Discuss this quote (2 Viewers)

[Rothbard]

"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

 

[Climactic]

There are also way too many fat people.

If you can see that there are certain things that are good and bad for your fellow countrymen then of course you should support eugenics, but there is never going to be a party to vote for that would implement a eugenics policy. It's a taboo almost as bad as being a pedophile. Hitler messed that all up so you're labelled a Nazi if you believe in it. Nowadays the average intelligence levels of Western countries are being lowered because the less smart poor people have the most children and governments invite such people to breed with "baby bonuses" or whatever. Eugenics flipped on its head.

As a libertarian, and if you are for improving the genetic character of the human race at the same time, would you like to see certain people "starve for their imbecility?"

 

[cosmo kramer]

I am pro-eugenics, but am not particularly comfortable with compulsory eugenic measures in the pursuit of social hygiene. Instead, a holistic, non-coercive approach that combines a varied array of postive and negative eugenic measures should be employed to discourage the least effective elements of the Australian community from propagating, and encourage the most effective elements to multiply.

Nobel prize winning physicist and engineer William Shockley, the man who developed the solid state transistor, became a staunch advocate for eugenics later in his life. It came to dominate his career, and he saw it as more important than his pioneering work in electronics.

Eugenics flipped on its head.

Indeed. The expression for this is called dysgenics. Singapore ran a baby bonus progam from the 1980s until the early 2000s (?) that required a certain educational level for eligbility. This was eugenic, unlike our moronic baby bonus policy that hands out large sums of money to the worst possible people so they can create more ugly, stupid, poor babies than they would have been motivated to otherwise.

 

[cosmo kramer]

lmao that video is so awkward

shockley is prob arguing with two people who have acollective iq about 20 points higher than his

 

[abbeyroad]

tbh I'm all for advancing humanity through any non-coercive means. But eugenics is wrapped up in "racial hygiene", forced sterilization and compulsory "euthanasia" etc(thank the nazis).. So I cannot condone it. When we engage in those methods, we're not really improving our genetic disposition, we're actually going backwards, to the time when we used to kill anybody who looks or thinks differently for shits and giggles.

Genetic engineering is still in its infancy so we can't do much with it. However, once we can make a dumb person smart, a short person tall and a disabled person able through genetic engineering, I don't see why we shouldn't. Those who keep yapping on and on about genetic diversity can keep their diversity. Undesirable traits like imbecility and propensity for violence etc that are inconducive to human survival will be taken care of by natural selection anyway.

 

[Climactic]

How would they get taken care of by natural selection? The smartest most successful people have the least kids. It would help if the government stopped taking care of the disadvantaged people but then you would still have people opening soup kitchens and shit.

 

[cosmo kramer]

But eugenics is wrapped up in "racial hygiene", forced sterilization and compulsory "euthanasia

Eugenics can be wrapped up in things like that, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. If you had an educational/occupational threshold for the baby bonus program in this country for instance it would in effect be a eugenic program. Eugenics does not necessarily have to take a leben sunwertesleben approach, as Singapore recently demonstrated.

Non-coercive means are best. I suppose the libertarians here could formulate a truly non-coercive (one that does not require taxation) eugenic program for their hypothesised stateless society, as well.

 

[abbeyroad]

Eugenics can be wrapped up in things like that, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. If you had an educational/occupational threshold for the baby bonus program in this country for instance it would in effect be a eugenic program. Eugenics does not necessarily have to take a leben sunwertesleben approach, as Singapore recently demonstrated.

Non-coercive means are best. I suppose the libertarians here could formulate a truly non-coercive (one that does not require taxation) eugenic program for their hypothesised stateless society, as well.

it won't work, 6k don't mean much to an university educated couple with a combined income of 140k pa. in order for the bonus to be effective enough an incentive, it must be set substantially higher than the economic cost of raising another child. in effect the government would pretty much have to pay for the full cost of raising the child to adulthood, plus a "procreation premium". Now remember, the more the parents earn, the higher the cost of raising that child. Also, if iq correlates with job performance, then in order to encourage the smartest people in our society to procreate, the government would have to raise the baby bonus to an insanely high amount to account for the higher opportunity cost (it being pay rises and promotions forgone etc). The program would likely take up a large percent of the budget, and the government can only get that money by raising more taxes, thereby creating the circle of suck.

tl;dr, either it wouldn't have the desired effect, or it would bankrupt the government.

 

[abbeyroad]

How would they get taken care of by natural selection? The smartest most successful people have the least kids. It would help if the government stopped taking care of the disadvantaged people but then you would still have people opening soup kitchens and shit.

meaning those traits would become less common ie the imbeciles are more prone to accidents and the violent idiots are more likely to get killed so they can't procreate etc

 

[cosmo kramer]

it won't work, 6k don't mean much to an university educated couple with a combined income of 140k pa. in order for the bonus to be effective enough an incentive, it must be set substantially higher than the economic cost of raising another child. in effect the government would pretty much have to pay for the full cost of raising the child to adulthood, plus a "procreation premium". Now remember, the more the parents earn, the higher the cost of raising that child. Also, if iq correlates with job performance, then in order to encourage the smartest people in our society to procreate, the government would have to raise the baby bonus to an insanely high amount to account for the higher opportunity cost (it being pay rises and promotions forgone etc). The program would likely take up a large percent of the budget, and the government can only get that money by raising more taxes, thereby creating the circle of suck.

tl;dr, either it wouldn't have the desired effect, or it would bankrupt the government.

I would have to analyse the Singaporean data (if there is even any, and there probably isn't) to confirm whether or not positive eugenics in the form of monetary incentives can actually be viable. You raise interesting points, but non-coercive eugenics need not be positive. Eugenics is the manipulation of reproductive practices in order to maximise (or minimise) the distribution of a socially desirable or undesirable attribute. If positive eugenics can not be effective in the non-coercive sense, then negative eugenics may be. How effective do you think monetary incentives for sterilisation would be on lower class and underclass individuals? Given the low future time orientation of bogans, I can see many being persuaded not to have children in the promise of plasma screenz.

A program like this is certainly worth a try anyway. It can't do any harm.

 

[abbeyroad]

that depends on whether the incentive for sterilisation is > than the incentive for procreation. but even if it did work, its impact is gonna be negligible as genetic change in a population doesn't just happen overnight. let's just wait til we've mastered genetic engineering yo.

 

[Rothbard]

why don't we just leave the dumb people and head over to galt's gulch?

 

[cosmo kramer]

i'd be more happy with a eugenics program that encourages attractive women to have fuckloads of kids tbh

 

[Climactic]

why don't we just leave the dumb people and head over to galt's gulch?

Because you need people to be janitors or whatever.

 

[Jon Stewart]

we have robots homo

 

[abbeyroad]

we might want to kill all the dumb people before we head over to galt's gulch cos sooner or later they'll want a piece of the pie, and when that day comes, we'll have a whole bunch of violent imbeciles at our gate, demanding to be let in. we don't want those imbeciles diluting our social purity.

 

[Jon Stewart]

We're better at making weapons though

 

[abbeyroad]

those weapons are useless when we are outnumbered 20 to 1. man don't you know, those dumb people are violent motherfuckers. breed like rats too. you don't want them destroying our society do you?

 

[Lolsmith]

A tank would disagree with you

 

[cosmo kramer]

why is jon stewart here