One Adaptation of the Stalin Method

Steven Levitt briefly discusses Nicolae Ceauşescu, the former Communist dictator of Romania, in chapter four of his famous book, Freakonomics. In 1966, Ceauşescu declared abortion to be illegal in Romania, stating that, “The fetus is the property of the entire society… Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity” (115). He implied that it was a person’s responsibility to have children—that he or she owed it to the country. Further, “all contraception and sex education was banned. Government agents regularly rounded up women in their workplaces to administer pregnancy tests. If a woman repeatedly failed to conceive, she was forced to pay a steep ‘celibacy tax’” (116).

The Romanian government strongly coerced citizens into having children, and Ceauşescu gave an… interesting… moral incentive for people to do so. His incentive for coercing people, though, was purely a material one. Most people in Romania at the time were extremely poor, while Ceauşescu and other government officials (40 of whom were members of his family) were quite wealthy—Levitt mentions that Ceauşescu’s wife had 40 homes! To maintain such an extravagant lifestyle, Ceauşescu needed more and more resources. So, it seems he figured, if the population was larger, there would be more people to tax, thus more to steal.

Stalin may have been Ceauşescu’s inspiration. In chapter 7 of Power and Prosperity, Olson describes methods Stalin used to increase his “tax theft.” He said, “Stalin’s innovation was to confiscate for his own purposes almost the total natural and tangible capital stock of the country and then use these resources to produce…[what he] wanted” (114). I’m not familiar with any of Ceauşescu’s other policies, but considering his policy on abortion, it seems he just employed a cruder version of Stalin’s tax collection policies—he claimed all fetuses as the government’s property, thus made it so there would be more people to steal from in the future. The birth rate of Romania doubled within one year of the abortion ban (Levitt 116), so Ceauşescu got his wish in that sense. However, perhaps it’s worth mentioning that Romania’s infant mortality rate dropped fairly suddenly in 1989, when the abortion ban was lifted (and Ceauşescu and his wife were executed).