It never fails to fascinate me how human beings can be so logical about somethings, and so damn illogical about other things. Take for instance: Life Insurance. The people that create, support, sell and even purchase life insurance all agree on several fundamental things.

1) Everybody dies.
2) Human life is worth something.
3) Time is money, hence:
4) The longer the insuree lives, the more money that the insurer gets.
5) Every insuree gets a payout after they are declared legally dead.

So, what this means is that everyone has a price. No one is “priceless,” really. Irreplacable for sure, but not so expensive as to not have a price associated with him or her.

I myself am insured enough so that my wife can live comfortably for at least 10 years after I die.
My wife, on the other hand, is only insured enough to get her a good funeral and, maybe, a new Ferrari for me.

Now this does not mean I do not value my wife. It merely means that she does not make enough money for it to be a great financial drain if she leaves this earth (barring of course, how she leaves the earth. If she spends all my Ferrari money on hospice care, well, then, no sports car for me) In this case, value is based on earning potential, which seems a fair enough assessment, for this exercise, anyway.

The next logical step comes from supply and demand. The more things there are, the less they cost, generally. This why computer and DVD players are so much cheaper than they used to be. Now comparing a human being to a DVD player is a little tricky, because human beings are capable of far more than DVD player, and so the “demand” can be expressed in a variety of ways. People can “want” other people, as in “we want a child” (demand = desire to procreate), people can “want” other people that can perform a service for them, as in “we need more policemen” (demand = jobs), and people can “want” other people for companionship. as in “I want a boyfriend” (demand = relationship).

Of these, the only one of the demands that can perform the supply function all by itself is the desire to procreate. It is this desire than then allows for other demands to be met. It is also this desire, and the increasing number of people that it provides, that cause all upward trends in the economy.

For example: everyone can agree, that, at least in principle, there is a finite amount of room on the Earth. If all 6 billion of us carve a little piece out of the Earth for our very own, (i.e., homeownership) , then what happens when person number 6,000,000,001 comes along? Land, being finite, is necessarily scarce. And good land, or good real estate, is even more scarce. So as the number of people on the Earth increases, the average price of dwellings must necessarily increase.

Now of course this is a philosophical exercise and not a very realistic one. The truth is, apartment buildings can be built taller, homes smaller, and lots can go from an acre down to a postage stamp. But the underlying truth is that if a good chunk of people suddenly perished (lets say, oh, bird flu or something), it would destroy the housing market. Too many homes, not enough people to buy them. And mortgage companies may go belly up too, since so many loans would go into default from death.

Other economic indicators would crumble too, if there was no net increase, (or even a decrease) in human beings. Inflation might quickly soar, (too many dollars chasing too few goods? Or maybe too many dollars chasing too many goods!) but most assuredly the stock market, the bond market, energy prices, and of course the futures market would be devastated. All of these indicators and products require more humans to be created to enjoy products, services, loans, gasoline, etc., in order to slowly become more valuable.

But that makes humans sound very valuable. Without more and more of them, things would fall apart. The problem with this logic is that demand for new supply comes only from the new supply. And the new supply is taught that humans are sacred, which means there is no way to get rid of junk product. By comparison, cows are sacred in India. As any Indian will tell you, the cattle there mostly just gets in the way.

As a thought experiment, think of toasters. All toasters eventually die. Most toasters work very well for a long time, and then something happens. Perhaps they cease to toast relibly, and we put it in a drawer, in case we have some need for an extra toaster. Or maybe they cease to heat the bread, or the spring breaks? In which case, we try to fix the toaster. If all goes well, the toaster works again, and we continue to use it. If not, the toaster winds up in a landfill. But ALL toasters eventually die.

If you had a really expensive toaster that occasionally set fire to a home, would you keep it? What if shot out flaming pop-tarts that hurt small children? If you reliably fix it, you might, right? But if you couldn’t, surely you would throw it out, so no one else ever used it again.

With this in mind, could someone please tell me why Andrea Yates and Charlie Manson are not in a landfill? Bad toasters should be thrown away, right? There’s really no way to fix the really crazy people, sorry. And even if there was, would you trust them with your kids? If there is 6 billion people on the earth, who would miss these two? Besides, someone else just gave birth to quintuplets the other day, so it’s not like the population isn’t still growing…