China's population problem: It's running short of workers

The American Left is at the moment engaged in a peculiar assault on American liberalism, especially its protections of individual rights and the interests and rights of minorities. The First and Second Amendments both are under attack, as are the Senate and the Electoral College, and other counter-majoritarian institutions that form an important part of the American constitutional architecture. The everything-is-racist campaign of the past few years is intended largely to discredit these institutions. Representative Ocasio-Cortez has judged the Electoral College both “racist” and a “scam,” a common view among progressives. Paul Krugman and Will Wilkinson, both writing in the New York Times, have insisted that projects ranging from liberalizing regulations to defending the Bill of Rights are, somehow, racist enterprises. Michelle Goldberg, also writing in the New York Times, dreams of “an end of the GOP” for the crime that Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg describes as conspiring “to stop the New America from governing.” Greenberg dreams of an unchallengeable Democratic monopoly on power “liberated from the nation’s suffocating polarization to use government to advance the public good.”

Polarization is what happens when there are two opinions about something. What happens when there is one opinion — one permitted opinion — about something is: China, roughly.

The main reason the modern United States has not, for all its errors and failures, pursued something as destructive as China’s one-child policy is that no one actually has the power to do so.