From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Apr 04 2002 - 10:08:29 MST
On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, William wrote:
> If the United States became overpopulated wherein the density of people in
> California and Florida became very widespread, similar problems will occur.
Actually, only parts of CA or FL can be considered "densly" populated.
Obviously we could do the calculations of people/sq km and determine
this precisely instead of speculating about it. My guess would be
that one of the New England states or Delaware would end up as
"most densely populated".
> For a Libertarian, the current Welfare State is a crime and would turn a
I assume you are speaking for yourself, yes? Libertarian != Extropian.
I for one would argue fairly strongly that any system that taxes the
general population and puts a reasonable fraction of that income into
peer reviewed scientific research is going to advance an extropic agenda
faster than a "pure" libertarian society where the only scientific
research that gets funded is by those who understand science sufficiently
to want to donate their resources to it. [That would be another "useful"
figure for extropic discussions -- which country spends the greatest
fraction of GDP on scientific research?]
> People should NOT be paid to have kids as is true now and I would strongly
> agree with the general vision in the A.I., Artificial Intelligence movie:
> reproductive licenses would be an extremely good idea. If the 2 parents
> could not afford to pay for raising the kid that they had, obviously the
> cost is a massive drain on the society at large.
It puts you on the slippery slope. You immediately have to judge the
"quality" of the upbringing a child would have. Do you only give licenses
to parents who can afford to send their children to private schools?
Would not extropians consider religious and potentially many public
school systems harmful to the child (and therefore justification for
denying licenses to parents who would send their children to them)?
What about college education? Should the parents be able to pay
for that as well? While we are at it, lets only give licenses
to people who are going to have children of above average intelligence.
We do not have an overpopulation problem that cannot be solved by
laws and/or technological improvements. One only has to look at the
general improvement in air and water quality in the U.S. over the last
30 years to realize that.
I'm probably one of the more well traveled people on the list
having visited ~45 U.S. states and more than 20 foreign countries.
I can speak from first hand experience that most of the U.S., Russia
Russia even India are not "overpopulated" (if by "overpopulation"
you mean the counties around Los Angelas).
If your measure for "overpopulation" is traffic density, then
that can easily be solved by air cars.
So I don't think "licenses" for reproduction are the right way to go.
Robert
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