Even after all these years of experience, socialism still has a reputation as a humane alternative to capitalism. This is preposterous, because socialism means controlling or stealing people’s property, whereas capitalism means nothing more or less than the freedom to own, accumulate, and trade the fruits of your labor. Socialists are ideologically driven to run other people’s lives, from where they live to how they work and whether or not they have children. This implication of socialism has been put into practice all around the world, from Nazi Germany to Communist China, and was even proposed as a federal law in the United States by the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger.

As Sanger wrote in “America Needs a Code for Babies”:

Article 1. The purpose of the American Baby Code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies, to assist couples who wish to prevent overproduction of offspring and thus to reduce the burdens of charity and taxation for public relief, and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit. …

Article 3. A marriage license shall in itself give husband and wife only the right to a common household and not the right to parenthood.

Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit for parenthood. …

Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth. …

Article 8. Feeble-minded persons, habitual congenital criminals, those afflicted with inheritable disease, and others found biologically unfit by authorities qualified judge should be sterilized or, in cases of doubt, should be so isolated as to prevent the perpetuation of their afflictions by breeding.

You won’t hear politicians citing that part of Sanger’s heritage when they try to steer your tax money toward Planned Parenthood.

Under conditions of freedom, people can procreate as they choose. They can fall in love, marry, raise families and make their own decisions. No true socialist society can permit this. People use resources. If the state leaves procreation to free people’s decisions, it cannot plan the economy — as socialists insist on doing. The only way that such planning is possible is to end the freedom to procreate without permission. For this reason, China’s one-child-per-household rule was not an aberration; it was the fulfillment of the desire to plan the social order. No surprise that the China branch of Planned Parenthood helped to implement that brutal policy, which led to the mass abortion or infanticide of millions of baby girls.

The National Socialists in Germany were also obsessed with controlling reproduction, in their case seeking to goad “good” Germans into breeding, while stopping the racially “inferior” from reproducing their kind. Abortion was selectively legalized for “non-Aryan” Germans, and imposed by force in concentration camps — just one of the crimes for which the Nazis paid at Nuremberg.

As we saw from Sanger’s proposal, America was once afflicted by the same impulse. A generation of academics, policy makers, and public intellectuals rallied around a solution to that generation’s demographic panics. Too many of the wrong people were reproducing and getting rich. Something had to be done. So a series of policies were implemented to realize the dreams of these eugenicists.

Forced sterilization was one of the policies proposed (and implemented in a dozen U.S. states), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Minimum wages started as a eugenics program: a high bar to enter the workforce would effectively ban inferiors and imbeciles from earning money, and hence starve them out and exterminate them in one generation. (That’s a paraphrase from a mainstream economics book by Frank Taussig that appeared in 1912.)

Other policies inspired by eugenics included zoning (keeping fit and unfit separated), segregation (same), Jim Crow laws (no race mixing), working hours limits that targeted women (women in a eugenics regime serve only one purpose), immigration restrictions (again, designed to keep the national genetic pool pure and prevent “mongrelization”), and even welfare payments that were structured to discourage women from working.

These policies are all still with us, even if the early rationale has been entirely forgotten. Most of the time we are happy to whitewash this ugly history, and pretend that  all this legislation was designed to help people rather than control and/or exterminate them.

Are the Eugenicists Always With Us?

Surely eugenics could never return. We are more civilized than that. Or are we? Statists are never happy when major aspects of human life elude their control. Controlling the population mix and demographic trends goes with the aspirations to control society. Going back in history, Plato’s totalitarian vision of the social order (in The Republic) requires that the state control women’s pregnancies, and take full control of the child after birth. No state that seeks to manage people can possibly permit the “anarchy” to reproduce and rear one’s own family.

Ludwig von Mises, in his devastating 1922 takedown of socialism, spelled this out. He had seen, unlike very few others, that socialism would necessarily require the nationalization of women and also the complete control of birth. He was largely alone in having this insight: socialism isn’t just about the control of liberty and property but about the control of people and their sex lives. As he wrote:

Without coercive regulation of the growth of population, a socialist community is inconceivable. A socialist community must be in a position to prevent the size of the population from mounting above or falling below certain definite limits. It must attempt to maintain the population always at that optimal number which allows the maximum production per head.

Equally with any other order of society it must regard both under- and over-population as an evil. And since in it those motives, which in a society based on private ownership of the means of production harmonize the number of births with the limitations of the means of subsistence, would not exist, it will be obliged to regulate the matter itself. How it will accomplish this need not be here discussed. Nor is it relevant to our purpose to inquire whether its measures will serve eugenic or ethnological ideas. But it is certain that even if a socialist community may bring ‘free love,’ it can in no way bring free birth. The right to existence of every person born can be said to exist only when undesirable births can be prevented.

This was a very telling criticism at the time it was written. In the English-speaking world, books like The Passing of the Great Race were on many coffee tables, books that forecast the death of the “white race” and hence the end of civilization. Demographic panic was everywhere. And it was precisely through this fear that socialism first came to the United States.

A few decades later, we saw the results. The full implications of such policies were realized in Nazi Germany. The urge to control demographics led to the building of a killing machine without parallel, all constructed and deployed in the name of science. The influence of the U.S. experience with eugenics was not lost on Mises, who wrote the following in 1947:

The Nazi plan was more comprehensive and therefore more pernicious than that of the Marxians. It aimed at abolishing laissez-faire not only in the production of material goods, but no less in the production of men. The Führer was not only the general manager of all industries; he was also the general manager of the breeding-farm intent upon rearing superior men and eliminating inferior stock. A grandiose scheme of eugenics was to be put into effect according to ‘scientific’ principles.

It is vain for the champions of eugenics to protest that they did not mean what the Nazis executed. Eugenics aims at placing some men, backed by the police power, in complete control of human reproduction. It suggests that the methods applied to domestic animals be applied to men. This is precisely what the Nazis tried to do. The only objection which a consistent eugenist can raise is that his own plan differs from that of the Nazi scholars and that he wants to rear another type of men than the Nazis. As every supporter of economic planning aims at the execution of his own plan only, so every advocate of eugenic planning aims at the execution of his own plan and wants himself to act as the breeder of human stock. …

The mass slaughters perpetrated in the Nazi horror camps are too horrible to be adequately described by words. But they were the logical and consistent application of doctrines and policies parading as applied science and proved by some men who in a sector of the natural sciences have displayed acumen and technical skill in laboratory research.

We are living through yet another round of mass demographic panic. We are being told: The wrong people are coming here. The white race is dying out. We have too many little “carbon footprints.” Such notions are newly popular, and they are displacing concern for higher ideals like human liberty.

Beware, my friends. The statists are coming after a fundamental human right.