intelligent and responsible people do not simply give up and allow the idiots to dominate the future

That would ring truer if not spoken by an idiot who dominates the present. CNBC is replete with these know-nothing goobers, and even assuming I bought in to their selective breeding strategy for repopulation after the apocolypse, I sure as hell wouldn’t endorse their target audience to handle the job.

This is not to say that we all need to have kids, but rather, is to say that we shouldn’t necessarily fault those who do choose to have them

That’s fair on its face, but more as a practical consequence. At some point you have to ask, what would we even do about people having more kids than we’d like. And the answers - from trying to shame them by screaming at them to doing old school Nixon-era sterilizations of whole populations - are incredibly grim and gross.

it would be nice if at least some of them were raised by responsible, intelligent and well-educated parents

If you want responsible, intelligent, and well-educated parents tomorrow, you’re going to need to house and feed and educate and generally provide quality of life for kids today.

But we hate kids today. That’s why, despite the economy growing at a steady clip for the last 20 years, we’re at record high child poverty with 1 in 5 kids living in poverty in the 40 richest countries. The current generation does not want to pay money to see them grow up health, strong, and capable.

Given the poor treatment they’ve received, why would Zoomers be expected to have lots of kids of their own? They have known nothing but declining standards of living, with a promise of worse to come.