Well in that case....

> "I don't get why employers should be forced to pay for someone's choice to have children."

Because

> "There are laws passed by legislators who are elected. The rule of law is established by force"

That's why. The men with the power, who control the men with the guns, have declared that this is the way our society should work. There is your realpolitik answer.

> The men with the power, who control the men with the guns, have declared that this is the way our society should work.

Obviously, in this case, that didn't happen or mindfulgeek wouldn't have been let go.

The system these powerful men have set up does not prevent people from breaking the rules the powerful men have set. It does however lay out potential consequences for breaking the rules, should the victim choose to navigate this system in the correct way.

They are powerful, but not omnipotent. They are men, not gods.

Good point, now we can get a (for me?) more interesting discussion:

- Was something illegal done here? - If yes, why is it (seemingly) so easy to do this? - How can this be changed? - Should it be changed? (In my opinion: Yes, a law which is easily breakable is useless)

Note: I only raise questions of legality here, not morality. I will not even start to discuss the morality of this action, because in my opinion anyone who says anything besides "horrible, not tolerable" in his analysis of what happened here has such a fundamental different set of core values from myself that any discussion would be a complete waste of time.

> Was something illegal done here? - If yes, why is it (seemingly) so easy to do this?

Laws don't exist to make it impossible to do the prohibited things, they exist to provide consequences for doing the prohibited things. Particularly, civil laws of this kind exist to provide compensation to those harmed by the act prohibited.

But they tend to require the person who believes they are due compensation to actively seek it.

It seems relatively easy to rob or murder someone. Does that make the laws against such activities useless?

An aging population is never good for any government. Unless you are a really overpopulated country, having a positive birthrate is a good thing (translates to economic growth). The case for encouraging the population to have children is pretty straightforward...

Economic growth isn't a desirable thing in and of itself. What really matters is wealth per capita. If growth is flat and population is down, that's a better situation where growth and population are both increasing at the same rate.

it will be very difficult to maintain the economically active population over total population ratio constant, you need a corresponding increase of productivity to offset the increased burden over the few working...

Right now in Europe and the US we have boatloads of people sitting around without jobs. How does it make sense to import more people to compete for the few jobs that are left? Automation means you need a smaller percentage of working people to maintain society. We can't figure out what to do with the people we have.

Although terrible for the affected, in the US the unemployment right now is 5%, hardly a catastrophe. 10% average in Europe is not horrible. If you take Spain (24%) or Greece (26%) yes, is bad, but is not sustainable and most probably things will improve in a few years... but I'm talking about decades of population reduction.

>Although terrible for the affected, in the US the unemployment right now is 5%...

U3 is a fanciful number, both because people are using disability insurance as a way to collect benefits indefinitely and because once you give up looking for a job you don't count as unemployed. The US has the lowest labor force participation rate in decades.

Another way to increase younger population is also to encourage immigration in that population group. However, for other reasons, this will never be acknowledged as a reasonable measure :)

Eh, what? Not only is this acknowledged as reasonable in many countries, it's policy.

The anti-immigration sentiment often seen in the US (sometimes even on HN), and in a lot of European countries seems to say otherwise.

There isn't much anti-immigration sentiment in the US. What we have in the US is anti illegal immigration sentiment.

In terms of European countries there was an article about a week ago regarding Americans going to Germany for free college. The Germans were hoping they'd stay.

I think people worry about the quality of immigrants. We want more young Sergei Brins and fewer middle aged guys with a sixth grade education.

While that may be technically true, AFAIK it's hard for someone to immigrate to the US. If I wanted to move to the US tomorrow, I believe it would involve me having to get a job before I got there.

One could argue that saying that you're against illegal immigration and making legal immigration very difficult is the same as saying that you don't really want immigration.

We have over a million legal immigrants a year, so even if you can't get in easily somehow a whole lot of other people are managing.

Well, some countries have a pretty open immigration policy because of low population grow.

I'm pretty sure this idea will not survive the next 30 years; raw manpower is no longer the main driver of economic growth and wealth creation.

I agree that raw population grow is not a sustainable solution, but at least you need to grow at the replace rate or you're in trouble.

Care for the elderly is still an intensive task. Maybe yes, in 30 years it will be done by (Japanese) robots but we're not close yet.

You have the economic burden too: how much more productive each working individual has to be if it has to offset an increased ration of non working individuals?

Lastly, I don't think a country is sustainable with a dwindling population unless it can be physically and culturally isolated and has an important deterrent against military action

Not entirely. John Locke's take is that you agree to a rule of law by choosing to live in it, and that you can move to another government if you disagree.

Only Thomas Hobbe's take was based purely on force, because he viewed the nature of man as being vile and completely evil, which isn't surprising given the environment he lived in.

I think you mean Thomas Hobbes. :)

Derp. Good catch. Was reading the comic yesterday.

Groups must persist; therefore a group must sacrifice to ensure that the actual next generation is created and cared for. Schools, parental leave, etc, are all required. Any society that neglects these would seem to be self-limiting.

K, you are more than welcome to go ahead and break our laws. Oh you don't feel like suffering the consequences we've set up for doing so? Then you've agreed to the social contract. Countries that have to reestablish sovereignty with each succeeding generation are failed states.