New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has written so many laudatory columns about China that one wag has even suggested he defect.

And yesterday we learned that cranky and irascible Ted Turner, creator of CNN, winner of the America’s Cup in an earlier life, and father of five children, thinks people need to be told how many, or how few, children to have, just as they do in China:

Mr. Turner – a long-time advocate of population control – said the environmental stress on the Earth requires radical solutions, suggesting countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. He added that fertility rights could be sold so that poor people could profit from their decision not to reproduce.

Michelle Malkin notes the elitism dripping from his statement, and notes the hypocrisy, as well:

Don’t you love how Turner just assumes that it’s on “the poor” to stop having kids? Who has a bigger carbon footprint — poor kids living in small dwellings and walking everywhere, or the children of billionaires who borrow dad’s private jet to go to the prom?

Isn’t there a more polite way for Ted to essentially say “the rich should inherit the earth and the poor should just f-in die off” than this? I’ll give him points though for trying to add a hearty dose of free market capitalism to his push for totalitarian ecocide. Ted will do anything to avoid allowing anybody on this horribly overpopulated planet to live on his two million acres of land!

What is it with liberals and China? Has China supplanted Castro’s Cuba as the workers’ paradise. That would indeed by strange since China has embraced capitalism to an extent that their economy is one of the world’s strongest. Friedman seems to like the Hidden Empire because it doesn’t have that messy democracy thing to muck things up. Turner likes the one-child-per-couple limit that has led to female babies being killed upon birth.

Ted, stick to making buffalo burgers. It’s the only thing you do well.