A POLICY FOR LEFT-HANDED INSOMNIACS

Many countries have a "population policy," for they are blessed with governments that know what is good for The State, The Nation or The People. The totalitarians need many warm bodies as cannon fodder, and women who have born 10 or more pieces of such war materiel are rewarded by the proud title Hero of Socialist Motherhood. I have forgotten how many little Aryans were required to earn a signed picture of the Fuhrer, but Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren write "Individual rights must be balanced against the power of the government to control human reproduction. Some people have viewed the right to have children as a fundamental and inalienable right. Yet neither the Declaration of Independence non the Constitution mentions a right to reproduce."(1) And Paul Ehrlich: "Several coercive proposals deserve serious consideration, mainly because we may ultimately have to resort to them unless current trends in birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means."(2)

The Chinese totalitarians practice forced abortion, and the totalitarians of Stanford University expelled anthropologist Steven Mosher from the Ph.D. program after their Chinese brothers protested against his report on the practice.(3)

In a population headed for decline, though it may now still be expanding, the average age rises, as does the ratio of old to young. This leads to such effects as an oversupply of teachers and an increase in the cost of pension plans and life insurances, since fewer young participants pay for more old beneficiaries.

In a society of self-responsible and self-reliant individuals, these would be minor problems subject to self-adjustment by a free market. But a paternalistic government has ways to solve them, too. The Social Security system is not critically affected by the dependency (old-to-young) ratio, for it is bound to go bankrupt anyway; and due to the clout of the NEA lobby there are now more teachers than in the old days when they taught their pupils to read.

In Europe, where birth rates have long been lower than in the US, they are now also dropping faster; and the governments meddle more in what is none of their business. The Spanish and French are being bombarded with advertisements to have more babies, a goal personally backed by President Mitterand. ("Will we still be French in 30 years?" asks the headline of a Paris daily. Mais oui, madame, if Francois Mitterand is around long enough...) As of next year, the Danish government will pay parents $525 a year per child, a financial bargain that Danish couples will surely find irresistible. But Italy's Institute for Population Research has the ultimate answer. "The lack of demographic policy is a policy," says its director Antonio Golini. "It is a policy of penalization for those who want more children."

Quite so. The US government, too, is penalizing left-handed insomniacs by its lack of a policy toward them. (Please keep this issue out of Congress.)