Important Considerations

I also don’t think it’s unreasonable that the inventor of what is possibly the most important technology in the history of Amenta - the technology responsible for the fact that we don’t need to make that sort of trade-off any more - get to have a say in how a small portion of the gains from his invention be used without people trying to cheat him out of it.

When we consider the benefits of this approach, it stands out as a clear winner in every respect. The ex-reds don’t interbreed with born-cleans, so the dysgenic effect of mixing red genes into other castes does not occur. They are physically seperate, so there’s hypersensitives don’t need to risk interacting with ex-reds. At the same time, they remain under the control and supervision of born-clean governments, who can ensure their good behaviour and prevent them from scheming against society. The main criticism I’ve seen of the approach is that it requires significant areas of land to be put aside for ex-reds - but with successful red-cleaning now bringing access to vast amounts of land via the capacity to colonise planets this is no longer a concern except for governments that cannot even temporarily spare the land required, leaving the approach clearly superior to all alternatives.

I should note, however, that I don’t think we should leave descendents of population violators to remain in the red caste generation after generation until they build up hereditary pollution themselves. We have red-cleaning now (and to be clear, while I don’t support integrating reds, I definitely think we should clean them), but the process is expensive enough that a solution that requires we repeat it generation after generation is undesirable. Rather, I think we should sterilise the children we adopt out to reds, that we should continually fill the red population with more illegal children, and that if this is insufficient we should fill our remaining need for red children by letting people who have failed to buy regular credits take part in a second auction selling credits by which they can raise their children for the first year but are thereafter required to adopt them out to reds.

Of course, it’s not going to happen, because voters always support wishy-washy non-solutions that cater to their sense of moral outrage over proposals that will actually help reduce the numbers of reds and uncredited children and blues would rather win votes than actually do what’s right for their people.