An old joke, and other notes
It's a joke from the 1980s. And every time I recall it, I botch the attribution ... so I'll go with Paula Poundstone this time: "You need a license to have a dog, but anybody can have children."
The irony is apparent, but there is no solution.
As Neverfly pointed out, the species could find some advantage in willful selective breeding. To the other, though, I'll counter that we're human, and such a program could easily wipe out the species for lack of telephone sanitation. Even setting that aside, though, we're not ants or bees.
It's a strange phenomenon to witness; it happens frequently. Human consideration of our own condition often sees us dancing in temptation with ideas that would likely improve our species within a utilitarian framework, but defy the whole purpose of our societal endeavors. Are we robots? Are we ants or bees? Are we purely utilitarian creatures? What, then, is talk of liberty? Factory bosses still want compliant, nearly-automated workers;
Charlie Chaplin is not obsolete in this sense. And there are plenty of social justice advocates who would—inadvertently I think ... er ...
hope—reduce socialization to a bland, uncontroversial stream of pabulum. It's not that I don't get these causes; the factory boss wants increased efficiency, and the social justice maven wants people to be able to go about their day without someone asking them to feel guilty that they were born black, or female, or gay, or poor, or whatever. But Americans, for instance, won't work under the conditions we hear about at Foxconn, where our iPhones are made. And while most can agree that you don't go around calling people niggers, there comes a point where we reserve the right to laugh at subcultural quirks.
People don't want to be automatons. Society does not require a hive mentality. And, over the long run, given human frailty and propensity for screwing bad ideas into the roadkill pooch, it is entirely possible that a selective breeding system will first encounter the question of whence comes the lumpenproletariat, untermensch, or, as we call it in the U.S., service industry. Or the factory worker. Or something else. You know, who among the artificially overrepresented Alphas and Betas will do the jobs of the Deltas and Epsilons. And then, of course, arises the suggestion of tailoring the birth rate allocations.
The reality is that the human endeavor presently
requires a large population working hard in poverty. This is a tragic outcome of the best we've figured for cooperative resource distribution schemes. But to willfully tailor the situation to such ends? The faithful will call it "playing God". The cynical will denounce it as hubris. The logical will mutter to themselves, "This can't end well."