For a while now I have felt like I did not have a good answer for libertarian acquaintances when they would ask why a libertarian should be a pronatalist. I had answers, but not ones that spoke to the peculiar psychosis that afflicts the libertarian mind.
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These being established, let’s proceed. States establish social security. Social security uses the coercive taxing power of the state to redistribute resources intertemporally, but usually also across income brackets as well.
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Libertarians often oppose this sort of thing. Now, sophisticated libertarians may accept it: forced saving to account for hyperbolic discounting, or some other rights-compatible approach, but few of these approaches can account for the income redistribution component.
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Thus, almost all libertarians will regard old age social insurance as the kind of policy that, while perhaps justifiable on some exigency grounds, should raise an eyebrow in terms of economic liberty.
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It is, in a word, the kind of policy you would expect to cause some kind of distortion, and that distortion is probably not welfare-maximizing.
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So we would expect that the imposition on economic liberty of old age social insurance will (for whatever it’s possible benefits) create some kind of undesirable perverse outcome somewhere else in the economy.
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We know from our givens above that old age benefits do in fact alter fertility: more benefits, less kids. And we also know that fertility is considerably below what people report desiring. I submit, this IS the distortion libertarians are looking for.
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Or at least I am comfortable allowing libertarians to believe that this is so. So. Social Security reduces fertility below what people want as it taxes young people to subsidize old people instead of those old people investing in young people to take care of them directly.
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Or, again, you might think if you are a libertarian.
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This beingvtye case, and assuming you are a decent libertarian who wants to mitigate harms, you would rationally desire to correct this issue. Repeating old age social insurance is one option. But has many other political and economic costs.
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Your second best option is to somehow create policies that, in as deft a way as possible, offsetsvtye antinatal impact of old age pensions. That will most likely be some kind of cash- or cash-like pronatal policy.
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Thus, a libertarian thinking seriously about how welfare states work and acting with even a modest degree of political strategy will have a pretty decent motive to espouse pronatal policy. /fin
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