Why welfare-state liberals are almost hopelessly obtuse

...most especially the ones who squawk about overpopulation and how we should all stop having babies. They don't really mean it, of course, because who would change their adult diapers when they end up in the nursing home? Please pass the irony supplements.

The brilliant Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review

We still need to have children so that we can enjoy a secure old age. Modern societies have disguised the old bargain by socializing it. They maintain expensive government programs to assist the elderly, financed by successive generations. The children still take care of the elderly when they grow up, but now it’s all the children providing for all the elderly, collectively.

In some ways this arrangement may represent an advance for civilization. Most people seem to think so. But it has a little-appreciated drawback: It imposes a heavy, if hidden, burden on parents, especially those with several children, and societies that adopt it therefore tend to have fewer children. For both moral and practical reasons, it is time to revise the generational bargain again.

He sums up left-lib thinking nicely: "Don’t raise children yourself, but benefit in old age from the fact that others have done so."

One of his conclusions? "We ought to end the federal government’s bias against having children."
Amen, brother.

h/t Pundette
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