“Childbearing is, at bottom, a long-horizon investment: a rational actor accepts a low time preference, sinking two decades of capital and labor into a payoff that only matures across generations. That calculation depends entirely on a stable institutional environment in which the link between sacrifice and reward holds. Modern interventionism, the self-reinforcing pattern Mises identified in which each intervention’s side effects become the pretext for the next, has severed that link through six distinct mechanisms.”

Don’t be put off by the economic jargon in this opening paragraph of The Six Nooses: How Interventionism Is Strangling the Family’s Will to Reproduce, a perceptive piece by Felix Yang in Mises Wire, an online libertarian media outlet. You don’t need to be an economist to appreciate his sometimes-technical explanation of six distinct mechanisms that undermine fertility: fiat-currency inflation; the socialization of old-age support; medical monopoly; the nationalization of education; the stripping of housing sovereignty; and administrative relief.

His bottom line: “The only path back is the restoration of private property and the family’s own sovereignty over its financial, physical, and intergenerational decisions.”