The best piece we’ve read in respect of the showdown over the Obama administration’s contraception mandate is in the latest number of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. The sage who puts it out, James Grant, might catapult into his corn flakes upon reading that sentence. For ostensibly, his article has nothing to do with the Obamacare mandates that are creating such a collision with the Catholic church and leading figures in the Protestant and Jewish communities. The words “contraception” and “birth control” fail to make an appearance in his dispatch.

Rather, Mr. Grant’s topic is the future value of real estate, viewed through a prism fit for the investors who read his bi-weekly. Its headline, however, is “America’s people power,” and it begins with the words “love and marriage.” It takes Mr. Grant not more than half a paragraph to get into the topic of population growth, without which and ready financing, he notes, “the asset once stockpiled by leveraged homebuilders yields only weeds and tax assessments.” Adds he: “Lots of growing families are what a landowner roots for . . .” Among major economies, he calls America the “world capital of fecundity.”

The question his essay ignites is why in blazes the Obama administration — as we are teetering on the edge of another recession — is choosing for its signature issue of the year the expansion of contraception. The fact of life is that contraception is bad for growth. We are not speaking here of individual choices. We’re for individual choices. The government intervention, however, does not protect individual choice. It’s an effort to remove the balance of incentives and instead to steer the market toward contraception. If the administration were for maximizing choice, Mr. Obama would also be plumping for free in-vitro fertilization and, for that matter, free childbirth.

As it is, Mr. Obama seems intent on slowing America’s population growth. Does he want us to be like, say, Japan, which, Mr. Grant points out, has a population that, tragically, “will shrink by 0.14% a year to 2020 and by 0.37% between that year and 2030”? Adds Mr. Grant: “Europe’s will grow by only 0.08% til 2020, before declining by 0.04% through 2030.” Germany’s population is projected to shrink and even, Mr. Grant notes, Communist China’s population is in trouble. It will grow by but 0.34% a year to 2020 and by 0.04% a year through 2030. After 2025, China’s population is actually expected to start contracting, where as our population will grow by 0.83% a year through 2020 and by 0.71 a year through 2030.

“We Americans have not forgotten the art of baby making,” Mr. Grant quills. “Thus empowered, we are collectively setting in motion one of the solutions to the crisis of redundant roofs.” The question that bedevils us is why the truths of which he writes are not as plain in Washington as they are from the windows on which Mr. Grant looks out toward the Statue of Liberty. Why aren’t the Republicans making this point on the hustings? We do not wish to sound indifferent to our noble clergymen, with their warnings about the infringements of Obamacare on religion in this country. These columns have shared their warnings. But there is also an uplifting argument to be made in respect of growth and population that would illuminate the absurdity of making a priority of subsidizing the preventing the conception of more Americans.