The Easy Way When an airline files for bankruptcy, the planes don’t fall out of the sky. The pilots still show up to work. The fuel trucks still pump jet fuel. The mechanics still fix the engines.
The physical reality of moving humans through the air continues seamlessly. The shareholders, management, and creditors reach a new agreement in a boardroom. A lot of paper wealth disappears, the debt is reset, and life goes on.
This happens every day.
Humanity is not trapped by physics; we are trapped by a refusal to renegotiate. The supply chains, the global agricultural system, and the energy grids can all be operated without the burden of massive interest on debt, and the requirement of infinite growth that comes along with it. It is possible to begin to shrink consumption through a declining birth rate, and set GDP decline targets.
We can walk down the mountain.
If a catastrophic event such as a long drought in a grain center causes financial collapse, that can be sudden and disastrous. A planned restructuring does not happen as a single, global bankruptcy that instantly freezes the
international credit required to ship food, mine phosphorus, and keep the physical supply chains running. Restructuring is a managed process, and will likely happen across countries at varying times.
When the global financial system was restructured at Bretton Woods, or when the world went off the gold standard, international trade did not suddenly halt. The ships didn’t stop sailing and the tractors didn’t stop running while the new agreements were hammered out.
The goal of a restructuring is to negotiate a new reality without letting the “going concern”—in this case, the physical survival of humanity—collapse unnecessarily. We can maintain the short-term operational credit required to move grain and fertilizer across oceans while simultaneously writing down the long-term debts that demand infinite growth.
Humanity is deep into an ecological collapse because we are acting out an ancient play that has grown too large for the Earth’s stage. Having one child, or none, pushes the domino. When you reduce the population, the growth engine fails. There’s no way around that. Robots don’t buy houses, cars, clothes, or vacations.
At this point, the reader likely understands this. If we have one child or less everywhere, the global population goes down. If the population goes down, consumption goes down. If consumption goes down, worldwide we cannot pay our debts. When you do not pay your debts, you trigger default and you now have to restructure the debt. Both
borrowers and lenders will know the population is in decline. They will not assume consumption will grow, that we will need more of everything. There will be a widespread shrinking of debt on the books, and credit available.
That brings down the value of the stock markets, bond markets, and the banking sector. Bringing down their value does not mean they disappear. It means collapsing the expectation of infinite growth. It means wiping out the three hundred and fifty-three trillion dollars in over-leveraged debt, deflating asset bubbles, and ending the stock market’s demand for perpetual expansion.
It does not mean we forget how to process a letter of credit for a cargo ship. Just as governments and central banks suspended the normal rules of capitalism during the COVID-19 pandemic—pumping trillions of dollars directly into the system to keep the physical supply chains functioning while the economy paused—they can and should intervene to ensure the operational plumbing of global trade survives the transition.
The sectors that make actual products still exist, and the mechanisms to facilitate their trade will be preserved by necessity. These industries must adjust to a new world where the plan is not endless growth, but maintaining what is essential while we can. This happens to declining companies and industries all the time. We know how it works.
Citizens will need to speak up and step up. There is no reason to repeat the mistakes of the past, destroying food
while people are hungry. If citizens and governments get the food to the people, keep the systems running, and don’t accept the hoarding of essential goods in the name of managing prices or currencies, shifting to a declining economy need not result in famine or poor health outcomes.
We apply what the world knows about declining industries to the broader economy. We expect most things to shrink as the population shrinks. That is exactly what we want. That means less pollution. Less water use. Less land needed to sustain ourselves. More space nature can have back. More biological resources so we can eventually live off the interest. We continue this transition for 100 to 250 years. We eventually reach a population level where we can live off the interest of the Earth. And then we start having two kids per person again so we can sustain the population at that level.
We live in balance with the Earth to the best of our abilities, and there is no reason to believe that humans can’t continue to live and thrive on this planet for hundreds of millions of years to come.
That’s the easy way.
Still, for the skeptical reader, there remains one last question. Why would wealthy people just let this happen?
Won’t they fight back?
They might.
This part of the analysis needs an upfront clarification.
There is no single person making global decisions. While there is concentrated power, the growth economy is not one unified entity.
Each country is different. Some are more connected to their people than others. They have different histories and current political environments. While every government still has a GDP growth target in place—knowing we have too many people on the planet and that we are rapidly running out of essential resources needed for survival—it is inaccurate to assume they would all respond identically to a voluntary reduction in birth rates.
The rest of this chapter engages with the various levels of escalated responses that ruling classes have historically employed against their own populations.
Exploring these examples clarifies the levers available to groups that want to combat voluntary population decline.
While initial economic levers are likely to be utilized broadly, violent coercive tactics have been used less frequently in modern history. The chapter concludes by examining how shifts in asymmetric warfare make extreme state violence militarily and economically improbable today.
The human population is going to come down one way or another. That is not up for debate. The planet determines that, along with physical laws. Above, I have shown what the easy path looks like. This is the path for
which this book strongly advocates. What follows is what this book is designed to avoid.
Hitting Your Wallet If people begin to actively choose to have one child, or none, and openly state why—that they are doing it to stop destroying the physical planet, to shift away from the goal of endless growth in consumption, and to bring the population down to a level where humanity can live off the biological interest of the Earth—much paper wealth will disappear. The result is not a temporary demographic dip, nor is it an accidental cultural trend. It is a reproductive strike. It is the start of an intentional, long-term, global population decline.
It is reasonable to assume that those with enormous wealth in the current system will fight to keep the current system alive. The options available to them are fairly limited.
Their first line of attack, and the only strategy that I predict will be widely used, is to hit people in their wallets.
This strategy is rarely effective.
When ancient Rome transitioned from a republic to an empire, Emperor Augustus realized the patrician class was not reproducing fast enough to maintain the state’s power structure. In 9 CE, he enacted the Lex Papia Poppaea.
This law explicitly penalized unmarried adults and childless couples by stripping them of their right to inherit wealth
and barring them from attending public games. If you did not give the empire children, the empire confiscated your family’s capital [1]. That works on wealthy people who have an inheritance to worry about. During a financial crisis where paper wealth is disappearing, this is hardly a useful tactic.
In 1926, as Benito Mussolini sought to build a massive industrial and military workforce for fascist Italy, he realized birth rates were too low. He instituted the tassa sui celibi—the tax on bachelors. Men who refused to marry and have children were subjected to a punitive, escalating income tax. Mussolini explicitly stated his calculation: “Numbers are power.” The state needed bodies, and it bled the childless to get them [2].
The data shows it was a failure. Despite the aggressive financial penalties, Italy’s birth rate did not go up.
Instead, it continued to drop steadily throughout Mussolini’s rule, falling from a total fertility rate of roughly 3.7 children per woman in the early 1920s down to 2.4 by the mid-1940s. The public found ways around the state’s demands. Many men simply absorbed the tax as a frustrating cost of living rather than taking on the massive expense of a family. Others got married to avoid the tax but quietly continued to use natural birth control, like the withdrawal method, to keep their family sizes small. They complied on paper, but they refused to produce the children the regime demanded.
The Soviet Union utilized a similar approach. From 1941 until the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s, the communist state enforced a Nalog na bezdetnost, a “tax on childlessness.” Men between the ages of 20 and 50, and married women between 20 and 45, who did not have children were legally forced to surrender 6 percent of their total income directly to the state [3].
As in Italy, this did not reverse the trend. The birth rate in the European parts of the Soviet Union steadily declined from the 1950s onward, dropping below the replacement level in major cities like Moscow and Leningrad by the 1970s. Citizens actively subverted the law. Since the state allowed tax exemptions for people who were physically unable to have children, a black market for medical documents flourished. People bribed doctors to provide forged certificates of infertility. Others entered into fake “paper marriages” to navigate the system, while still choosing not to have children. Citizens turned to bribery, loopholes, and quiet defiance to protect their wallets and their independence.
In the United States, leaders are openly floating ideas to tie a citizen’s voting power and tax rates directly to their reproductive output. In 2021, U.S. Senator JD Vance argued that childless Americans should pay higher taxes, stating, “We should punish the things that we think are bad.” He went further, suggesting the state should strip political power from those who refuse to participate in the growth economy: “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but
let’s give control over those votes to the parents of those children.” He argued that as a parent, “you should have more power… more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don’t have kids.” [4] While demanding that citizens produce more children for the state, the U.S. is actively reducing the social welfare programs families rely on to care for those kids.
In August 2024, the Senate officially blocked a bipartisan bill that would have expanded the Child Tax Credit and lifted 400,000 children out of poverty. When explaining why they blocked money going to parents, politicians were blunt, arguing that they feared giving parents money to feed and house children would stop them from laboring in the economy. Senator Mike Crapo stated the expansion went “too far toward the Democrats’ goal of turning the child tax credit into a subsidy untethered to work.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed the expansion for families, calling it “cash welfare instead of relief for working taxpayers.” [5] U.S. politicians have consistently moved to slash funding for SNAP (food stamps) and WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children). Recent federal budget laws and House appropriations have routinely threatened to strip billions of dollars in food assistance, risking the physical removal of hundreds of thousands of children from the programs that keep them fed [6]. When JD Vance was asked what the government should do to help working parents survive the
crushing, inflated cost of daycare, he dismissed the need for structural funding, stating, “one of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for daycare is, maybe grandma and grandpa wants to help out a little bit more.” [7] The cost to raise a single child from birth to age 18 in the U.S. has crossed $303,000 [8]. The standard federal tax credit offers parents just $2,000 a year. The U.S. government is offering $36,000 across eighteen years to take on a $303,000 cost, while simultaneously cutting childcare, slashing food assistance, and threatening to remove voting rights for those who do not comply.
The citizens are weighing the costs. In a recent American Family Survey, a staggering 70 percent of Americans stated that raising children is now unaffordable, citing “insufficient money” as the primary reason they are actively limiting their family size [9]. Parents are openly pointing to the impossible burden. As one working mother recently explained to researchers, she simply couldn’t keep up with the $500 a week it cost for daycare even while working two jobs—day security and night delivery—eventually having to pull her one-year-old out of care entirely [10].
Not all governments are the same. Historically, governments have also offered positive incentives to encourage higher birth rates: child tax credits, cash bonuses, subsidized housing, food vouchers, baby bonds. These too tend to fail.
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has explicitly tied the survival of the Hungarian economy to a massive increase in the domestic birth rate: “For a country to be strong, demographic decline must be out of the question… A country which is in demographic decline—and, to put it bluntly, is not even able to sustain itself biologically—may well find that it is no longer needed. A country like that will disappear.” [11] Orbán’s premise ignores basic population mechanics. Once the population drops to a sustainable level, and the cost of rearing children is no longer prohibitive, citizens can return to a replacement level of roughly two children per woman, stabilizing the population.
He further claims, “If families are not functioning, if there are no children, then a national community can simply disappear… sooner or later there would be just one survivor left to turn the lights off: we would face potential extinction. This vision is not some feverish nightmare or imagined threat… it is a real, mathematically provable danger.” [12] The actual ecological risk stems from overshoot—sustaining 8.3 billion people on a planet with a much lower carrying capacity. Nevertheless, the Hungarian government continues to push for population expansion in spite of the physical limits. To achieve this, his government
currently spends an astonishing 5 percent of its entire national GDP on policies to increase births—among the highest rates in the world [13].
On the surface, it looks like a series of generous incentives. Women who have four or more children are permanently exempt from paying any personal income tax.
The state also offers young married couples the Babaváró, a “baby-expecting” loan. This is a general-purpose, interest-free cash loan of up to $30,000 that couples can use for anything. If the couple successfully produces three children, the entire debt is wiped clean [14].
However, real estate prices in Budapest have skyrocketed since these programs began. In Budapest today, upgrading from a couple’s apartment to an apartment with enough bedrooms for three children costs a premium of roughly $40,000. The state’s $30,000 loan does not cover the market-rate cost of the extra bedroom required to house an extra child in the capital city. Not to mention the costs of raising a child to adulthood.
The loans are also conditional. Young couples who take the interest-free money are legally bound to the state’s baby-making timeline. If they struggle with infertility, suffer miscarriages, or simply get a divorce before a child is born within the strict five-year deadline, the contract is broken.
The loan immediately converts to a market-rate loan, and the state demands the couple retroactively repay the entire interest subsidy in a single lump sum within 120 days [15].
Bettina, a 32-year-old teaching assistant in southern Hungary, told reporters how the state’s biological timeline feels when a couple actually takes the loan. “We are trying hard for another baby now,” she admitted, “but as the term approaches it does increase the pressure.” [16] For those who refuse to take the money or choose not to have children, this effectively works as an economic punishment. “They say they could only afford a loan, a car, or a flat, if they had a child,” explained one childfree Hungarian citizen, noting that the government’s policies intentionally treat those who refuse to participate as “second-class citizens.” [17] Another citizen, Tibi, looked at the elevated cost of living and the state’s conditional money and stated, “what Fidesz is calling a family policy is a financial trap, and families are becoming victims without realizing.” The plan has not worked well. Demographer Balázs Kapitány summed up the state’s failure perfectly: “Decisions about having children are complicated and complex. People are not like machines, in which you throw a coin and get a hot chocolate.” [18] The data proves his point. When the major subsidies expanded in 2015, Hungary’s fertility rate was 1.45. Over the next six years of heavy spending, the rate rose to a peak of 1.59 in 2021. Then, the trend reversed. In 2022, the rate fell to 1.52. By 2024, the fertility rate had dropped to 1.38. That same year, the total number of annual births
fell below 75,000, hitting the lowest level recorded since 1949 [19].
The financial incentives do not change the physical reality of the citizens’ daily lives. When asked why they are refusing the state’s money, citizens point directly to the grueling economic treadmill. As one Hungarian citizen explained, “If we wanted to maintain our standard of living and provide everything for our child, it just wouldn’t be possible. By the third month, we’d already need to take out a loan and go into debt.” [20] In South Korea, where the fertility rate has plunged to 0.72, the government has spent over two hundred and sixty billion dollars in two decades trying to encourage citizens to have children through massive cash handouts and subsidies. The birth rate continues to drop.
According to demographic research, it costs roughly 365 million won (about $275,000) to raise a child to age 18 in South Korea. That cost is a staggering 7.79 times the South Korean GDP per capita, making it statistically the most expensive country in the world to raise a child relative to a citizen’s income [21]. Handing a family a few thousand dollars at birth does nothing to dent a $275,000 eighteen-year cost. South Korean women frequently cite the impossible cost of housing, extreme societal competition, and a punishing corporate culture. As one 30-year-old South Korean citizen recently told a national newspaper when asked about the state’s incentives, “having children would lead to bankruptcy no matter how I
calculate it.” Another woman, pointing to the astronomical cost of education and shelter, noted simply that children have become “a luxury, as out of reach as a Porsche.” [22] These policies tend to fail on their own, but they do successfully bring social stigma to those who choose not to have children. State pressures rapidly translate into cultural alienation, framing the choice as a failure of civic duty [23].
This can be combatted directly. When people realize they are not alone—that choosing a smaller family is a calculated vote for continued life on the planet—the effort gains resilience. A shared narrative removes the shame and replaces it with purpose. Falling fertility is normally framed as sadness, selfishness, decadence, feminism, secularism, loneliness, housing costs, delayed marriage, careerism, or cultural decline. People are made to feel that not having children is a personal lack, a failure of adulthood, a failure of femininity, masculinity, patriotism, religion, maturity, optimism, or family duty.
Having one child, or none, is an act of refusal. It is conscious. It is strategic. It is a way for people to stop feeding a machine that needs endless new humans because it cannot compute ‘enough.’ Refusal is discipline, care, and ecological responsibility. Having one child, or none, is solidarity with future life. Of humans, and all of the other species we share this planet with. Shifting narratives helps.
When someone says, I don’t have kids, people can say thank you for your restraint. When someone says, I only have one
child, saying thank you for choosing life can make a difference.
Share why you are having one child, or none, with others. Encourage them to learn more, and do the same if it makes sense to them. This single act will help you keep your own costs down, and keep the planet habitable for humans and other life forms.
Fighting for Reproductive Freedom Again, there are around 195 independent nations in the world. There is no reason to believe that they will act in unison. Some nations may immediately listen to the will of their citizens, look at the physical limits, accept that their populations are shrinking, and begin the hard work of restructuring their debts. Others may only do this after trying financial incentives first.
Once we move past incentives, we arrive at the more forceful approaches. I will explore the history and current uses of these strategies simply because they have been used before. This in no way implies how many nations will try, or succeed, in implementing these kinds of restrictions. This is an exploration of tactics, not an estimate of the likelihood they will be used. These approaches are unnecessary, invasive, and counter to the long-term sustainability of life on Earth. It makes far more sense for a nation to pause,
accept ecological reality, embrace the will of its citizens, and restructure.
In Russia, the government recently banned what it calls “child-free propaganda,” making it a heavily fined offense to publicly talk about choosing not to have kids.
Russian authorities have created state registers to track pregnancies and have stripped abortion licenses from hundreds of private clinics to trap women into carrying pregnancies to term [24].
In Iran, facing a declining birth rate, the government passed a “Rejuvenation of the Population” law that banned the free distribution of birth control in the public healthcare system and explicitly outlawed voluntary surgeries like vasectomies and getting tubes tied [25].
In the United States, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the case that had made abortion legal in the country. Fourteen states quickly enacted near-total abortion bans. This predominantly impacts lower-income citizens who lack the resources to travel out of state. Furthermore, it degrades the broader healthcare infrastructure; a 2022 Commonwealth Fund report found that maternal death rates were 62 percent higher in abortion-restricted states, while the Association of American Medical Colleges tracked a 6.7 percent decline in OB-GYN residency applications in those same states, destabilizing general pregnancy care networks [26].
In overturning the ruling, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: “In future cases, we should
reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.
Because any substantive due process decision is demonstrably erroneous, we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.” [27] This explicitly questions the landmark legal ruling (Griswold v.
Connecticut) that protects access to basic birth control.
The state reclassifies birth control as “abortion” by redefining when human life begins. When legislators pass “fetal personhood” laws that grant legal status to a fertilized egg, they are not just regulating pregnancy; they are creating a constitutional conflict where the “rights” of an embryo could eventually override an individual’s right to prevent conception. This legal groundwork is designed to provide the Supreme Court with the necessary opening to revisit Griswold by arguing that the legal protection of life at fertilization supersedes the “zone of privacy” that previously protected reproductive rights. By reframing birth control as a matter of “fetal rights” rather than personal health, politicians intentionally invite the courts to dismantle the legal shield that has kept birth control accessible for over sixty years [28].
So far, the data shows the limits of modern state power. According to the Guttmacher Institute and the Society of Family Planning, the total number of abortions in the U.S. actually rose slightly in the year following the bans [29]. Why? Because the population bypassed the state using logistics. Nonprofit networks shipped abortion
pills—mifepristone and misoprostol—across state lines and international borders using telehealth and the mail.
It is important to note that in most of the West, commercial birth control like pills and condoms remains legal and accessible. While some state legislatures have escalated legal restrictions on access, they cannot easily police individual biology.
If the state does successfully ban commercial birth control, the ultimate defense is the realization that human beings managed their fertility for thousands of years before the pharmaceutical industry existed. The state can shut down a clinic, but it is vastly more difficult to ban human biology and the weeds growing in the soil. We can look to history to see what natural approaches actually work safely.
For instance, the withdrawal method has a roughly 20 to 22 percent failure rate with typical human error, but if done perfectly, that failure rate drops to 4 percent—with zero physical side effects [30]. Far more precise is modern cycle tracking. This isn’t the outdated “rhythm method,” but tracking daily morning body temperature and physical signs to pinpoint the exact six-day window when a woman can get pregnant. Studies show that with perfect use—strictly abstaining or using physical barriers during those few days—the failure rate is less than 1 percent. It is statistically as effective as the birth control pill, with absolutely no side effects or reliance on drug companies [31].
Historically, men and women also used plants to subvert state control. In ancient Greece and Rome, a plant
in the fennel family called Silphium was used so effectively as an oral birth control that the city of Cyrene built its entire economy on it, stamping the plant on its coins until it was picked into extinction [32]. Enslaved Black women in the American South, knowing their children would be born as plantation property, secretly chewed cotton root bark. It contains a compound that interferes with pregnancy hormones and stimulates the uterus, acting as a highly effective, though physically painful, way to prevent or end a pregnancy [33]. In Europe and Appalachia, women used the seeds of wild carrot (Queen Anne’s Lace) with very mild side effects, blocking the body from preparing for a fertilized egg to attach. There are even historical methods for men. In South Asia and Central America, men ate the seeds of the papaya. Modern clinical studies confirm these seeds contain an enzyme that stops sperm from moving, dropping sperm counts to zero when eaten daily, with fertility returning to normal once stopped [34].
But this history of plant medicine is also filled with desperate and deadly methods. Women frequently turned to pennyroyal, a mint-like plant widely documented across Europe to end pregnancies. However, its essential oil contains a massive liver toxin. Women used it desperately, but the dose required to end a pregnancy was dangerously close to the dose that causes total liver and kidney failure. It routinely killed the women who took it. Rue, a plant used in Latin America, stimulated the uterus but carried severe side effects including stomach bleeding and liver damage [35].
Knowing the difference between what works safely and what kills is the foundation of protecting your body if a state tries to claim ownership of it.
The most severe end of this spectrum is forced pregnancy. When the United States banned the importation of enslaved people in 1808, the Southern economy faced a labor shortage. To maintain their wealth, plantation owners pivoted to forcing births. Enslaved women were explicitly valued, priced, and traded based on their ability to have children, frequently labeled in ledgers as “breeding women.” Forced pregnancy was systemic. Enslaved women were routinely forced to have sex with specific enslaved men chosen by the owners, or they were raped by owners and overseers [36].
Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Washington in 1792, talking about the people he enslaved: “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.” He is proudly calculating a 4 percent annual profit purely from the births of enslaved children [37].
The casual nature of the correspondence shows how common this once was. Fortunately, modern examples are far fewer, but heartbreakingly, forced pregnancy still occurs.
Nearly two centuries later, in the late 1970s, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia wanted a new peasant class to work its agrarian economy. To bypass personal choice and
rapidly manufacture a new generation of laborers, the state instituted a nationwide policy of forced mass marriage.
According to transcripts from the United Nations-backed war crime tribunals, citizens were forced into ceremonies marrying up to 160 couples at a time to complete strangers [38].
The state explicitly commanded them to reproduce.
Survivors testified that during the weddings, cadres explicitly ordered the new couples to “commit themselves to producing more children for Angkar [The Organization].” After the ceremonies, couples were placed in small bamboo huts while armed militia, known as chhlop, were deployed to crouch under the floorboards and listen for consummation.
The threat of execution was constant. As one survivor, Sophon, testified: “The chhlop came to see whether we had sex or not; if not they would take us to be educated… we were both willing to have sex because we were afraid of Angkar.” [39] When couples tried to quietly resist, the enforcement became violently direct. Survivor Mom Vun testified that when guards outside her hut heard her and her forced husband quietly agreeing to fake the consummation, the militiamen broke into the room with weapons and a flashlight. “They threatened us… and they actually got hold of his penis and to insert it into my thing,” she testified
to the tribunal. “It was so disgusting but we had no choice… We were afraid that they would shoot at us and we did what we were instructed to do in order to survive.” [40] In 1966, Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania realized his economic plans for rapid industrialization were failing because the domestic birth rate was dropping. He determined the population needed to grow from 19 million to 30 million to supply the factories. He did not rely on financial bribes. He enacted Decree 770, which outlawed all contraception and abortion for women under the age of forty-five who had fewer than four (later five) children [41].
Ceaușescu explicitly stated that citizens were the biological property of the empire. “The fetus is the property of the entire society,” he declared. “Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.” [42] To enforce this physically, the state deployed the Securitate, a secret police force, to monitor women’s bodies.
The state instituted mandatory monthly gynecological examinations for women in workplaces, factories, and schools. State doctors and secret police agents—bitterly referred to by the citizens as the “menstrual police”—would physically inspect women to check for pregnancies. If a pregnancy was detected, the woman was tracked. If she miscarried, she was interrogated by police to prove she had not intentionally terminated it. As one woman who lived
through this testified: “I will never forget my first imposed gynecological exam in high school. They made us girls stand in a row and go into the medical office to be checked… The purpose, they told us, was to get a medical document necessary to enroll for high school graduation.” [43] To ensure the medical system complied, doctors were given birth quotas. If the birth rate in a doctor’s district dropped, their salary was slashed.
Women turned to the black market when faced with unwanted pregnancies. An estimated 10,000 women bled to death from illegal, unsafe, back-alley abortions to escape the state’s mandates [44].
Over half a million children were abandoned to grossly underfunded state-run orphanages. Florin Rucareanu, a survivor of one of these facilities, described the reality of being a child produced purely to satisfy a state quota: “We were wiped out as human beings—silenced, humiliated. Our personalities were dissolved. Those places were the slaughterhouses of souls.” [45] During the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, Serbian forces systematically utilized “rape camps” as a mechanism of genocide. Bosniak women and girls were imprisoned, repeatedly raped, and intentionally held captive until their pregnancies were too advanced to safely abort.
The explicit goal was to force them to bear Serbian children to physically erase the Bosniak bloodline and repopulate the territory.
“Women were often deliberately kept in detention until it was too late to get an abortion,” noted Belma Becirbasic, a researcher who documented the aftermath of the camps [46].
The psychological trauma of forced state reproduction was permanent; survivors who were forced to give birth often abandoned the children in hospitals, unable to raise the physical evidence of the empire’s weaponized biology.
Two decades later, the Islamic State (ISIS) utilized forced pregnancies to expand its Caliphate. In 2014, ISIS militants surrounded the Yazidi community in Northern Iraq, slaughtering the men and capturing thousands of women and girls. They were systematically sold in slave markets, forced into marriages, and repeatedly raped to produce children for the regime.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Yazidi survivor Nadia Murad documented the reality of the state claiming ownership of her biology: “The sexual violence ISIS unleashed on us was a weapon of war,” she wrote. “I found my soul, my body, my emotions to be occupied and used by people who look like humans, but they are not human.” [47]
The Cost of Capture For thousands of years, civilians have been terrified into submission by the military. Historically, an army of trained soldiers facing a group of unarmed civilians was not a battle; it was a slaughter. An empire could afford to put its men in heavy armor, put them on horses, and arm them with steel. When a wall of armored cavalry charged a crowd of starving civilians, the civilians died. In 1358, during a peasant uprising in France, the chronicler Jean Froissart documented the absolute, effortless military supremacy of the state’s armored knights over the working class: “They fell upon them, and slew them like beasts… they killed more than seven thousand, and left none alive.” [48] Seeing the sheer bloodshed, populations routinely surrendered their freedom just to stay alive. The state held a total monopoly on violence. The dynamics of warfare changed the moment a citizen could kill an elite soldier from a distance. Thousands of years of military strategy became obsolete with the perfection of the firearm. A poor farmer hiding behind a tree with a musket wiped out centuries of military advantage.
This is exactly how the United States was born, and why the right to bear arms was written into the foundation of the country. The British Empire, a great military superpower, sent heavily funded, pensioned soldiers marching in traditional battlefield formations. The
American civilians refused to play by those rules, using the terrain to turn the empire’s rigid tactics into a fatal liability.
The British officers were shocked. In 1775, the commander of the British forces in North America, General Thomas Gage, wrote back to London admitting that the nature of warfare had suddenly changed: “The rebels are not the despicable rabble too many have supposed them to be…
In all their wars against the French they never showed so much conduct, attention, and perseverance as they do now.” [49] Following the bloody retreat from Lexington and Concord, British Lord Hugh Percy wrote a frantic warning to his superiors, realizing the empire’s elite tactics were useless against armed, decentralized locals: “Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken… they concealed themselves in houses, and advanced within ten yards to fire at me and other officers, though they were morally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant.” [50] Then, guns became rapid-fire.
With the invention of smokeless powder and the machine gun, a shooter’s position was no longer given away by a cloud of white smoke. By World War I, the industrialization of slaughter was absolute. The machine gun erased the hierarchy of the empire. Aristocratic officers were no longer
safe observing from horses; they died in the mud right next to the privates.
A war that empires promised their citizens would be a quick, glorious victory dragged on for years. The human body simply could not cross a field of machine-gun fire. A German machine gunner at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 documented the sickening ease of destroying an empire’s charging army: “The officers went in front… When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. We didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.” [51] The attrition was so severe that it destroyed the romantic illusion of combat. As British soldier Harry Patch, the last surviving combat veteran of the trenches, recalled decades later: “It wasn’t worth it. No war is worth it.
No nation is worth it, neither is any boundary… It was just a legalized mass murder.” [52] Then Germany tried to take over the world, and the empires did it again. That conflict ended with the United States wiping out Tokyo with napalm and leveling two Japanese cities with atomic bombs.
Weapons of mass destruction created a strict ceiling on how much force an empire can practically use against its own people. You can wipe out an entire city, but that is not a win for an economic empire. You cannot extract resources from ashes. You cannot tax a radioactive crater, and you cannot force dead bodies to work in factories or service a national debt. As the military historian T.R. Fehrenbach famously wrote regarding the limits of modern
super-weapons: “You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life… but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.” [53] Future global conflicts revealed a major surprise: the most technologically advanced, heavily funded militaries in the world suddenly struggled to inflict their will on poorly resourced enemies. To capture human capital, the empire cannot drop a nuclear bomb. Look at Vietnam. A superpower was fought to a standstill by insurgents who weaponized the jungle itself. As one U.S. Marine recalled of the Viet Cong’s booby traps: “You didn’t know if the next step was going to blow your leg off or put a bamboo spike through your foot. The enemy was the trail. The enemy was the trees.” [54] Decades later in Afghanistan, local resistance fighters outlasted the political will of the United States military using one simple, devastating advantage: the Improvised Explosive Device (IED). They did not have to defeat the U.S. Army in a conventional battle; they targeted the logic of occupation.
The physical machinery of containment reached its boundary during this conflict. Insurgents utilized commercial electronics, wireless triggers, and fertilizer to build thousands of roadside explosives. They did not have to conquer a capital; they simply had to make the ongoing
operational cost of occupation unviable for the state’s budget.
U.S. Army Lieutenant General Thomas Metz, who directed the military’s Joint IED Defeat Organization, plainly admitted to Congress that the superpower was being bled dry by cheap, decentralized violence: “We are fighting a thinking enemy… they use a $30 weapon to defeat a $3 million vehicle.” [55] The psychological toll of fighting an enemy that used cheap garbage to halt a trillion-dollar military was profound. U.S. Marine Staff Sergeant William Dixon, who survived multiple blasts, described the impossible reality of trying to police a weaponized terrain: “You’re looking at a pile of rocks, a piece of trash, a dead dog on the side of the road, and you’re wondering if that’s the one that’s going to kill you… They don’t fight us face-to-face. They bury twenty dollars’ worth of explosives and blow the tracks off a tank.” [56] The war between Russia and Ukraine is teaching the world what conflict and resistance now are in the era of drones.
At first, the conflict looked like traditional modern warfare, fought with the most expensive missiles on earth.
Then, the mask came off. The military empires realized you cannot win a war by shooting down a cheap drone with a two-million-dollar Patriot missile. That cost ratio will bankrupt a nation in weeks.
So, they experimented with cheaper alternatives.
They realized that a four-hundred-dollar commercial quadcopter—the exact kind you can buy online for taking wedding photos or inspecting real estate—worked well enough to drop a crude explosive directly through the open hatch of a heavy armored vehicle. They went all in. Ukraine is now manufacturing them as fast as possible, ordering them by the millions.
Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, summarized the severe tactical disruption this presents to traditional militaries: “We have cases where a drone costing $500 destroyed a tank costing three million to four million dollars… This is a completely new war.” [57] A Ukrainian drone operator on the frontlines, going by the callsign “Darwin,” described how commercial electronics have leveled the battlefield: “A guy with a controller and a headset can stop an entire armored column. We see them before they ever hear us.” [58] This reality has spread globally. Non-state actors are buying consumer technology in bulk. Cartels in Mexico are dropping explosives from commercial drones. Gangs in Haiti are using them to hold off state police.
In Myanmar, the civilian resistance—fighting against a heavily armed military junta—is actively 3D-printing semi-automatic weapons in jungle camps. They do not fully rely on a weapons smuggler; they just need an internet connection. They download open-source digital
blueprints and print the parts using standard, commercially available plastic printers originally designed for hobbyists.
As one young Myanmar rebel told a reporter from a hidden camp: “When the military staged the coup, we had nothing. We fought them with slingshots and homemade hunting rifles. Now we print our own guns… We cannot wait for the international community to save us. We have to make the cost of their rule too high.” [59] Cheap plastics, lithium batteries, and next-day deliveries have inadvertently handed the modern citizen more asymmetrical firepower than any prior state would have ever allowed.
A state deploying military force against its own citizens for reducing consumption triggers catastrophic consequences. Entering a managed restructuring process is the only structurally viable option. For now, the military and the police are still human beings. They are people with families, mortgages, and consciences. They must comply with orders to enact harm on citizens. This is hardly a guarantee, particularly when the “crime” is not giving birth.
As warfare and policing become more robotic and automated, a population resisting such an oppressive regime has no choice but to maximize costs to the empire. They will not have a chance at winning a head-on conflict with a state entity, so the battle becomes an insurgent rebellion. In these kinds of conflicts, the resistance intentionally destroys anything of high value to the state. They tend to target the infrastructure that sustains the state’s weapons systems,
communications, finance, energy, computers, chips, fiber optics, grain, and data centers. The military then will often try to shock the resistors into surrender with tanks, explosives, concentrated acts of violence, and widespread capture. In response, the resistors spread out, decentralize, and dig in for a long-term rebellion.
That sets this kind of conflict up to be the deadliest the world has ever seen.
A kinetic civil war against a modern state would not be a heroic movie. It would be a brutal, bloody war of attrition fought with suicide drones, printed plastic guns, and homemade explosives. Both sides would suffer immensely.
I cover this only for the skeptical reader. Killing people does not increase the population. It does the opposite. Armed conflict rapidly decreases the population.
Declaring war on armed citizens choosing to have one child only makes the problem worse. Governments know this.
That is why I believe we will restructure the debt. And life will go on. They may test the waters. The resistance will show them that the water is hot. Modern asymmetrical warfare vaporizes wealth and infrastructure indiscriminately.
No one wins that fight.
There is no reason to go to such violent extremes to maintain the impossible illusion of endless growth.
Whether intentional or not, the One Child Revolution has already begun. The global birth rate is the lowest in human history, down to about 2.3 births per woman from historical highs of around five. Regardless of their views on empire, growth, ecological limits, sustainability, biological diversity, equality, freedom, or slavery, women are having fewer children. When this global number drops below the replacement level of 2.1, the population decline will begin.
This book is just a nudge. As more people consciously choose to have one child, or none, because they want the population to decline—and because they know that infinite growth on a finite planet is a fool’s game—the trend will become unstoppable by any empire.
You are now free to vote.
Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I hope you choose life.