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Attention Democrats: People Have Value. Even Poor Black People.
Over at National Review, Dominic Pino examines Janet Yellen’s rationalization of abortion from an economic perspective. Remarkably, Ms. Yellen said the following to Sen. Tim Scott:
…one aspect of a satisfying life is being able to feel that you have the financial resources to raise a child, that the children you bring into the world are wanted and that you have the ability to take care of them. In many cases abortions are of teenage women, particularly low-income and often black, who aren’t in a position to be able to care for children…
As you might imagine, Sen. Scott was unpersuaded by this argument: “I’ll just simply say that as a guy raised by a black woman in abject poverty, I’m thankful to be here as a United States Senator,” Scott told Yellen.
Mr. Pino goes on to eloquently explain the roots of this perspective of modern leftists:
More fundamentally, Yellen’s view of human beings is incorrect: She views them as macroeconomic liabilities rather than macroeconomic assets. In her view, they take up space, consume resources, and impose burdens on those who care for them. And of course, they do those things. But they don’t just do those things. They also come up with new ideas, produce resources, and care for other people. On balance, they are assets, not liabilities.
This is a point that progressives have failed to understand for years. From the eugenics proponents of the early 20th century to the environmentalists of today, progressives have never believed that human beings are, as economist Julian Simon called them, the ultimate resource. They’re forever stuck in the zero-sum world of Malthus, where people are problematic mouths to feed, instead of the positive-sum world we actually live in, where people are a creative force to invest in.
I often hear leftists rationalize their support of abortion by saying, “Look, I’m just being practical here. We’ve got to deal with realities, right?”
Mr. Pino explains why leftists’ economic arguments are even more absurd than their ethical rationalizations. No, killing babies does not make sense. Even if the mother is going through financial difficulties at the time of her pregnancy. Even if the mother is black. Even then, Ms. Yellen.
People have value. They have value from an ethical and spiritual perspective. We’re all God’s children, for Heaven’s sake.
But even if you don’t believe that, surely you can see that they also have economic value. Perhaps you might think they are limited economic value today. But what about some years from now? Could it be that they might improve themselves someday? People can do that, you know. Even if they are black and poor, Ms. Yellen. Even those people.
I’m struggling to get past the elitism and racism oozing from Ms. Yellen’s statement about poor black mothers like Sen. Scott’s Mom (pictured above). But even if I could get past that, I would point out to Ms. Yellen, “People have value, you idiot. Even poor black people, you racist snob. Who on earth are YOU to suggest that some people should be killed because they are currently of insufficient economic value? You’re a government bureaucrat, for Pete’s sake. What is your economic value to society? Should we vote you out of office, or take you out back and shoot you? Are you listening to what you’re saying? Do you want ME deciding if your life is worth living? Do you want anybody deciding that, other than yourself? Do your words make sense to you? Honestly?“
Every rationalization for abortion sounds absurd to me.
But some of them sound like pure evil.
I can’t believe Democrats are saying stuff like this out loud. To a black man, no less. In public. On national TV. Oh my God.
They can’t recognize evil, even when they say it themselves.
But at least they are helping others recognize evil. Make evil this obvious, and anyone can see it. Anyone who has eyes to see.
Just writing about Ms. Yellen’s statement makes me feel unclean. I feel like I need a long hot bath. And all I did was copy and paste it. She said it out loud. In public.
How do these people sleep at night?
Published in General
As I commented on another thread, Yellen might as well have said, “the child sacrifices must continue until the economy improves.”
Disgusting.
One credit I’ll give the pro-abort, godless Left. They’re turning me into an extremist ultra-MAGA abortion abolitionist. Time to repent. It’s good for the soul (of the country).
I’d love to hear how Yellen squares the circle of how penniless unskilled illegal aliens are supposedly a benefit to the economy but babies born to poor black women are a drag on the economy. How does that work?
My problem with Pino’s argument is that he chooses to play on Yellen’s ground – on the ground that people are macroeconomic assets or liabilities. On that basis, some people are liabilities. Frankly. Mass murders are liabilities. That’s an extreme. Most people are assets. The problem is no one knows a priori who is going to be an asset or a liability. Which argues against abortion. Playing on Yellin’s ground allows Yellin to play percentages and engage in a calculus that is problematic.
That is what is wrong with National Review, ceding the grounds of an argument to other members of the professional class.
I sleep at night because I don’t believe in Christ’s mercy and I don’t believe that G-d helps the poor or downtrodden minorities. I don’t think life as being a gift but a burden to be endured. I would not want to be born in a messed up family and so I don’t abortion is a bad thing. Also, from what I have observed people who are poor and dumb just make kids without really thinking about it or doing very much for them.
As unpleasant as killing child in the womb is I don’t think it’s necessarily worse than being born.
Also, please keep in mind that you are a very privileged person Dr. Bastiat. You are genetically superior than the vast majority of human beings. We are all happy that you were born and that you have procreated but I think that’s a sensible attitude to have towards everyone.
The low-income child should want to be aborted rather than be one of those sorts of people who will never get into the right schools.
The zero-sum/Population Bomb mindset gets disproven daily but it does not seem to matter. Some people need to believe the upper-middle-class secular liberal zeitgeist is the pinnacle, the end of history. Markets, dissenting opinions, inconvenient people, and disagreeable facts all need to just disappear. People, industries, religion, community need to be seriously curtailed and amputated if they cause discomfort. The upscale lefty mindset is a frozen intolerant place.
Many people simply don’t have economic value. The economic arguments for aborting Down syndrome children are perfectly valid.
Tragic Henry. It comports with the Left’s view that there is no value in struggle and suffering. I reject that completely, having some familiarity with suffering.
This is the Big Lie that the Left exploits to gain power — that the government’s main purpose is to alleviate your suffering. Second to that lie is that the government is capable of accomplishing this deceitful purpose. It really is Satan’s false promise.
I know some Downs people who are important, loved family members. I know some very high-income people who deserve to be belatedly aborted for the good of society.
If you have a high utility for nice people, the economic argument changes.
That’s a fascinating post. I am sure niceness is incredibly powerful but hard to measure.
But when I met Satan, he said he leaned libertarian.
Or just, Children are a burden to the economy.
Illegal aliens can work more for little money. Mothers and babies are very poor workers. Mothers have to do everything carrying a baby in one arm, and babies don’t take instruction well.
99.9% of all adults would make the choice to live another day. Babies would too, if asked.
If that mindset predominates, many will die as well fed slaves (perhaps willingly)-but slaves nonetheless
I think Scott’s view of people is deeper than any pure economic theorizing. I think he believes that economies exist to service humans, rather than humans existing to service the economy.
Why? Slavery is inefficient and unpleasant? Free labor works and is morally superior.
Progressives never change – this was no different that the progressive movement of the early 1900s . The whole lot of them were Eugenicists
Who said anything about every person having “economic” value? I sure as hell didn’t, though you’ve implied as much by quoting part of my comment, then referencing Down Syndrome children, as I did in my comment.
You want to make an argument that judging lives by their “economic value” is valid? Do it without me, son.
Video or it didn’t happen.
People have been making Yellen’s argument for decades. As enjoyable as I find prosperity, it has always struck me as disturbing that many people think someone would be better off dead than being born poor. I guess if a terrorist blew up a grade school full of poor kids he would be doing them a favor?
Being of German extraction, I, early on, worried about getting into the ‘life unworthy of life’ mindset. It just seems easier to be pro-life and make that my default position.
What Yellen is saying, and is implied by almost all abortion advocates, is that it is better to be dead than to be a poor black child. It is, perhaps, unintentionally revealing about what’s really going on in their heads and what it is that they value.
Straight from Margaret Sanger, their heroine. Or is that heroin? Evil then; evil now.
Do you think so? It seems to me pro-aborts almost never get as far as thinking about “what’s best for the baby.” What’s best for the woman, in their way of thinking, is that the baby dies. It’s all stage one as far as I can tell. They never even get as far as thinking about the psychological “health” (moral/spiritual condition for those of us not strictly materialist) of a woman once she realizes she’s killed her baby(ies). Or that abortion on demand sets women up for sexual exploitation by irresponsible men on a scale not seen before in human history — even when babies were exposed out on the hillsides of Greece by their “fathers” who didn’t want them. Greek men still (one presumes) were/stayed married to the babies’ mothers. Which is to say, Yellen went a step further than most by showing “concern” for the welfare of poor, black babies.
Leftists are moral monsters when they’re not just shallow reasoners.
The abhorrence and disgust at Yellen’s comments is right on point. The amazing thing is that none of the commentators here seems to understand that this is, and has been, the core perspective of Economists since Economics was created as a field in the United States. Irving Fisher, regarded as the father of American Economics, the man who established Economics at Yale at the beginning of the 20th Century, regarded by Economists universally in the US as the most brilliant American economist ever, was a vile eugenicist. He wrote a book about it. Eugenics was appropriated as a particular expertise of Economists then, and has always been so. Eugenics in America was forced sterilization of the “unfit”. Forced sterilization feel out of polite consideration after the Holocaust (yes the Germans forcibly sterilized 10 times the numbers that America did–600,000 vs 60,000, but the Nazi doctors performing forced sterilizations got off at Nuremberg by citing Buck v. Bell, the opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes), but was replaced by abortion. The attitudes expressed by Yellen were exactly the same as the early 20th Century Eugenicists. They have been at the center of Progressive thinking from the outset, among economists, scientists, physicians, politicians, etc. , etc. etc. Francis Galton was knighted in Britain for concocting the idea of Eugenics. Obama’s science advisor, Holdren, an acolyte of Paul Erlich, advocated forced sterilization for the world’s indigent. And so on and so on.
Dr. Bastiat’s field of medicine is based on Eugenics ideas. And the Eugenics approach is starting to go wild with the prospect of germ line genetic manipulation. The perversions of medicine are hard to catalogue adequately. Perhaps Dr. Bastiat should look at his own field to understand how he is part and parcel of a Eugenics industry. Consider that the whole idea of psychotropic medication was concocted and discussed at a conference hosted by Ciba Geigy in the 1970s based on Eugenics motivations. Linus Pauling strongly advocated spiking food, water, even air, with psychotropics to control the unruly human population. He also advocated his “yellow star” program of physically and visibly branding anyone with Sickle Cell trait (the molecular defect causing which he discovered) to prevent them from marrying and reproducing with anyone also affected by the trait to avoid the risk of having sickle cell disease offspring. The attitudes expressed by Yellen are common to all of our elites. Ruth Bader Ginsberg fully agreed with such thinking.
I recommend Thomas Leonard’s remarkable book, “Illiberal Reformers” for more information on the vileness of the Economists who promoted Eugenics. The ideas of these economists remain the core of elite opinion today across all fields. And then some.
So, of course, Yellen, as an elite economist, in tune with the thinking of Progressives since Progressivism emerged, is going to hold such opinions, and not apologize for them, but to insist on them. Tim Scott and Lawrence Jones notwithstanding.
Henry Castaigne (View Comment):
If no inalienable transcendent source of inherent dignity then freedom won’t last-the most you can hope for is a well appointed prison.
Kind of a stretch. Pulmonocardiac medicine part of the eugenics industry? Lost me on that one.
There is no question that the intellectual pedigree of the alleged elite comes out of some ugly ideology. Paul Ehrlich is a buffoon. That his sidekick Holmgren was a scientific advisor to Obama was a joke.
There is a pseudo-Darwinian mode of thinking which assumes that one is the pinnacle and that evolution is thus over. Static thinking… the desire to prune away things that don’t fit or are messy (the entire lower middle class, fossil-fuel engines…) rather than innovate.
The real lesson of natural selection is that you never know what’s coming. T Rex was at the top of the food chain until that meteorite hit. Powerful companies can be gone in a flash because a better mousetrap actually was invented. Cultures & empires fall. Our entitled class loves to imagine gloom and doom (climate change, nuclear war) but does not act as if they actually needs to prepare or adapt. True diversity in which styles, differences, perspectives and choices are preserved and markets kept open is the key to survival, not self-glorifying twits who want to freeze society, their status, and history itself.
Morally superior you say? From whence does such superior morality come and how do we know it’s either moral or superior? In some cultures they love their neighbors, in some cultures they eat their neighbors. How do we tell which is “morally superior” in the absence of some transcendent source of morals? Is it merely economic inefficiency that makes cannibalism wrong?
C.S. Lewis once remarked, “Aristotle said that some men are fit only to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.” This was a subtle way of observing that the utilitarian view of human beings, so popular in non-theistic worldviews, fails to account for the moral failures inherent even in allegedly superior human beings.
The Judeo-Christian answer to where morality comes from, for millennia of course, has been that a transcendent God exists and superintends the definition of morality — that He Himself is the reference point from which moral standards emerge. In that moral context, stupid people and clever people, both having been created in God’s image, share an equal moral status without regard to anything as laughable as their economic abilities. In such a situation, to take the life of an innocent human being is an affront to God’s own image. That is the thing that makes it wrong. (cf. Genesis 9) It isn’t wrong to murder only when the victim is clever. And it isn’t merely the possibility of reducing the sum total of economic output that makes murder wrong.
The sanctity of human life is not a utilitarian artifact of intelligence or of economic potential.
Well free labor feels morally superior to slavery. Slavery is still super unpopular among utilitarians. For now anyways…