Everyone, including the poor, has a right to have children. You, on the other hand, do not have any right to meddle in anyone else’s decision about whether to have children.
You say that the UDHR says protects “the rightt [sic] to have a family”, but what it actually says is “the right to marry and to found a family.” Every single person who reads that knows perfectly well that it means the right to have children. Why embarrass yourself by pretending that it doesn’t mean what it plainly does mean?
Not that there is anything wrong with old-fashioned if it happens to be right. A friend of mine has spent the last 15 years working mostly on crop prediction and one of the things he’s been doing is check “old farmer’s wisdom” with modern, statistical methods: he sums up his results as “the old folks didn’t know statistics but they bloody well could count”.
Yes, but I’m not suggesting that people currently alive should be killed to lower the population, am I? I’m saying that people should be limited in their breeding so that the numbers of people decrease over time. That will help the environment. It’s for our own good much like making someone wear a helmet when riding a motorcycle.
Yeah, how many families of the developed world would be willing to live in a hut with no electricity and their only source of food and income being their little patch of ground and some goats? Are they willing to gather and burn cow poop as a heating source (which my ancestors did on a treeless prairie)?
If I vote, I have the right to meddle. I could help elect people who will stop supporting people with my money who breed irresponsibly.
Have and Found mean the same to me. Let’s assume that means they can have kids (that is unless you say two married people who don’t have kids aren’t a family? Having kids ‘extends’ the family, they don’t make it). There is NO mention on the numbers of children or that they can’t be limited to certain numbers if warranted.
Well if you don’t have a solution, and I don’t, and no one does, we are going to need someone to come up with one, so we need to have more children so we have better odds at getting a solution. Children are the solution, we are the problem.
My passport is an instrument of freedom, not a restriction; it PROVES I am a citizen of Canada and can therefore re-enter the country. (As for leaving the country, it’s not Canada that checks my passport on my way out. I may have a right to leave Canada, but I have no right to enter Italy.)
And even if I lose my passport while abroad, Canada will let me back in. I’ll have to prove some other way I’m a citizen, but it happens all the time.
I’ve said the number of people are the problem. I’ve laid out some conditions on which to limit people from breeding willy nilly that include people who don’t have the minimal means to support their kids. It does not exclude rich people unfit to care for children. I’m truly baffled why people would object to preventing selfish people from breeding who have no way to raise their kids effectively?
So, you are saying that the condition on my freedom is that I prove that I am a citizen of a particular country. That is different from me saying that there should be conditions on having children such as some minimal capability to support those same children how?
I think what you don’t understand is that the vast majority of people in the world believe that having children is a basic human right. People don’t like it when you take their rights away “for the greater good”.
Well, there is China…but they are looking to (finally) start to consider getting rid of their 1 child policy (for a 2 child policy per couple). Of course, it’s taken them practically hitting the wall with an aging population that is also unbalanced to even consider that this policy might have been misguided…
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Sound familiar?
So, we’ll keep patching the symptoms rather than fixing the root cause of the matter?
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Of course, it’s taken them practically hitting the wall with an aging population that is also unbalanced to even consider that this policy might have been misguided…
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Why was it misguided? One report says it prevented 400M additional people being born. A 30% difference. Does China need an additional 400M people more than the 1.36B they currently have?
One report. In reality, China’s birth rate was already shrinking when the policy was enacted, and it has followed the same pattern as Thailand- which of course does not have a one-child policy.
But, again, the earth doesn’t really care if you are receiving welfare payments or not. Pollution is caused by consuming resources, which is overwhelmingly the realm of the rich. If your real agenda was environmentalism, you’d be aiming to restrict the reproductive rights of the rich first.
So, what you are saying that the one child policy didn’t have any effect at all?
Sure, who’s providing those welfare payments, btw? Everyone who doesn’t need them perhaps? And in this context who is rich and who is poor? Because I’m getting a ‘noble poor’ and ‘evil rich’ vibe here when I’m just singling out people who don’t have the capacity to raise children. Unfortunately, an economic capability is one of those conditions. If you can’t even feed your children why should you be allowed to have more until such a time as you can afford to do so?
“Hey, neighbor! The wife and I want to have another kid. We have 5 already but don’t really feel complete with only that number. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough money to feed the little blighter, so I’ll need money to cover his expenses. I figure $12K a year should cover it initially. Don’t look like that! The other neighbors are pitching in for the other 5! Here is my bank account number, start wiring the money in immediately.:). Oh, btw, sorry about the police being here late last night. The wife was getting a little uppity and needed a bit of a ‘correction’ after she found out our Daisy was helping out her ol’ Pappy, if you know what I mean, heh heh heh.”
I’m just saying if you want to beat up on the poor, there are better ways to do it. “Only rich people should reproduce because I’m worried about the planet” doesn’t make any sense. Maybe you are worried about the planet and also want to take away the human rights of the poor, and that’s fine. But they don’t tie together.
So to summarize, in order to “protect the environment” you’d like to deprive other people of their basic human rights, but you won’t voluntarily make a small sacrifice of your own towards the same goal. That’s a massive instance of hypocrisy on your part.