The totalitarian nature of the left occasionally bursts into the open. Consider this editorial in the Canadian Financial Post arguing for imposing a one-child policy on the world:

…The fix is simple. It’s dramatic. And yet the world’s leaders don’t even have this on their agenda in Copenhagen. Instead there will be photo ops, posturing, optics, blah-blah-blah about climate science and climate fraud, announcements of giant wind farms, then cap-and-trade subsidies.

None will work unless a China one-child policy is imposed. Unfortunately, there are powerful opponents. Leaders of the world’s big fundamentalist religions preach in favor of procreation and fiercely oppose birth control. And most political leaders in emerging economies perpetuate a disastrous Catch-22: Many children (i. e. sons) stave off hardship in the absence of a social safety net or economic development, which, in turn, prevents protections or development.

China has proven that birth restriction is smart policy. Its middle class grows, all its citizens have housing, health care, education and food, and the one out of five human beings who live there are not overpopulating the planet.

For those who balk at the notion that governments should control family sizes, just wait until the growing human population turns twice as much pastureland into desert as is now the case, or when the Amazon is gone, the elephants disappear for good and wars erupt over water, scarce resources and spatial needs.

The point is that Copenhagen’s talking points are beside the point.

The only fix is if all countries drastically reduce their populations, clean up their messes and impose mandatory conservation measures.

Jonah Goldberg notes:

One of the simultaneously heartening and dismaying aspects of the Obama era is how it demonstrates that bad ideas never, ever, ever, die. They can go into remission, to be sure, but the the bacillus lives on. Via Drudge, I just read this hideous call for a planetary one-child policy.

I don’t have the time to go through all of the arguments why Diane Francis’s supposedly brave truth-telling is disgusting and idiotic, but the good news is that I’ll have plenty of opportunities in the future!

But one point does cry out to be made. Imagine if someone wrote an op-ed saying that we need a planetary ban on abortion. Feminists would get their dresses over their heads in outrage about such a naked assault on “reproductive freedom.” But here is a woman in a very prestigious Canadian newspaper arguing, in effect, that every country in the world should force women everywhere to have an abortion if they already have a child. Put aside, for a moment, the pro-life objections to this. Even if you think the unborn are really just a bunch of cells, mere “uterine contents” with no more moral import than fingernail clippings, how on earth can anyone believe in “reproductive freedom” and not be absolutely horrified by the police-state evil of such proposals?