Why are we facing climate and other ecological crises, massive inequality, and decaying democracies? How did things not get better than they were in the past? As a new peer-reviewed book by folks at the Fair Start Movement makes clear, these problems derive from a massive power grab by elites in the middle of the Twentieth Century.
The book was recently recommended reading by a leading constitutional scholar.
The core claim it makes, that fair family policies which – restore a biodiverse nonhuman world, ensure equal opportunities for children, and build democracies where each person actually has the capacity to influence outcomes – would override all competing interests and rights has been subject to five successful peer-reviews: The Primary Right, A Human Rights Approach to Planning Families, Constituting Over Constitutions, The Right to Matter, and Justice as a Fair Start in Life. But we don’t need peer-review to understand the claim. How could we reject these values and believe in any viable conception of freedom, especially as the loss of nature through the climate crisis seriously harms infants? How can we separate these values from our creation, and how could anything logically precede creation – or existential – justice? How could we actually choose who has power over us without the “first election” of a just family planning norm?
Rather than ensure equal opportunities for all, and ecological sustainability via properly interpreting Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, world leaders invented a family planning model that evaded their collective responsibility to invest in and protect future generations. They pretended an interpersonal right was personal. They went for “nobody else’s business” over actually protecting kids. And by using that nonsense to maintain the trajectories at the time, they went for growth over equity.
They faked justice, and human rights, to protect existing power structures. Yes, we all got scammed, and our children will suffer as a result.
But as the book demonstrates, there is no real justice without a Fair Start in life. And right now, taking resources from the top of the wealth pyramid – the one Nobel Laureate Steven Chu recently decried – and using those resources as better family planning incentives/entitlements would have ten to twenty times the beneficial impact on the the climate and other ecological crises, massive inequality, and decaying democracies we are faced with today relative to downstream approaches. Fair Start is justice and freedom, or ensuring the capacity to consent to the influence of others.
The move to take those resources, and ensure birth equity, exposes a new border war between free people, and preconstitutional people or “precons” who refuse to collectively constitute free and just societies, and thus threaten our kids’ future.
This is the bottom line: Unless we prioritize an ecosocial Fair Start in life, we are not coming from a just place. Precons won’t prioritize each child getting a fair start in life. Free people will. Full stop.
Order your copy today, and join the fight for true justice.
- Concentrations of wealth and power only exist because world leaders chose isolation family planning systems meant to avoid collective obligations to protect future generations. This fundamentally created every crisis, from the climate to massive inequity, we face today.
- The right to a Fair Start in life is the first and overriding human right, obligating us to target those concentrations – and people like Ivanka Trump and other wealthy families like the Raymonds – to limit and decentralize their power and pay what they owe. They benefited from, and furthered, a lie at the heart of our systems of human rights and democracy. They are at the heart of the power grab. Government and all political obligations derive from people, who derive from their creation. The duty to ensure a Fair Start in life – the god norm – overrides all other rules, like the property rights that empower people like Ivanka. Fair Start is promoting a process called the Tell the Truth campaign, under federal law, to require disclosures of who played what role – and what role they plan on playing – in creating the crises we face today.
- Making them first apologize and then pay, via Fair Start incentives and entitlements, is the most just and effective way to compensate future generations for things like the climate crisis, with impacts that are ten to twenty times more effective than the downstream measures other nonprofits are promoting. Don’t get scammed. First things first – let’s start by creating optimal and just populations.