Freedom Line Blog

Vice President Biden was at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, yesterday for an address on U.S.–Chinese relations. Looking over his remarks, one gets to thinking that the Taiwan Strait is nowhere near as dangerous a space as the distance between Biden and a hot microphone.

Biden, remember, is a scholar of everything, prone to confusing the ridiculous with the sublime, and loquacious in inverse correlation to his erudition. So it should come as no surprise that the Vice President felt free to weigh in on the dynamics of Chinese society. The particular angle he chose, however, may surprise. From the remarks:

You have no safety net.  Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.  The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people.  Not sustainable.

Leave it to Biden, the court jester of an administration that has shown no regard whatsoever for fiscal prudence, to reduce what has been called “the biggest single holocaust in human history” to an accounting problem.

In that conceit, Biden is not so different from the Communist Chinese who created the one-child policy. Their rationale, after all, was to reduce the burden on Chinese society that would stem from population growth. In essence, it is a tyranny of the living over the unborn — an ideal that could not be further removed from the Declaration of Independence’s promise of rights given by God. In China, the most basic right of all — the right to life, which has pride of place in the Declaration’s enumeration — is a function of one’s perceived worth to society.

That, Mr. Vice President, is worth ‘second-guessing’. As for your glib dismissal of the moral stain imposed by China’s macabre exercise in totalitarianism? “Not sustainable.”

The Wall Street Journal reports China’s controversial one-child policy will have disastrous effects on the country’s capacity for economic growth, a stunning rebuke to policymakers who argue that predetermining fertility rates is key to eliminating poverty.

Since the one-child-per-couple policy went into effect in 1980, over 400 million births have been prevented, decreasing the amount of poor people and thus the rate of poverty.  (Though since the policy applies to everyone, it has also reduced the amount of children born to middle class and wealthy families; i.e. those most likely to produce entrepreneurs and innovators.)

An informal advocacy group in China is trying to overturn the one-child policy because of a generational imbalance that threatens continued economic growth:

They say China’s elderly population is expanding rapidly as Mao-era baby boomers retire, putting new burdens on society to cover the cost of their retirement. At the same time, China’s labor force is due to start shrinking in 2016, reversing the demographic phenomenon of a widening pool of low-cost labor that powered a manufacturing boom over the past three decades.

It takes people to grow an economy.  If Chinese policymakers continue to eliminate entrepreneurs and workers from the economy, they will soon experience the same chilling effects of the demographic winter settling in over Western Europe and Japan.