Imagine a Eugenic America where citizens who earn less than median income are forbidden to have children. Enforcement isn't perfect, so 5% of all kids born are "illegals." Over time, this leads to a substantial stock of people who weren't supposed to be born in the first place.
Regardless of your political standpoint, you probably think the libertarian advocate of Open Breeding has right on his side. Suppose then you were transported to Eugenic America. How would you rebut your side's stereotypical objections to free reproduction? How convincing would you be? If your honest answer is, "Not very," what does that tell you about your compatriots?
Bryan never says so explicitly, but his thought experiment is an analogy for boarders.
According to Gregory Clark's research on wills in England from 1200 to 1800, that's pretty much how English society worked: the richer you were, the earlier you could get married and the more children you would tend to have.
And we all know how badly that turned out!
Bryan:
Indeed, his two-sentence comment strongly suggests two frightening positions:
1. There is no important moral distinction between (a) a social system where everyone is perfectly free to have children, but rich people end up having more kids than poor people, and (b) a social system where draconian eugenic policies actually forbid poor people to have kids.*
2. The social consequences of England's historic differential fertility were so outstanding that we shouldn't morally criticize draconian eugenic policies likely to have similar effects…
Generalizing this approach would imply, for example, that there is no important moral difference between a 99% Catholic country with freedom of religion, and a 99% Catholic country where an Inquisition cruelly persecutes dissenters to maintain Catholicism's dominance.
