Paying Mothers To Be Mothers, People To Be People

 THE COMMERCIAL BEGINS with two very pregnant people sitting side by side in airplane seats. you see them from the knees to the neck. The announcer informs you that there is a movement to classify pregnant people as "essential workers", and to put them on the public payroll, at something like twenty four hundred a month. Enough to make nearly anyone want to get pregnant. I was too shocked to pay attention to the rest of the ad. Granted, it takes a village, but do we really want to subsidize reproduction on  a planet with more than seven point five billion bodies, and counting? Multi millionaire mother to receive pregnancy stipend! The solution to that potential nightmare is of course means testing, which, upon further reflection, could be the solution to nearly everything else which ails our ailing free market economy. Free means tested money for the needy. Think about it; by guaranteeing that everybody is a consumer, demand explodes, as does production, distribution, sales, and societal prosperity, including for the rich. You might argue against paying poor people to breed like rabbits. Fine. Pay them to be people. Any given person, given sufficient opportunity to accumulate bad decisions, can reduce himself to poverty. the image comes to mind of Muhammed Ali walking down the street handing out twenties. Perhaps the imposition of a rule requiring part of the birth dividend be deposited in an untouchable account for the future use of the child. If memory serves, George McGovern ran for president on a platform plank calling for a guaranteed minimum income for all. that he lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon seems incredible. In the twenty twenty election Andrew Yang resurrected the same concept, and lost badly in the primaries,  again,surprisingly. Maybe our corporate masters have brainwashed us against sharing. Maybe we like to make our money the old fashioned way, by gambling for it in the stock market, ganging up with groups of investors and buying a bundle of Gamestock stock, artificially driving up the price, then cashing out before our co conspirators do. But let's face it. If we in the United States of Avarice are willing to even consider the notion of paying perfectly good public money to people for having babies, then we are just about willing to pay anybody for doing anything.