Neville Chamberlain, Britain’s pre-World War II Prime Minister, was desperate to prevent another European conflict. With memories of the First World War still fresh, he flew back and forth to meet with the man he called “Herr Hitler” to find a way to avert another and even more bloody armed struggle.

Sadly, in his fevered effort to prevent war, he precipitated it. Hitler saw in Chamberlain a weakness born of anguish, and he pounced: the formal corporal got Czechoslovakia and felt free to follow his vicious political dreams. Chamberlain did not want to make the hard choice his times demanded, and thus contributed to the horror of the Second World War. 

Americans Don’t Like Hard Decisions

None of us like difficult decisions. Often we prefer compromise, forestallment, and self-deception (“It won’t be that bad”) to being forced to make hard choices.

This is as true of public life as private. We want government’s gifts without its obligations. We want it to provide security without any loss of our privacy. When a politician comes along and tells us we can’t have everything we have come to expect, that changes are needed if our pet program is to survive or if the country is to avoid further indebtedness, that policymaker is deemed uncompassionate, insensitive, a shill for the rich, out of touch with the mainstream, or just plain mean-spirited.

We want government’s gifts without its obligations.

Recently a couple of Congressmen have had the audacity to speak about tough issues without cosmeticizing their words. Referring to the newly proposed Republican health insurance plan, U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said on CNN this week, “Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice. And so maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care.”

Immediately, Chaffetz was attacked. “House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi … pounced on Chaffetz’s remarks, tweeting they are ‘offensive and show a lack of both understanding and compassion’.” 

This is pretty typical stuff; with her husband Paul, the son of Republican bankers, the Pelosis reported a 2014 net worth of “between $43.4 million and $202 million in assets.” No wonder she is so “understanding” — given her anecdotal knowledge of poverty and inurement from its grimness, she can afford to advocate letting the poor eat cake and give it some icing, too.

Funny thing. The respected Catholic advocate for the poor, Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers movement, wrote the following about New Deal policies designed to help those in need:

Roosevelt will be elected on the platform of Cake and Circuses. During the depression years the relief checks flowed in, and now during the war years the government checks come regularly on the first of every month. The millions who are thus bought and paid for do not want any change. They are afraid of change. Mothers of six children cash their $180 stipend every month and go on a binge of department-store buying, movies … candies, radio, and even sometimes a car. It’s amazing how much you can get in the way of luxury if you just do without the necessities.

I wonder what Mrs. Pelosi would say to Ms. Day were the latter still with us and making the same kinds of remarks as Mr. Chaffetz.

A Darkening Future

The reality is that whether rich or poor or solidly middle-income, many Americans don’t like making hard choices and are profoundly offended when asked to do so by their political leaders. America’s entitlement programs are heading steadily toward insolvency. President Trump has said he does not want to make any changes to them but, in fact, increase their funding.

Mr. Trump has called for a massive new infrastructure improvement program and a significant increase in defense spending. And so on.

America’s growth is below a robust or even sufficient population replacement level.

I do not dispute that our highways and bridges need rebuilding or that our Armed Forces need more of just about everything. Were our population growth adequate to provide us with the workers we need and will need both for productivity and an enlarging tax base, there is the possibility we could grow our way out of deficit spending, at least significantly. 

But we are at below a robust or even sufficient population replacement level. Many of our unemployed or under-employed lack the job skills or basic tools (fluent literacy, for example) to gain and maintain employment. 

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the FY 2017 federal budget deficit will be $559 billion and as of March 8, 2017, the federal Treasury Department says that America’s “total public debt outstanding” is $19.880 trillion.

This is a darkening picture, and I offer no quick remedies for removing its discoloration. However, there are some things that, over time, could help America truly grow again and return to a pattern of spending, at the national level at least, only what we take in.

Solution: Make Decisions, Have More Kids

First, were the federal government to return many of its functions to the states, the people would have to make decisions much more close-to-home than those imposed by a distant capital the effects of whose policies are lost in mind-numbing statistics.

The Constitution authorizes only a few real duties — large and significant, yes, but not unbounded — for the federal government. Were states allowed to retain more of the money they now send to Washington, the fiscal pressures on the federal government would diminish.

Americans prefer the predictable to the possible.

Yet D.C. policymakers understand that devolving power to the states means losing some of their own, which to many politicians is chilling to contemplate. And then there are the American people, who like people everywhere are wary of change and prefer the predictable to the possible.

The American people: that’s where my second proposal comes in. We need to have more children. As my friend and former colleague Dr. Pat Fagan has written in The Public Discourse,

Even if all the market reforms of the Washington think tanks, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes Magazine were enacted, we’d still need to kiss the Great American Economy goodbye. Below the level of economic policy lies a society that is producing fewer people capable of hard work, especially married men with children. As the retreat from marriage continues apace, there are fewer and fewer of these men, resulting in a slowly, permanently decelerating economy.

And as Pat and Dr. Henry Potrykus have demonstrated, “The historical balance of population growth, human capital development, and physical capital investment is the optimum national path to economic growth. Growing our human capital is critical to our future economic growth.”

Put more simply: America needs more kids.

Children impose inconvenience, costs of money and time, unpredictable outcomes, and so forth. They also provide love, fulfillment, and the future of our country. When married couples have them, they bless the world.

Neville Chamberlain, in not deciding, decided. Let him not be America’s role model as our country addresses the great challenges of our time.