blunt, it looks like a curse.
It looks like you've disturbed the ancient pharaoh burial grounds of the anti-gods of little children and sleeplessness, and you have triggered a curse upon your family.
It looks like a burden.
It looks like a sentence to me.
I've seen this from the outside.
I've inhabited it to some degree from the inside when I lived with my brother and he had small kids.
It's a nightmare. Your life is just plodding from one day to the next and there's really no point to it all.
You're either hurting your kids or you're away from your kids.
You're actually not with your kids at any particular time.
And this doesn't even count when they get a little bit older and you have all of the hellish joys of them getting involved in sports.
Ah, gymnastics, horse riding, they become swimmers, they become soccer players, they go to brownies, they get all this sort of stuff, right?
So... The guy I worked with was saying the other day, it's like, oh yeah, like twice this last week I got home, I'm cooking my kids dinner, they're cranky, and then my wife phones and says, you know, you've got to get them to brownies in 20 minutes, and I'm just halfway through cooking a meal.
It's like, what a nightmare.
You've got to hurl everything down, remember to turn the stove off, drive them out, pick something up at McDonald's on the way through, go, go, go, rush, rush, rush, get them, get them, get them somewhere.
Oh my God, what a complete and total nightmare, and what a nightmare for the children.
And what a nightmare for the children.
And I've written about some of this in The God of Atheists, so if you have a copy of that novel available for the mere donation of $50, then you can listen to it or read it, and I've sort of talked about some of this.
But what a nightmare. What a complete and total nightmare.
That is not something that I would ever really want to sign up to.
Now, as a father, or as a potential father...
I would be more content if I was working eight hours a day with a short commute.
I would be comfortable with that.
But frankly, I've never really liked the idea of being the hunter-gatherer guy who goes out and picks up the money for a wife and kids who stay home.
Because that just seems like...
Well, aren't we sort of missing something here?
Like, it's great that I get to spend...
An hour with the kids each night, but that's not really much of being a father.
Biologically, fathers aren't supposed to be gone for almost all the day and then kept awake at night.
Because then, I mean, I'm awake at night because the kids are up or the babies are screaming or whatever, and then I get up, I say hi to the kids in the morning, I go to work, I come home, I say hi to my kids a little bit, and it's much more civilized if one partner is staying home, and it could be the husband, it could be the wife, who knows, right?
But, you know, for me, the whole breastfeeding thing is fairly important, even now that I'm 40.
Anyway, we'll come back to that another time.
But that just didn't seem to be a whole lot of fun for me.
I mean, you get the weekends and that's great, but it's not much fun being a father during the weekdays because you get maybe an hour, hour and a half with your kids, maybe two a day.
And that doesn't seem quite as much fun for me.
I'd much rather work part-time and spend time with my kids and maybe rotate with my wife or anything like that.
If I'm going to do it, I want to be able to do it and be there.
I don't want kids to be a sort of afterthought.
So, That's just me, though.
I know that there are lots of people who are comfortable with that.
I like kids so much that I don't want to be away from them.
And part of the decision for Freedom Aid Radio is just I enjoy spending so much time with my wife that anything I can do to increase that would be fantastic.
Every day that I'm away from her, it's just a day less that I'll get to spend with her because we're going to die one day and we don't get any time back later.
So the...
The vision of what it is to be a modern parent just looks like a complete nightmare if you've got two people working.
If you've got one person working, that's sort of better.
To me, that's got a lot to do with it.
Now, there are other factors sort of involved as well, which is that marriage is no longer the exclusive domain of sexuality.
In fact, it really couldn't be unless you're really, really abstinence-based religious, in which case you're just having anal sex.
This extended childhood that we just have to slog our way through to make anything decent out of our lives these days is a real negative towards, I think, having kids at any kind of decent young age.
So I graduated from high school at 18.
I worked for a year and a half up north.
I went to school when I was 20, and I graduated when I was 24.
And so I've already been sort of sexually mature for a decade.
You know, is somebody going to say, well, you really shouldn't have any sex until you get married?
It's like, yeah, right.
I'd like to concentrate on something once in a while.
So people get into this habit of having sexual relationships without any commitment, and certainly if there is a commitment without any real dire sense of marriage or children or anything like that, certainly not children.
And that sort of disconnects things.
And for me, that was just kind of...
You know, it'll happen when it happens.
There was sort of no pressing need for me in my 20s and sort of early 30s to sort of figure out I've got to get this family thing done because I was kind of in a protracted adolescence.
And part of that was...
I mean, most of that was school.
Part of that was culture and so on.
But then what happens for me, at least, or at least what happened or what is sort of part of my thinking around this sort of area...
Is that children are a very grave responsibility in so many ways.
But I remember an old WKRP where I think Carlson's wife gets pregnant when she's, I don't know, 45 or something.
And he says, oh, I don't know if we should have this kid or whatever.
These are troubled times.
And she says, well, you know, people have been saying that for the last 2,000 years.
And that's true, but there was no birth control, right?
So that's sort of a whole different kind of thing, and there was religion, and there was all of that kind of stuff.
So sexuality, which of course is nature's cattle prod to have children, is disconnected from that.
So we can pursue that pleasure without having children.
But as far as the whole troubled times argument goes, there are two aspects of it that's really sort of sunk into my consciousness.
And when I was going through therapy, one of the One of the conversations I had with myself was around children.
It is not ignoble to unplug the blind photocopier, which was the statement that was rolling around in my brain at the time.
I'm not saying that's entirely my opinion, but I know where it was coming from.
I think are important around responsibility for the future of children.
You don't have children for yourself.
You have children for children.
Of course, yourself and your interests are involved in that, but it's more than just, ooh, they'll love me and they'll look cute in booties, which they do.
But you have children for the sake of a good life for your children.
And so for me, there were two aspects and continue to remain two aspects that trouble me with regards to having children and bringing them up and giving them the world of the future, which is that there's a personal level of doubt and fear about the future and there is a sociological or larger society level of doubt and fear about the future.
Now at the personal level, I've talked about this briefly, well before, so I'll just talk about it now briefly.
I have had such a multifarious career.
I have never been able to find a real solid niche that makes me feel secure that I'm not going to have any problems in terms of layoffs and job demand and so on.
I mean, if you're a lawyer or a doctor, maybe it's different, but in the software realm and in the executive realm and so on, it's all just very, very exciting.
And I've never been much of a networker.
I hate doing that kind of stuff.
It just feels manipulative. I'm not saying it is.
That's how it feels to me.
So, naturally, I'm not any good at it.
I have...
A relatively strong desire for innovation, so I've done management and technical and sales and now marketing and so on.
But I've never had the kind of job offers or the proliferation of job offers or the ability to negotiate with that kind of stuff where I felt like, wow, this is a rock-solid career.
And there's a lot of reasons for that, some of which are my issues, some of which are not.
But at a personal level I've never really sort of felt that I have the financial stability and security to be able to provide a stable income for my family.
I've been through two major recessions, which were just general in economics.
I've been through an enormous crash in terms of the tech sector in 2001.
I've gone through more roller coasters in my stock portfolio than I'd even care to mention.
But all of this sort of combines for me to say, well, you know...
I don't feel like we've got a huge bedrock to build the old DNA pyramid on, so let's just wait till that sorts itself out a little bit.
I've never really felt stable in that kind of way.
And it's not that I feel like I couldn't make any money.
I mean, whatever happens, I could make money.
There's a larger sort of issue, some of which is sort of personal, and the larger one is sociological.
The one that's more personal is, well, tax rates just keep going up and services keep going down.
And it's all these damn little things, like, you know, tax at 60%, but now I have to pay for more of my own dentistry.
Now I have to pay for my own eye exams.
Now I have to pay for this, that, and the other.
Now companies are cutting back on benefits because the corporate tax rate went up, so now I have to pay for X, Y, and Z. So...
It's just there's the tax rates from the government, but then there's just the general whittling that occurs from everything else.
So there's that aspect that's sort of totally beyond my control.
You can cut back your spending, but you can't make the government stop taxing you to death or offloading, while keeping the tax rates high, just offloading more and more costs onto you.
So there's that aspect. Another aspect, though, in the sort of general sociological stuff is...
I'm no economic fool.
I can see the writing on the wall, right?
The unfunded liabilities of the US government amount to $450,000 per family.
Where is that going to go?
Well, it's going to go to bankruptcy. We, as a country that has the longest undefended 49th parallel border with the largest trading partner in the unknown universe, if the US economy has a sudden and severe crash, then all bets are off, right?
What's going to happen? What's going to happen?
Well, bad things, right?
If they doubled income taxes and personal taxes and sales taxes and corporate taxes, they could start to deal with some of these unfunded liabilities.
But, of course, that's pure nonsense because if they did all of that, then...
There would be an economic crash to the point where, you know, you don't get to double taxes and get double the money, right?
That never happens.
Ooh, the snow's beginning. How exciting.
30 centimeters of snow around here tonight, so naturally I won't be going to the office tomorrow.
So, for me, I can sort of see the writing on the wall as far as the economy goes, and that has two particular fears for me, right?
The first, of course, is at a personal level that I simply would not be able to make any money to feed my family.
And that's stressful enough, of course, if it's just you, when you have kids.
Well, it's catastrophic, right?
That's not the kind of life that I would...
I would rather not have kids than have to deal with that kind of stuff where there's a massive recession, there's 30% unemployment, you can't get a job for love or money.
And I've been in that sort of situation before.
Youth unemployment was around 20-25% during the recession that I had to deal with in the early 90s.
And, of course, there was another one in the 80s.
And so I know what that's like.
I mean, you can't get anything.
This is where I ended up weeding gardens and being a babysitter for old people and just anything, right?
It's not enough to raise a family on.
So I just don't view that as being particularly productive.
The other thing, of course, is what kind of world are my children going to grow up into?
I know.
I mean, it's totally clear where government spending, government power, warfare, welfare, where all of that's going.
And, yes, I do believe that there is a lot that can be done to try and turn things around when they crash.
But for sure, they're going to crash.
And maybe by the time I finish this podcast, but probably not more than a couple of years, five, ten years afterwards, there's going to be a monstrous crash.
And so there's the personal fear of sort of trying to feed the family, so to speak, but then there's also...
The concern about what kind of life are my kids going to inherit?
Are they going to end up in some sort of Cuba-like economy where nothing really can be achieved and they just plot to work at some sort of low-rent state job and never have any possibility to express themselves?
What a nightmare! For me, of course, if I do have kids, then I can't do this kind of work nearly as much.
Certainly, if I'm working full-time, it would have to pretty much stop, right?
So if I have kids, it's like I don't do my part to make the world better for other people's children and don't make the world better for my own kids.
If I don't have kids, or I get to do this while having kids at home, then I have more capacity to make the world better for my own kids.
There's, of course, no guarantee whatsoever.
So these are sort of some of the decision points that I've had or made around children.
Love the little tykes. Would love to have kids.
I mean, for me, the ideal, and this is sort of what we're working towards as a family, is if we have kids, then I can stay home and do Freedom Aid Radio, and Christina can work home or close to home with her patients, and I mean, that would just be a bliss, a blissful life, and I think that would be great.
So that's sort of one of the ways that I'm trying to find a more palatable way to have kids.
To me, it's a whole lot more complicated than...
I mean, I've never thought, oh, I have an old-age pension, and therefore I don't have to have kids.
And the reason is, of course, I remember talking about this even in junior high school, right?
This is the persipacity and intelligence of children that, in junior high school, I remember very, very clearly, long before I was political, a number of friends and I simply saying that...
There's just no way the old age pension is going to be around when we retire.
Even being like 14 years old or 15 years old, that was very clear.
That was all just nonsense.
This is how children get their society.
It takes a lot of education to get children to stop loving that kind of stuff.
As we talked about on Sunday, children hate war, but when they get to be adults, they don't because they go through the public school system.
Now there's that, and the last sort of thing that I'll mention is that there's all then those other difficulties around having children in a crazy world, right?
In a world full of really crazy, sick people.
Except for you, me, and 12 other listeners, to be later named.
Which is, okay, so what am I going to do?
I'm going to send my kids to public school?
Well, great. Then they get to learn all this statism.
They get to learn all this environmental stuff.
They become little tyrant nags in the 1984 model.
And I've got to spend all the rest of my time and energy trying to deprogram them.
And then if I do successfully deprogram them, I have to then answer their questions as to why the hell I sent them to the government schools to begin with, since I dislike the government so much and disagree with everything that it uses to indoctrinate children.
Well, that either means private school, but then private school is just going to be a whole bunch of other crazy people, or it means homeschooling.
And homeschooling has its own level of excitement and all that kind of stuff, right?
So there's all that stuff.
And then there's my kids go to play with my neighbors.
My neighbor happens to be Christian.
His son proudly marched over to show me a picture he drew of Christ.
And I said, oh, cool, a guy with a beard, right?
To which he was rather startled.
But then my kids are going to say there is no God to other kids, and those other kids' parents are going to go rangy, and there's going to be this.
I mean, there is a whole quagmire of hellishness around dealing with other parents, and there's someone on the board who's going through this very issue at the moment.
And there's, you know, children invite a whole bunch of crazy people into your life, like it or not, play dates, other kids' parents, and so on.
So there's that aspect as well, that it means sharing your life with a whole bunch more crazy people than you have to if you're not so much with the kids.
And then you also have that challenge of children are too young to explain why you're a sort of person-hating...
Bested like me. They're too young to understand that, right?
They just want to go to the guy's house who's got a wee, right?
And so his father happens to be a socialist professor or who is a cop or something like that.
And you've got to say, hey, a wee is fun, but not for me.
Unwee for daddy because he has integrity and the kids are going to go rangy and they're not going to understand why and it's just going to look like meanness and cruelty and maybe they'll...
Forgive me when they get older and all this kind of stuff, right?
So when the world is very corrupt, there's a lot of challenges involved, and I see all of those.
And please understand me when I say I do see all the pluses of raising kids and having kids and the love and the joy and the wonder and the exploration.
I get all of that, so please don't imagine that I'm arguing because I think that people shouldn't have kids.
I'm just talking about... And ways in which the kid's thing is unsettling or a negative experience or potential experience for me.
So, you know, don't flame me with, I can't believe you hate children, and so on.
I wouldn't be having this conversation.
I don't have these conversations with, gee, I really want to be an accountant.
You shouldn't be an accountant because I don't want to be an accountant, right?
So... You know, that's live and let live, but I want kids, and so the corollary of that is looking at the negatives and why I haven't had them yet and so on.
Because, you know, when I want something, I generally tend to do it, right?
So the question is sort of why.
And these are sort of the issues that have been rolling around in my head.
Now, they haven't pushed me over to the side of no kids, but they certainly have made it less pressing, let's say, to have the children.
It just, I get how difficult and hellish it's going to be all around and all over to have the kids.
And I get all the pluses.
I mean, I really do love kids.
But I think that when this guy wrote this article and said people don't have kids because there's old age pensions, I think that there's a whole lot more in that.
And for me, a lot of free domain radio and the goal that I have, which I'm sort of working on, of executing a bailout strategy immediately or over time to do it full time, has something to do with the fact that I'm tired of the rat race and see it leading has something to do with the fact that I'm tired of And it's not that I don't enjoy my job or anything.
I just kind of get that it's not going to lead to anything that's sort of stable and permanent.
You just talk to too many people who have these pieced together stressful careers, and that is not something which has led me to feel that I have enough control over my own economic destiny to be able to take the commitment of having children.
So for me, it all sort of comes together in a very large number of ways to help me at least understand why I don't have kids yet, but that's certainly something which I'm willing to listen to from those who do, and I certainly appreciate you listening to this.
Please send me some donations.
It's been a little dry lately. I really do appreciate if you could throw me some money.
It makes it all worthwhile.
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