Here we have been suggesting that part of the problem, for both individuals and our society more generally, is poor people having kids they can't afford to sup

Here we have been suggesting that part of the problem, for both individuals and our society more generally, is poor people having kids they can't afford to support well, i.e., in the sense of good parenting. But from some poor countries there are claims that when outside forces result in poor people having more money, right away they slow down on having children -- the rate of births falls. So, for one related point, using some version of socialism to raise poor people from poverty should reduce the burden on society of children of poor people and not increase that burden. Or, in this case, poverty does not cause people to exercise more discipline and be more responsible but on both points, less. So, society might calculate an expected return on investment: Invest some money in raising poor people out of poverty and see how much society saves later in expenditures on the social problems of children with poor parents with poor parenting. But, wait, there's more! Finland beat back the Swedes, Russians, and Germans, but now they are losing! How? They are having only about 1.5 children per woman. Extrapolate that out for 100 years and see a smaller Finland; for 300 years and see nearly no Finland. And that figure of 1.5 is close to what holds in several countries in Europe. Why? So far in the more advanced countries with the higher standards of living, they have decided they don't want to be parents. Joke: Come back in 500 years and find nearly everyone super fired up about being good parents. Why? Because all the other branches of the tree died out! Darwin wins again! Of course, there is likely a grain of truth in this joke, and if so then we stand to be in one of the periods of relatively fast genetic change, assuming that the desire to be good parents is significantly a genetic thing. But, wait, there's more! So, some of the people lost their jobs because in effect their jobs were shipped overseas. So, we go to a retail store, buy an item made overseas, pay for it, and then also pay taxes to pay to help the person who lost their job as we bought this item from overseas. Are we actually helping the US in this way? I know; I know; all those textile workers in the Carolinas were supposed to get much better jobs at Microsoft as Microsoft sold software to the overseas textile industry. Who believed this? Yes, apparently in the US we can import items with low or no import tariffs; I've heard that this policy on imports is rare in the world, that most other countries protect their domestic workers. There are claims that such protectionism is, net, bad for the US economy, but this argument seems to write off the training, experience, and capital associated with the person who lost their job with this expensive write off ignored. For more, the economy is important. Then destroying the financial system is a disaster. How to do that? We saw how in the 1920s: Use high leverage to blow an asset bubble. In response we put in a lot of controls in finance to keep that from happening again. Then starting in 2000 or so, we did it to ourselves again, although this time with real estate. Plenty of people, e.g., the COB of Wells Fargo who said clearly that we would not like the results, saw the problem coming. Yet, we let the bubble inflate. If we want to say that actions have consequences, then we should be willing to say that bubble blowing has consequences and with discipline, we had plenty of information, we wouldn't do such a thing. For more, one of the problems in the US is social problems from poor people, but actually we wanted poor people and have worked, more than once, to import a distinctive lower class we could have as poor people and cheap labor. We've deliberately created an underclass, and we are seeing some of the consequences. From all I can see, except for new technology in the last 60 years, the US standard of living was higher in the 1950s. Then we exported a lot but imported very little. But how did the exporting help the US? Or, workers at Caterpillar built an earth moving machine and sent it to a third world country or one of the countries so damaged in WWII that they couldn't make such a machine again yet. So, the US got paid in foreign currency that we swapped for gold or some such -- nearly useless. Net, the US was able to do better being nearly self sufficient. Sure, we might import rubber and tin, but mostly we were self sufficient. Sounds like maybe we should be self sufficient again.