Doubts creep in about wisdom of ‘no-kids zones’ in South Korea

I will say this in defense of libertarian individualism: I think you should have a right to opt-out of being a citizen of any given country. The ability to do so, in practice, varies from totalitarian states where you physically cannot leave without risking being killed to western liberal democracies where you're allowed to renounce citizenship with just one condition - get another citizenship first.

While the latter is certainly extremely reasonable and humane relative to the former, that condition is still an insurmountable barrier for lower income, cognitively impaired, or otherwise vulnerable folks.

If you lack the means to obtain another citizenship, you are more or less the partial property of the government you were born into (given they are legally entitled to a portion of all your earnings), and you have no way of leaving.

That we more or less "trap" the vulnerable into partial financial servitude wherever they're born makes me mildly uncomfortable in the same manner that the concept of chattel slavery makes me deeply uncomfortable - no person or institution ought to have such dominion over another living, breathing person that the latter cannot disassociate from former.

We wax and wane about the necessity of such resulting from the social contract, but the social contract is the only contract I know of that is both serious and enforced (even if not literally defined), whilst not being one that you enter into voluntarily.

A key component of what renders a contract valid in contractual law in the US (stemming from common law) is that all parties to the contract must enter into it voluntarily, with full knowledge of it, free from coercion or deception.

We at least ought to stop calling it a "contract" and start calling it what it really is - Demands for involuntary tributes to the ruling elites (who benefits more from taxpayer dollars - the poor and needy, or Lockheed Martin executives?), that you must comply with under threat of force, up to and including lethal if you resist the wrong way.

I'm not saying the alternative is simple, but it seems unjust to me that human societies force their most vulnerable people into subservient economic relationships with governments (that have lengthy track records of using those very same tax dollars to perform horrific and flagrant atrocities against humanity, like drone bombing weddings, abducting and torturing innocent people, etc), based purely on where they're born.

Animals don't engage in this kind of depravity - why must we?

I hope the societies of the distant future look back on our current system of government and see it for the barbaric, medieval, and inhumane institution it really was.

It's not child hate, unless you count the sarcastic younger generations' dark jokes. For me and my wife, it was a rational decision. We never enjoyed kids much, we have careers that we wanted to fully pursue, and other people are having enough kids to make up for our lack of 1-2 more. We're also convinced that the world is overpopulated. What's the advantage of being 9 billion or more against being, say, 5 billion? The happiest countries in the world have lower population density, so the resources aren't as strained, and the natural beauty is still afordable to all. Dwindling gradually shouldn't be as disruptive as we're made to believe.

That, and also the glomy future our kids would have had. The biggest culprits of climate change and pollution aren't giving signs of stopping anytime soon (even more with the recent demagogic resurgence), and while we'll be dead in a few more decades, the younger generations will live in harder times than we did. Not having kids is also an abstentionist stament, because people who want more kids overlap significantly with people who don't care about the world they'll be leaving to those kids.