This is perhaps the critical question by which sides are chosen in economic debate. When, as the question has been posed, a calf is born should we not consider the economy to be improved thereby? The answer must be ‘of course’: the economy has, without expenditure, received a new working asset. Then, as the dialogue continues, why should we not also consider the economy to be improved when a person is born?

One’s reply to this question should not be as easy as the questioner obviously wants it to be, for the answer defines a constituency which the economist resolves to serve. The concealed questions here are: is the economy there for us? or are we there for it? and, ultimately, who are the ‘we’ that might be worthy of such consideration?

Let us adjust the question’s frame to that of a person born in a wealthy household. A child born among the household's servitors would be an asset because he is one more hand to do the estate's work. And he, like the calf, might be dispatched if the costs of his maintenance make him economically unproductive. If an economist considers you to be an asset, then he has taken the viewpoint of an economic system's owner class. Implicitly, this class is a small elite, living on passive income, and not making a physical contribution to the general product. (They can, we may be sure, afford to buy economic opinion-makers.)

Then let us consider the birth of another child, this one born to the wealthy householders of our example. A child of the estate’s owners would be accounted-for on the other side of the ledger: he is a new liability for whose maintenance the household product must be stretched. If an economist considers you to be a liability, he is implicitly taking a collectivist point of view. He sees economic order as existing to serve all alike, i.e.: for the purpose of maximizing everyone's leisure.

Historically the wealthy have always found ways to limit their numbers. When their wealth was substantially all the wealth of humanity, they sought to maintain its concentration as if they were quite aware of the economic principles in our wealth/population discussion. As history has proceeded, more and more of humanity have risen to levels of wealth that were once quite remote. Where this effect has been general, the most typical person acquires the outlook of a leisure class, and limits his progeny. Populations of Northern European ethnicity are receding everywhere outside the state of Utah.

Here again economic principles frame the question, but cannot answer it fully. Only culture can tell us how big the smallest socio-economic niche should be, or how much differentiation might be tolerated between the largest and smallest niche. The possibility of economic exchange between cultures defined by radically differing answers to these questions is, similarly, not entirely governed by economics.

Intercultural trade, for example, is always economically beneficial to both sides insofar as both sides enter into it freely. But not all interactions are culturally productive. Were economics the only consideration, the trade in crude petroleum between Christian and Moslem cultures would have everything to recommend it. Trade, however, entails a degree of cultural interpenetration; and the Moslems do not care to see their great families debauched in the casinos and brothels of Europe. Thus some portion of the profits from exploiting the Moslem's mineral resources is directed toward destroying their trading partner.

Capitalism’s rise was coextensive with development of middle classes sustained by a combination of wages and passive incomes derived from private property. Aristocratic regimes gave way to the parliaments demanded by this new ordering of power. Enlightened statesmen such as Bismarck and Disraeli concluded upon the wisdom of operating states so as to foster the economic creativity liberated by social mobility. States gave over the responsibility for enterprise to whoever should prove most successful at it; and found greater revenue sources in taxation upon a much enlarged economic system.

As with all systems, the institutions of middle class capitalism have expanded to an encounter with their limits. The object of economic expansion is the maximization of passive income; and this objective periodically results in the creation of fictitious asset classes, together with an overbuilding of real capital, to a point of generating ever smaller returns on investments. In such times, those relying on passive income would have no way to spend other than by liquidating their investments; and their spending would tend to right the system by putting the overbuilt capital plant to work.

Unfortunately, these points in history have seen governments stepping in to protect entrenched wealth by offering securities paying the returns demanded by moneyed elites. The burden of parliaments then ceases to be governance, and becomes the expansion of public debt upon the issuance financial instruments based on colonial expansion, war, and ultimately nothing more than prospects for taxes to be collected further and further into the future.

The founders of America’s Republic foresaw these misfortunes, and provided against them in their constitutional prohibitions against the direct taxation of income and protections for private property. Their precautions have, however, been lately cast aside: income is taxed directly at all levels of production; and property is no longer private, but belongs to those who promise to use it so as to generate the most taxes. Thus the larger population is being rendered into mere economic input for the benefit of a new elite — just their state before free enterprise liberated the general population’s creativity.