From National Review, Kevin Williams’ China’s Population Problem:

Central planners are always fighting the last war. Even as the world’s population is projected to peak and then decline in the not-so-distant future (only 20 or 30 years) “population control” remains a going concern among progressives. It isn’t about population: It is about control. The same is true of gun control and “putting the economy under some measure of democratic control,” as Jamelle Bouie recently put it in the New York Times. In the progressive imagination, the perfection of society — and the perfection of man — is only a matter of control, and choosing the right controllers. This is how you end up with a callow young bartender with no relevant experience or knowledge drawing up grand plans to reorganize the entire world economy, which is understood to be a fundamentally moral question — ask young Miss Thunberg or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — with the technical details to be addressed by a bureaucracy to be organized later.

Moral imperatives are attractive in that they do not rely on any particular verifiable expertise or measurable outcome. Millions were starved to death in the Holodomor by those who were whitewashed as being nothing more than “liberals in a hurry.” That, too, was an economy under some measure of political control by people who said they were acting in the interests of the majority of the people.

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. Those dusty old terms from the long-forgotten civics textbooks — separation of powers, federalism, unalienable rights — have saved us many times from the worst kinds of tyranny. And, as our founders knew, the worst forms of tyranny very much include majoritarian tyranny. One might think that the Trump presidency would cause progressives to think twice about what William F. Buckley Jr. dismissed as “the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.” But they cannot endure such a thought. That why they remain unable to intellectually progress from November 2016 without convincing themselves that the election was somehow illegitimate.

To face the facts would be to understand themselves to be devotees of another god that failed. They may believe that they are not followers of the same god that has failed in China, but that is only a matter of comparing Zeus to Jupiter. They are slowly beginning to understand what’s happening in Beijing, if only because the bosses there have no other choice but to accept reality or risk a fate a good deal worse and more bloody than mere electoral defeat.

HKO

One of the recent best from Kevin Williamson.  The left is willing to tear down the walls against tyranny without comprehending why it was built.

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