Americans can learn which policies work and don’t work by looking at policies that have been tried in other times and places. That way, we can avoid the mistakes that other people have already made. That’s one of the reasons why people like Thomas Sowell so much – he is always talking about which policies work, and which ones don’t. And in Germany, it’s mostly policies that don’t.

Here’s a fun article from Victor Davis Hanson, writing for the Daily Signal. If you’re like me, you already know Dr. Hanson from his writings on military history. But he likes policy, too.

He says:

 Today I’d like to talk about the crisis facing Europe, specifically its self-implosion across the spectrum—energy, population, fertility, defense. Germany, for example, has been systematically shutting down its nuclear plants and, for a while, its natural gas electrical generation plants.

If you know your energy policy, then you know that natural gas and nuclear power are the two power sources pushed by conservatives. They are safe and reliable, and they are also zero emission. Best of all for me, they don’t kill bats, birds and other animals. Birds are my favorite animals, and that’s a huge reason why I hate wind and solar power – they kill birds in large numbers.

More:

the net result of all of this deliberate turn to wind and solar, at the expense of fossil fuels and nuclear, is that it costs about four times more to use electricity in Germany than it does on average throughout the United States. That’s not the only problem.

Germany is deindustrializing. And by that I mean it’s losing about 200,000 jobs in its auto industry due to these high energy prices and regulations. Its green mandates, especially electric vehicle mandates, have revolutionized the car industry, in the sense that they’re not selling abroad as they did in the past.

When you raise the prices of gas and electricity, it raises the price of all production of goods, and transportation of goods. The funny thing is that this has been going on for some time. I remember talking about Angela Merkel’s failed policies with an international student from Germany with I was in grad school. And they never pulled out of their death spiral! It’s still going now.

Anyway, the higher cost of gas and electricity is having big effects:

In addition to that, Germany’s disarmed. They only have about 125 attack aircraft. They have very few armored vehicles. Their active military is only about 180,000 soldiers.

They have 84 million people in the country. The fertility rate is getting very close to 1.4. I know we have problems here in the United States at 1.6, but 1.4.

And they don’t have borders. They have had a million to 2 million illegal aliens just prance into Germany, especially during the last years of the Merkel chancellorship. In terms of percentage of foreign-born, Germany has more foreign-born than does the United States, which doesn’t have a border in the south, at least until Donald Trump comes in. Twenty percent of the German population is foreign-born.

We have a new administration now, and if you look at the picks for Department of the Interior, and Secretary of Energy, then we should be getting some action on developing our own supply of clean energy. Let’s hope that we don’t make the same mistakes that the Germans made.

By the way, if people ask you “why are you a conservative?” it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You don’t have to bring up Bible verses, religious beliefs, or moral issues. Start with economic policies. Just tell them that conservative policies are policies that allow you to have a job, earn money, and spend it how you like. And when they ask you for an example, you can talk about energy policy, and how things are going in free countries that produce a lot of energy (like Norway) vs un-free countries that don’t develop a lot of energy (like Germany). Norway’s GDP per capita is $90,500 (great), but Germany’s is $61,900 (trash). That’s why we want to be like Norway, and we don’t want to be like Germany.

By arguing for conservative fiscal policies, you often will get an opportunity to argue for conservative social policies. Once people see that you have done your homework in one area, they will be more welcoming of your views in other areas. At the very least, you win whenever you can show your work.

Conservative policy is just “let’s do what works” and “let’s not do what does not work”. Secular leftist policy is “do what feels good” and “do what makes people like me”, but that often produces very bad results, especially for the next generation.

Image source: Clean Energy Wire (January 2023)

What approach should social conservatives take to solve the problem of the declining marriage rate? A naive approach would be to just order young people to “Get Married!” without analyzing and defusing the reasons why young people are declining to approach, date and marry like they used to. Most social conservatives go for the naive approach. But which approach really works?

So, let’s focus on men. Why are men staying single? Why aren’t men approaching women, paying for dates, and proposing marriage?

Here’s a short list of some disincentives that men are facing:

• no-fault divorce (alimony, child support, father alienation)
• domestic violence laws assume the man is at at fault
• false accusations to gain child custody
• paternity fraud
• massive student loan debt by women
• national debt / deficit
• lack of accountability for false accusations made by women
• women’s focus on working full-time after having kids means that kids have go to daycare and public schools
• women’s much higher rates of spending on non-essentials
• unrealistic expectations of men caused by social media
• commitment instability caused by past sexual history
• women’s hard swing to the political left

So, again, the response of naive social conservatives is to say “let men fix it”. I was having a conversation with a social conservative who researches marriage, and I asked him how many of these factors he’s considered. He hadn’t considered any, because women good, and men bad. Why would you ask bad men why they are not doing what the good women want? Just tell the bad men what the good women want them to do. And if it doesn’t work, try again. And if it doesn’t work, try again. That’s been the dominant approach by social conservatives since the start of the Sexual Revolution. They just keep trying to make men fix it.

But what if social conservatives decided to try an intelligent, problem-solving solution? Something that a software engineer might think up, that actually engineers a solution over the long-term, by changing the incentives that men face?

Here’s the story from the Daily Caller:

In a pioneering move in 2018, Kentucky passed the first law making joint custody the default in divorce and separation cases.

The common-sense approach to divorce and child custody cases has had a major effect, with the state’s divorce rate dropping by 25% from 2016 to 2023, surpassing the nationwide decrease of 18%, the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University found.

Following Kentucky’s lead, Arkansas, West Virginia, Florida, and Missouri enacted similar bills, with about 20 other states considering such legislation, according to the National Parents Organization (NPO).

“There is no law that affects more people other than taxes or traffic. Giving kids equal access to both their parents is just common sense,” Matt Hale, vice chair of NPO, told The Wall Street Journal in its feature on Kentucky’s law.

Hale attributes the decline in divorce rates to the custody law, saying that parents are now more inclined to remain together since shared custody requires couples to work things out and communicate. Hale also shared accounts of couples who chose not to divorce due to the shared custody presumption and later valued that decision.

This is a common-sense solution, as Kentucky’s law does not state that 50/50 custody be blindly granted in every case. Rather, it sets the baseline presumption that, upon divorce, the mom and dad will split custody.

When you make it less attractive for women to initiate divorce, then women divorce less. When women divorce less, men marry more. It’s very simple. Men today do not want to be financially ruined in divorce courts by child support, to pay for children that they don’t even get to see. I think if you added mandatory paternity testing, and removed the ability to make up false accusations that were never investigated by the police, that would be two more good reasons for men to come back to marriage. And that’s how these problems need to be solved. Not by telling men what to do, but by giving men a good deal.