Perhaps the analogy (to “throw [them] a bone”) the eugenicists might fancy is the pack of wolves, whose social behavior patterns bear something of a resemblance to humans. That one wolf that has the ostentatious white fur, runs slower than the others and frequently farts foul and furiously (bad for stealth) is, like the stupid person, a detriment to the community. Stupidity can be troublesome when it leads to damage, hazard, injury, disease or religion, in way similar to how an incompetent wolf can jeopardize the success/survival of the pack.
If you have to expend a lot of effort to devise and implement measures to limit the potential effects of stupid people, one might see that society might be better off without them. The problem with that line of reason is that, as has been note previously, intelligence is not a linear uniformity: smart people also do stupid things, because the scope of greater knowledge and cleverness is never sufficient to cover everything, or even most things, for any given person. In that respect, one could see morons as beneficial to society in that they might, in the course of their blithering, help us identify and address potential pitfalls.
But humanity is not a pack of wolves. What natural pressures are picking off members of our pack? We live in houses, drive around in cars, and buy our food in supermarkets - for all practical purposes, humanity has put itself beyond the kind of natural pressures that stalk other species. And the constantly increasing human population reflects this. Weaker members of the herd no longer endanger the herd itself.
The eugenics argument seems to be that we have to make a choice between stupid people and smart people. But we don’t. We have resources enough for both stupid people and smart people to live.
Actually, such a wolf in the wild might well wind up acting as baby-sitter to the pack puppies. Wolf packs do leave an adult behind to watch young puppies while the rest go off to hunt. So potentially such a poor hunter of a wolf might still contribute to the survival of the pack as a whole.
Darwinian selection operates differently on social animals than solo animals. Most eugenics proponents seem to consider people like lone tigers when in reality we’re much more interdependent.
I say we pay double to people who sterilize themselves and are under 5’5" and over 6’4". I’m in the cycling industry and do you know how hard its is to keep such a wide range of bicycles in stock and on the floor all the time? Its a real nightmare, if everyone were more closer in height it would make my life a lot easier.
(this is a sarcastic response, I do not really believe this)
This analogy only works for this conversation if the high-production semen was more limited in supply than other semen, unless you can demonstrate that smart people are going to make more babies to make up for the loss of the less smart ones. If my choices are inseminate half of my herd with “special sauce” or all of my herd with plain mayo, I’m pretty sure my farm will do better with the white stuff. A more accurate dairy farm analogy would be to sterilize the females that have lower production numbers.
The problem with spaying your lower-production cows is that you go from some to none: breeding dairy cows is how you get milk in the first place. If you cannot make some cow come fresh, you might as well lead her to the knackerman, because otherwise she is just chomping feed for no gain. Probably three quarters of the calves (almost all of the males) in a dairy herd are useful for dog food – but, you know, dogs gotta eat too.