Transcript: Polygamy, Birth Rates, and Libertarianism

Controversies in Libertarianism, Podcast 8

Date of recording: September 16, 2025, The Savvy Street Show

Host: Vinay Kolhatkar. Guests: Walter Block, Roger Bissell

 

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

 

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Good evening and welcome back to The Savvy Street Show. Today is podcast eight, the last one in the series, “Controversies in Libertarianism.” Once again, we have the eminent economist and libertarian legend, Walter Block. Welcome to the show, Walter.

 

Walter Block

Thanks for having me again. It’s always a pleasure.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. We also have my co-host with whom I keep switching hats. (They are invisible.) Today he is an esteemed guest and the co-author with me of Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics. Welcome to the show, Roger Bissell.

 

Roger Bissell

Good to be back here again with both of you.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

We’re talking about things that are not normally talked about in libertarianism.

Thank you. We are going to jump onto question one. Our topic is quite difficult today. We’re talking about things that are not normally talked about in libertarianism. Polygamy, birth rates, “Is marriage only a contract or an institution?” and so on. So, the first question I’ll direct toward Walter: Can consensual polygamy among consenting adults be un-libertarian in any way? And if your answer is no, why is it that polygamy has been typically kosher in only primitive and authoritarian societies, but not in the so-called civilized, advanced, industrial economies?

Over to you, Walter.

 

Walter Block

The first question, I think, is much more important and more interesting, at least to me, but let me try to address the last question first, which I think is relatively unimportant: Why do we have polygamy in historical times or many years ago and not now? I think because things were much rougher then, and there were fewer men because the men were killing each other. Therefore, if you had very few men and a whole bunch of women, polygamy makes some sort of sense. It’s interesting that in China, when they had the one-child policy for many years, a lot of people chose boys. Now in China, my understanding is, you almost have polyandry. I don’t know if they had polyandry, but they have so many males and so few females that one would think that polyandry, namely, one wife and five husbands, would be okay.

Polygamy is perfectly compatible with libertarianism because to me, libertarianism means anything between consenting adults, and we’re talking about consenting adults.

But I want to address the other question and broaden it a little bit. Yes, I think that polygamy is perfectly compatible with libertarianism because to me, libertarianism means anything between consenting adults, and we’re talking about consenting adults. If one man wants to have five wives or ten or whatever, and they all agree, fine—and polyandry, namely if one woman wants to have five or ten husbands, and they all agree, again, fine. Now, there was a very, very libertarian book, Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and if you haven’t read that book and you’re a libertarian, you’re missing out. It’s a magnificent book. There he had neither polyandry nor polygamy. He had group marriage, and maybe there would be five women and seven men or eight men and four women or various combinations. That seems eminently reasonable to me, as do gay marriages or lesbian marriages—and it could be four or five gay men or six or seven lesbian women having a marriage. It need not be always two.

[Incest is] violating no libertarian law.

Now, the much more interesting and controversial issue is: what about incest? Suppose you have a brother and a sister or a mother and a son or whatever. I’m going to step out on a limb, and this probably won’t play in Peoria, as they say, but I would say that they are violating no libertarian law. I’m not gay. I have one wife. I don’t want to be in any of these things, but that’s a different issue—my own personal taste. We’re not discussing my own personal taste now. We’re discussing, should you go to jail? Because that’s the only question that libertarians ask. Are you violating rights? You should go to jail. Well, are you violating rights if you agree to engage in any of these groups? I say you’re not violating the law [i.e., the natural law, rights], so they should all be legal. Whether they’re all moral is a very different issue, and libertarianism doesn’t concern itself with morality. Well, it does concern itself with morality, but only a small slice of morality, namely legality. What should be the law? What should be legal? And I say that my understanding of libertarianism is that “anything goes” between consenting adults.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, before I turn to Roger, I wanted to add to that one thing that you said, the group marriage, I had expressed in an article [the idea of] “marriage every which way, any which way,” and that upset the other Walter (Donway) so much he threatened to resign from Savvy Street. This is when gay marriage was being legalized. I did give him an example of a brother and sister cohabiting [that was] not necessarily incest. Who said there should be sex within marriage? But that was because the US has laws which benefit married couples. So, why does anyone take advantage of the tax laws? So, over to Roger, the same question, with the any which way/every which way marriage added on into the discussion, the group marriage, hippie marriage.

 

Roger Bissell

I shudder at the thought, for myself, of polygamy, of having more than one wife. I tried having more than one girlfriend when I was younger, and that never turned out well [laughter]. Some of the young ladies involved are still around, so I won’t say anything more about that. But I don’t think there’s anything inherent in polygamy, or in marriage in general, that has to result in somebody’s rights being violated, and to me, that’s the definition of anti-libertarian. Any time that you voluntarily interact with other people, someone might step on somebody else’s toes. Consenting adults aren’t immune to aggression, but we’re not unavoidably at risk either. You have to place your money and take your bet, or however they say that. There are bad people everywhere, and you have to use your discretion. Sometimes you have to live and learn. But are there risks?

We address whether it should be legal or moral, but there’s another issue of whether it’s prudent.

We address whether it should be legal or moral, but there’s another issue of whether it’s prudent. Are there risks involved that you don’t have in two-spouse marriages? Yes, to some extent, just like in corporations with multiple corporate partners, as opposed to a two-person partnership, but there are no guarantees either way. You might have a great corporate thing and a lousy two-person partnership, right? Or vice versa, or everything is good, or nothing’s good. Maybe you’re not cut out for marriage, or maybe you’re [only] cut out for a certain kind of marriage. The main problem with a plural arrangement when something goes wrong is that it’s harder to work it out in court. It’s more tangled and has more moving parts as they say. But as long as people can come and go freely, there’s nothing inherently anti-libertarian [in it]. It really depends on what people actually do to each other, not what kind of arrangement they have.

I know there are libertarians who have a broader view of what is unlibertarian. We touched on this several weeks ago. Some people think that corporations are inherently oppressive, and the nuclear family is inherently oppressive, because somebody’s going to be boss. The man at the top or the woman at the top calls the shots. Everybody else submits and gets bossed around, and this is tyrannical, right? Well, this can happen in corporations and plural marriages, but it can happen in a [business or] marriage partnership, too. Usually, it’s the man who is the boss, but sometimes the woman wears the pants in the family, and that happened in Ayn Rand’s marriage. She made all the income. Her husband, Frank, was basically just a homemaker and a companion. Fair enough. But when it came to Rand thinking, “Hey, maybe an outside romantic relationship would be just fine,” she pressured her husband and the guy’s wife who was her best friend. “Hey, we want to do this.” I know that there must’ve been some kind of at least intellectual pressure and intimidation like, “We are very rational, and surely you must approve of this.”

Well, I think that’s similar to what happens in some of the male-dominated plural marriages, like they have in that one branch of the Mormon church. Is it anti-libertarian? Well, by the definition we all go by, no. Can it be inhumane or sociopathic? Well, yes, but there are sociopaths all around us, and most of them don’t engage in aggression. They don’t break the law. They don’t violate our rights. They might make our lives more miserable at times than they should, but people need to take responsibility and be adults and try to be careful what they’re getting into and not just jump into [marriage] and treat it like it’s a frolic. Marriage is a more serious deal. It’s not just dating, or it shouldn’t be just dating. You’re serious.

Now, my wife has studied various cultures. She says when a polygamous married Mormon woman has children, and she’s abused by her husband, she’s threatened that if she reports him to the authorities, the children will be taken away. That’s kind of blackmail, and polygamy is currently illegal, so it’s really tough to fight against that because the woman is between a rock and a hard place. She’s trapped into going along with the abuse because otherwise she might lose her kids. That is unlibertarian, but I don’t know if that’s typical. Maybe it is. I’m glad I don’t know the situation well enough to be able to say. I just know that my wife has studied it, and she’s paid a lot more attention to it than I have, and she knows that some women have a really difficult time, and that it borders on rights violation. But in general, no, I’m with Walter. “Whatever floats your boat.”

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Polyandry, one woman, many husbands—polygyny, one man, many wives—and polygamy is both included.

Okay, I just want to clear the definitions here. Polyandry, one woman, many husbands—polygyny, one man, many wives—and polygamy is both included. So, we don’t have to specify which one it is if it’s polygamy: many spouses [of one gender] and one individual [of the other]. I have a division of duties in my house. My wife is the boss of the kitchen and of the bedroom, and I’m the boss of the living room and particularly of the TV remote. I can’t let it go; that’s in my hands [laughter].

Coming back to the marital contract: now, Ayn Rand said she believed in the institution of marriage. I’m not so clear on what she meant by that because there is a contract, but at least in Australia, the family law court intervenes in the contract and very often disregards prenups. So, if we just had a contract, you could have three women, one man, two men, six women, whatever. It’s just a contract. What if it breaks up? It’s like a legal partnership. They always specify what happens if you break up, who gets what, and sometimes they still fight. So, shouldn’t the marital contract itself be like any other contract: outside the scope of government, but not outside the scope of the courts, if you have an alleged breach of contract? So, over to Roger first this time, because he might know what Ayn Rand meant.

 

Roger Bissell

Sure. I think what you said is exactly the way I look at it. Marriage contracts are parallel to business contracts. I don’t think government should be trying to impose moral behavior on spouses or corporate officers other than [to make them] pay a penalty if they don’t [keep their agreements]. I think that some of the grounds for divorce should be stripped out of the marriage laws. I mean, it should be just incompatibility. If you’re incompatible, okay, “We’re out of here.”

Rand said: “Marriage should be treated like a business deal.”

As far as what Rand said, you’ll like this, if you haven’t heard her interview with Mike Wallace from 1959: “Marriage should be treated like a business deal.” So, there you are. And what she meant was that people are coming together on the basis of mutual interest, and they are trading values. You would think, though, that if you’re marrying someone, as opposed to just hanging out with them, they would be your highest value, “This person is really it for me,” and there’d be love and respect. But there are marriages of convenience and marriages of companionship.

As far as what [kind of] marriage Rand actually had with Frank O’Connor, maybe it varied from time to time, I don’t know, but the fact that she had that relationship with her protege, suggests that Frank wasn’t always her highest value. Or maybe she just didn’t put such a premium on marital faithfulness, fidelity, as some other people would. And really, your contract or agreement is between the two of you. I know in some, in some states—in the old days, anyway—they would legally punish infidelity. I don’t know if this is done very much anymore. I hope not. But if people want some background on this, if they’re morbidly curious—and, for me, that was 30 or 40 years ago when I satisfied my own morbid curiosity—Barbara Branden wrote a biography of Rand called The Passion of Ayn Rand. There’s even a movie about it. And Nathaniel Branden wrote about it also in [his memoir] Judgment Day. You’ll get all you’d ever want to read about [the affair]. If you want to hear the other side, James Valliant wrote a book called The Passion of Ayn Rand’s Critics. I would buy a used copy and dispose of it discreetly after reading. Anyway, Rand had a rather interesting, perhaps unconventional view of marriage.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, Walter, over to you. Should it just be like any other contract?

 

Walter Block

Yes, I agree with Roger on that. I wanted to do the counterpoint to what Vinay said about how he’s the boss of the living room, and his wife is the boss of the kitchen. I’ve been with my wife for 55 years. I think that’s a long time, and we’re still together, and my wife is in charge of everything except two things. She wants me to retire, and I don’t want to retire. Also, she’s not a libertarian, and I’m not giving up libertarianism. But everything else, should I get a haircut, not a haircut, what should I wear, what should we eat, where should we go, she’s in charge of everything.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Me [in my case], too, but I’ve hung on to the TV remote.

 

Walter Block

No, she’s in charge of that [as well] in my marriage. But I wanted to take up one thing that Roger said, and I don’t know if he meant it seriously or it was just a slip of the tongue, but I want to correct it. What he said, if I can put words in his mouth, was that some women, especially Mormon women of a certain sect that still carries on with polygamy, feel blackmailed. I think the proper word would be “extorted” or “extortion,” because blackmail should be legal, [while] extortion should be prohibited by law. In both cases, there was a threat: “Give me money,” or sexual services or something like that. [Roger: It was a typo (using Walter’s personal label for misspeaking oneself, such as by using the wrong word).]

Let me just expand on this for the audience, because we have a libertarian audience, and people might be interested in this. In both cases, there’s a demand for something, money, sexual services, whatever it is, and in both cases, there’s a threat. But the threat in the case of blackmail is to tell a secret, like, “I saw you taking a bath with a rubber ducky. Give me money or I’ll tell everybody.” I saw you with my binoculars taking a bath with a rubber ducky, and I can engage in my free speech, so it would be legitimate to threaten that and demand money. On the other hand, extortion is something like, “If you don’t give me money, I’ll shoot your kids.” Now, that would be prohibited by law. So, I’m glad it was just a typographical error or a glitch. No big deal. But since you mentioned it, I thought I would mention that, too. So, I am happily married, and my wife is the boss, except for these two minor details.

Vinay Kolhatkar

Actually, on this next question that I was going to ask, we’ve almost covered it, but I’ll ask it quickly anyway. Could we say each household should determine its own allocation of duties? And if one gender is prepared to take on the role of child rearing, for instance, what business is it of the government to intervene and try and make society more progressive? In other words, Walter, is feminism libertarian?

 

Walter Block

Feminism is very anti-libertarian.

No, no. Feminism is not libertarian. Feminism is very anti-libertarian. They say that men exploit women because men earn more money than women. For every dollar a man earns, a woman earns 70 cents, give or take, and they say that this is evil capitalism. But the facts of the matter are very different. The facts of the matter are that the reason for this is the marital institution. If you take all men and all women, the ratio is 70% or $7 to $10 or 70 cents for every dollar. But if you take [once]-married people [including] who are widowed, divorced, separated, whatever, the ratio is not 70%. It’s more like 40%. On the other hand, if you take never-married [people], there is no gap. And whenever you do empirical research, you never get 1.0. In my own research, it goes from 90 to 110. Namely, sometimes women make 90 cents for every dollar. Sometimes they make $1.10 for every dollar that a man earns. It varies. But it’s roughly no gap at all. Why is this? Because women who are married, and especially if they have kids, do the lion’s share of the housekeeping and the cooking and the cleaning and certainly the breastfeeding, and whenever you do anything, you do it at the cost of not being able to do something else as well.

My favorite example of this is Yo-Yo Ma, a world-class cellist, and Usain Bolt, a sprinter who did the 100 meters in about 9.3 seconds. They should give him a speeding ticket for that. It was a world record. The point is, how good a cellist is Usain Bolt? Not very good. How good a 100-yard-dash man is Yo-Yo Ma? Not very good. So, whenever you do anything, you do it at the cost of not being able to do something else as well or at all. Well, if the woman is cooking and cleaning and watching out for kids, obviously she’s not gonna be able to do everything else as well, namely, being in the market. The joke here is that the woman and the man both have a PhD in chemistry, and they both come home to [more] work, and you know what the man says to the woman? What’s for dinner, dear? Namely, she’s doing the cooking, even though they both have the same PhD. And if she’s gonna have kids, she’s gonna act a little differently. And if she has three kids, and by the time she gets back into chemistry, he’ll have more money than her. So, feminists are saying that capitalism is evil because the women are exploited, but they’re not. If they’re never married, there’s no gap. So, I’m not a big fan of feminists on the ground of libertarianism because they think that the free enterprise system is exploitative. It’s not.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay. Roger?

 

Roger Bissell

Well, I look at feminism a lot the same way I look at Black Lives Matter. The feminists could have a slogan “Female Individuals Matter.” Of course they do, but so do male individuals, right? Yet, if you say that, you’re oppressive, [male supremacist, sexist,] or whatever. Look at our culture. This is where I could go on an extended rant, but I’ll try to restrain myself. The movies and TV shows portray men as clueless idiots or salivating sex fiends or whatever, and the women are 110 pounds dripping wet, and they’re pounding the life out of guys who are two or three times their size. This is where our culture is now in regard to men. And we’ve got DEI. We had a female vice president whose most profound statement was about being “unburdened by what has been,” and we’ve got a gal just brought into the Supreme Court who at her confirmation hearing couldn’t give a definition of what a woman is. The only good thing about this DEI business, the checking boxes for being hired, is that they’re not at home, tormenting their children—I don’t think either of these ladies had any—and they’re not warping the minds of students. So, there’s something to be said for that, but not much. I don’t think it’s the business of government to make America more progressive like this. I think reverse discrimination is more of a crime than [progressivism].

There are libertarians who think feminism is fine because women have been oppressed and held down for decades, but as Walter said, the pay gap is partly imaginary. When you sort it out sufficiently, you see that married men and women have larger incomes than their counterparts, and unmarried men don’t make any more than unmarried women or married women. So, it has a lot more to do with what the corporations want: somebody who’s financially stable. There’s a lot of unmarried men who are still scuffling and haven’t gotten their act together. So, to go on, though, I think that we need to have as level a playing field as possible in terms of [keeping] the government out of it. We don’t need to redress “systemic sexism,” blah, blah, blah.

There shouldn’t be any discrimination against women, but there shouldn’t be any discrimination for them.

There shouldn’t be any discrimination against women, but there shouldn’t be any discrimination for them. I don’t think that there should be any role [for government] to mandate or incentivize or penalize or ban any kind of marital relationship. That’s the sole business of the two people [to decide] how much time a parent spends with the kids, what chores they do. They should work all this out, and there shouldn’t be any kind of [governmental] encouragement or “nudging.” Cass Sunstein talks about “nudging” people. Well, that’s just government intervention with a velvet glove. We don’t need this stuff. Parents and spouses should be free to arrive at whatever dividing up of duties and so on works best for them, and whatever the National Organization of Women feels about the matter is totally irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.

 

Walter Block

I’d just like to say a few words about discrimination. Male homosexuals are evil because they discriminate against half the human race in terms of love interests and bed partners. Lesbians are evil because they also discriminate against half the human race in terms of bed partners and love interests. Male heterosexuals are also evil because we discriminate against half the human race in terms of bed partners and love interests, and the same thing for female heterosexuals. So, [do] we all have to be bisexual? That would be the implication. But even bisexuals discriminate. They discriminate on the basis of lookism, on the basis of a sense of humor, on the basis of intelligence, on the basis of whatever normal people discriminate on the basis of. Namely, we libertarians believe in a thing called free association. Anyone should be free to associate with anyone they want, mutually agreed upon, and nobody should be forced to associate with anyone that they don’t want to. The problem with rape is that the rape victim doesn’t want to associate with the rapist, and the problem with slavery is that the victim doesn’t want to associate with the slave owner.

So, we libertarians believe that people should be free to discriminate all they want. However, when the government does it, it’s doing it in our behalf or with our money, and I would say the government should not be able to discriminate on the basis of race or sex or gender or anything like that. But they do. They discriminate on the basis of race. They say, “We have to have a professoriate at a public school that looks like America, and that we have to worry about the gap between white and black.” Well, what about the basketball gap? There’s a gigantic basketball gap between white and black. Should we spend money to make sure that whites can play basketball better, or maybe give black people weights so that when they run around on the basketball court, they can’t jump as fast? Kurt Vonnegut wrote a beautiful piece, “The Handicapper General.” This is what DEI is all about. I certainly agree with Roger, and I’m sure Vinay agrees too, that while private people should be able to discriminate to their heart’s content, the government should not be able to do any of this.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Yes, we are all agreed on this. By the way, Usain Bolt was 9.58 [seconds] on the world record for the 100 meters. I think that’s never been broken.

But now we’re going on to a completely different issue. Since the 1950s, birth rates across all societies have been declining. In Sudan, which is one of the poorest countries [in the world], in 1969, the birth rate was 7.01, then 6.99 in 1970. Now it’s around 4.1. And birth rates everywhere have been on a phenomenal decline. They say 2.1 is the right amount of children [to keep the population stable].

I have had two, but I don’t know how to get the point one, so I’m under the amount, but [2.1,] that’s for sustainable population. But now we have North America (in continental terms, the USA, Canada etc.), Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand averaging as an aggregate 1.5. Australia and the US are slightly above at 1.6. Of the top 30 countries with the highest birth rates, all of them are African countries except #9, Afghanistan. So, don’t tell me poverty or lack of housing or whatever is causing it [birth rate decline]. Something else, maybe pesticides, maybe feminism or inflation or rising individualism, is the cause of it.

So, Walter, what would you do about it? One, if you’re a libertarian and in government, but two, is there anything [that could be done] that is outside the scope of libertarianism or government? Hungary is doing tax incentives. Would you do anything like that, or just leave it alone?

 

Walter Block

Well, what you’re really broaching is what in economics is called “optimal population size.” I would approach it from two grounds, one economic and the other libertarian. From the libertarian, it’s very simple. The optimal population size is whatever children people voluntarily have. That’s it. Hopefully, there will be no wars or pestilence or anything like that. So, the optimal population size for libertarianism is whatever exists. And if 2.1 is [needed] to keep the population level, and you’re at 1.5, you’ll have a decreasing population. Fine. Whatever it is, is fine. But from an economic point of view, the question is, what population size will maximize per capita wealth? This is a very difficult empirical issue, and I don’t know the answer to it. Various economists have different views as to what is the optimal population size in order to maximize per capita wealth. I really don’t know. I haven’t followed that. I don’t really care about it. I just care about the libertarian optimal population, and that’s whatever exists. So, that would be the way I would approach that.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay. Roger?

 

Roger Bissell

Well, you gave quite a bit of statistics about how the trend is really widespread, and you were wondering about what possible factors there were. I would say, we should be interested in the possible factors causing it insofar as it relates to libertarianism. Is there any way in which the government or people are doing unlibertarian things that cause the population to go up or down or sideways or whatever?

Obviously, inflation: the government spends way too much, so they print money to finance it or borrow, and the inflation of the money supply then results in higher prices and higher costs of living. If farmers and factories don’t keep up with production, then there are more dollars chasing fewer goods, and the prices go up. Too bad. This discourages young couples from having children and delay starting their family. The buzzword we hear all the time now currently is “affordability,” and young people are having trouble. My younger daughter is getting married soon, and they’re trying to decide, are we going to have a child first, or are we going to try to buy a house first? Good luck, because times are really difficult, and both people have to work.

Feminism. We’ve talked about feminism, and that relates to individualism, and Vinay said that maybe individualism is a factor. I think [in some ways, that’s] a healthy trend. Vinay and I wrote a book about self-actualization, about Aristotle and having your best life, and a lot of people think children are part of that, while other people think children just get in the way. I suppose I’m beating up on Ayn Rand and the Objectivists tonight. She and many of her followers, not all of them, looked at children that way. The top five leaders of the movement have had a sum total of one child and two grandchildren, and that one [exception] doesn’t appear to be working out too well right now. These aren’t shining examples for young people who read her novels and think, “This is a great philosophy, but hey, wait a minute! Why aren’t they having kids, and what guidance do I have for having a family life and a marriage, when the heroine of one novel is getting it on with three different guys, and the heroine of another novel is getting it on with three different guys, and then the heroine in another novel gets it on with two guys and then ends up shot to death out in the tundra? So, wait a minute, I’m not getting much guidance here, except those women look like they’re having some fun.” So, where do the new Objectivists come from? Well, the same shopping mall that the existentialists and the Marxists get their followers from, the colleges. Most of the Objectivists still aren’t having second-generation Objectivists. If they have kids at all, their kids go off some other direction and then, “Well, I guess we have to go recruit kids at the colleges.” That’s fine, but unless a young person thinks they can really have it all, they’re going to lean in the direction their leaders have gone, and in the case of the Objectivists, [that means] toward career, away from families. I know they’ve been trying to address this in more recent years [by having] young mothers who are also Objectivists speak at their conferences and say, “Well, here’s how you can do it.” But they’re kind of late to the party, when [the movement has] gone 40, 50 years with almost nothing said about it, and you wonder what’s wrong with this picture.

The other thing I’ll mention is poison in the environment, the food chain, and the healthcare sector. We have the three P’s: plastics, pesticides, and pollution, and all of those things affect fertility or infant mortality or miscarriages or birth defects. Even vaccines have been linked with those kinds of effects, and the government has covered up those risks and even pushed people in their childbearing years to take vaccines that they maybe don’t need and that might hurt their chances to have a family. I think Operation Warp Speed is finally starting to get some scrutiny, and that’s good. So, maybe our years of being oppressed by the Health-Industrial Complex are going to come to an end. Rights are violated by those various poisons and [I want] a greater liability on those that are not taking care of keeping those poisons out of the food chain, the water supply and so on—they’re going to have to pay the piper and maybe be brought to court. But I think that would be a good thing for courts and regulatory agencies to look at, instead of trying to protect the snail darters and obscure species of ferns.

 

Walter Block

I’d like to add one more thing to the litany that Roger mentioned, and that is feminism. Before feminism, a lot of women wanted to get married and have kids. Feminism is teaching that marriage is a trap, and you’ll be exploited, and don’t get married. There are a lot of women now in their 50s and 60s who are very unhappy that they don’t have children because they’ve swallowed this poison of feminism. Do I say that feminism should be prohibited by law? No. I don’t go that far. But I’m not a fan, and as long as Roger is mentioning four or five or six very important issues as to why we have fewer people than we otherwise would, we have to include feminism on that list as well.

 

Roger Bissell

I want to toss in this, too. There’s another buzzword or phrase they talk about: “work-life balance,” and they try to help people to balance their home lives and their careers. The result of this usually is to push men away from the workplace toward the home and to pull women away from the home toward the workplace. That also tends to have an effect on people’s desires to have more kids. If men are nudged into spending more time as a househusband, they get a really strong reality check on how much work it is to raise the kids and do the housework; and when women are pushed to pursue external careers, they’re encouraged to hang in there and ignore their biological clocks, which are saying, “You really do want to have a baby, don’t you?” And she says, “No, no, not that! I’ve got a career.” So, a pregnancy is, of course, going to interfere with that. So, all of this work-life balance, where the women get out there and the men come in here, has a dampening effect. If government would just get out of the way, and if people would just stop trying to mold society and just let people make their own individual decisions, I think things would seek their own level, and it would be whatever it is. That would be just fine.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, let me just add two things here. One, we wrote in Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics, and I did the research on this: there is no such thing as a biological clock inherently, although a lot of women do feel it, so there is a cultural pressure. One of the things the Almighty God or nature did was to separate the sex act from having children, in the sense that all mammals were given a sexual urge, but human beings were able to use contraception and to use a pill, and they were able to divide sex and children up completely. So, you have a separate decision in each sphere, whether to have protected sex, unprotected sex, or no sex, but meanwhile, the children decision was in your hands rather than out of your hands.

There was always a gap between the religious people having children and the irreligious people having children.

There’s another trend, a very big one, two big ones that I didn’t speak about. In the United States, there was always a gap between the religious people having children and the irreligious people having children. But that gap has been widening and widening, and the religious people are still about 2.1, and the irreligious people are not [they’re at 1.2]. You might think that will solve itself, right? So, the religious people will multiply, and the irreligious people won’t, and in the end, everything will be fine. But no. There is another trend, and that trend is towards giving up on religion and not necessarily joining another religion, and that is the biggest trend. That’s why we have an overall declining rate, which you can solve with immigration.

But there is another point which I want to turn to, Walter. If you have a small society, are those who have children doing society as a whole a favor because they are de-aging society? You know, you can’t have firefighters and police force and military people who are 65 or 75 or 85. You need some nice pyramid, and [if those having children are] de-aging society, how would you compensate them—or will it just work itself out?

 

Walter Block

I return to what I said about optimal population from a libertarian point of view and from an economic point of view. What you’re really getting at when you say they are doing people a favor and then should they be compensated for this is what in economics is called “externalities.” Externalities are something that the mainstream believes in fervently and supports government activity on the basis of, whereas Austrian economists don’t go along with that. For example, Milton Friedman says we ought to have more schooling than the market produces. Why? Because people go to school just for their own benefit, to make more money, to meet a better spouse, whatever. But when they become more educated, they do everybody else a favor by being more intelligent, more educated, and they’ll vote better, and there’ll be less criminals and all that. Therefore, we should take money from those people who will benefit and give it to people who are going to school. So, here’s a woman in her 70s, and she’s got no children and no grandchildren, and she has to pay to support other people’s children because she’s supposedly benefiting from it.

Well, in libertarianism, nobody is forced to pay for benefits. Look, I’m now smiling at you, see, great smile, and I’m now charging you 10 bucks each for that smile. Look, I benefited you, I smiled at you. Give me 10 bucks each. The point is that if I billed you for it, and then you didn’t pay it and I sued you, I’d be a Milton Friedmanite, or I’d be a semi-socialist economist like Milton Friedman, not an Austrian. So, the idea that I have a child, and I benefit you guys, or you have a child, and you benefit me, and therefore we have to pay each other for the other guy having children is a non-starter for libertarians. Now, it might benefit people. Look, Murray Rothbard used to say that civilization is the best “external economy”—or the best “neighborhood effect,” to put it in Milton Friedman’s terms. We all benefit from having society. But you can’t bill people unless they agree to pay, and if you start billing people, namely taxing them to encourage other people to have children because we need more children, you’re not in Libertarian Land anymore.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Okay, I’m going to turn to Roger, and I did combine two questions, so they’re both now directed at you, but I’m just gonna add a couple of things. One, the United States says the mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers is 56, which is a bloody low age, given that a lot of men are living up to 86 or more. Secondly, I heard Charlie Kirk say once that if you want purpose in your life, you should not only have a lot of children, but more children than you can afford. May his soul rest in peace; that whole murder was horrendous. But this is your question: do you agree with Charlie? Do you agree with Walter on all these issues of birth rates and not having enough young people for the fire brigade and so on?

 

Roger Bissell

Well, I don’t know if I agree with Charlie, but that’s pretty much what I did. I had four children of my own and three bonus children. I know I’m suspected of being an evangelical Christian or something, but I’m just a guy who loves children.

You asked a very important question, though. When the society gets older, who’s going to be the policemen and the people in the army, and who’s going to work on the oil rigs and all this highly risky stuff that young, strong people, men, mostly, but some women, [are best suited to do]? I wouldn’t worry too much about that. During the next 10 years or so, artificial intelligence and robots are going to take on more and more dangerous physical tasks like this, so I don’t think the demographics are going to be an issue, before a tax incentive for having children would produce [more] young adults, which would be 20 years from now.

The only other reason I can think of is to make more little wage earners and taxpayers, but I don’t think that’s the direction we want to go. From a moral [or libertarian] standpoint, I’m all for people getting to keep more of the money they earned, even if it’s only some of the people who’d be eligible to do so, like people who have children. My favorite example is, if Al Capone steals a thousand dollars from me and a lot of other people, and then he looks at me he says, “Roger, I like you, and I will give you back $500 of that from my unspent hoard of stolen money.” Well, if I accept this money, I’m not hurting anybody else, any more than if he had simply given everybody a pro-rated share of what was left instead of giving just $500 to me. But I don’t like this idea of “incentivizing” people by giving them back some of their tax money in return for doing something the government likes for them to do. It sounds too much like crony capitalism. I would call it “crony family-ism.” Sure, everybody benefits, like in the argument about how education benefits everybody, but the benefit [of incentivizing more children] doesn’t show up for 20 years. In the meantime, only certain people are really benefiting, and those are the ones who are cranking out all these kids.

The only good thing about tax incentives is, it’s not a mandate. A mandate to have kids would be literally slave labor.

The only good thing about tax incentives is, it’s not a mandate. A mandate to have kids would be literally slave labor, in both senses of the term. It would be your labor: you have to do it. But it’s still the same problem: the preferential treatment for some people, picking winners and losers. “Well, no kids. you lose all your tax dollars, sorry.” Cronyism like this may not be the worst way to run a country and a government, but it’s going to cause envy and resentment. I remember all too well, 50, 60 years ago, during the Vietnam war, when some of us guys got deferments for medical reasons or to go to college, other people really shunned us, looked at us, like, “Man, you had a fake medical deferment, didn’t you. That heel spur wasn’t for real.” People don’t like selective slavery too well when they’re on the receiving end. I think capitalism [like having children] has provided many benefits, but it’s gotten a black eye, [un]deservedly, for the cronyism and the tax privileges and subsidies. I think the same thing would happen to families who dipped into the tax pool for having more kids. So, I really think there’s lots of reasons not to do that—libertarian reasons and just human psychology. It’s just not a good idea.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you. Okay, we’re almost at the end of the show, but I’ll let you two have one last comment on everything, but a short one. Walter.

 

Walter Block

I feel like I’ve been on a roller coaster with you guys, and we’ve covered everything from soup to nuts. It’s been a magnificent experience, and I made two new friends. I’m just delighted that you invited me to be part of this. This was a magnificent thing, and I’m glad that a lot of people will see it, and maybe we’ll get a book out of this afterward. So, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for including me in this wonderful adventure.

 

Roger Bissell

Back at you!

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

Thank you, and yes, Roger was part of that too, of being a host and the finest transcript editor. AI’s transcripts can be very bad, but they are very good by the time they leave Roger’s hands.

So, thank you both for participating in the series and contributing both as hosts and as guests—and thank you to the viewers for tuning in. That is what is going to make you more savvy and stay savvy. Good night and good luck.

 

Walter Block

Take care. Thanks again. Bye.

 

Roger Bissell

Bye-bye.