Vice President Joe Biden, Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, visited China and voiced his understanding of China's One Child Policy. The part that he understood was the forced abortions and the eugenics of baby girls. The part that he didn't understand was how the Chinese government expects one breadwinner to support four retirees. But as usual Biden had it backward.
The Chinese government isn't worried about how retirees will be supported, because they have no investment in them. They'll receive whatever social benefits are doled out, and that's it. China's brutal pragmatism and lack of democracy makes rationing health care and anything else easy. Massive rallies and protests happen all the time in the People's Republic, unreported by the media, and are ignored by the authorities. Tienanmen Square showed the limits of popular protest in creating political change. It's a lesson that neither the leadership nor the people have forgotten.
Biden should have really been asking his question in Washington D.C. While America has no official one child policy, it has promoted a shift from family savings and support, to a government supervised safety net. Taxes have gone up, the single income family has become rarer and birth rates have dropped. Marriage and children have become more expensive, the former has dropped at a staggering rate among lower income families, and the latter has gone up leading to large numbers of single parents.
The modern state has all for intents and purposes tried to replace the family, providing an expensive cradle to grave social support network. A network that favors those most who work the least.
The government replaces fathers, mothers and children. Children are cared for by the government. So are their elderly parents. The utility of having children diminishes. And the entire system is funded by higher taxes and economic gimmicks that decrease jobs and diminish buying power which lowers the number of self-supporting families, and lowers birth rates in general and especially among the productive working class who usually provide the biological base for population expansion.
Boosting tax revenues means rewarding spenders over savers, which leads to a consumeristic society that drives even more people into the social welfare system. And even those who stay out of it and try to save, are operating in a system whose monetary policy and programs are set against them. The short term tax revenue gains and monetary policy gimmicks lead to much larger problem as again they create more dependency as everyone is forced into relying on the government social safety net.
Birth rate is the engine behind the social safety net. If the birth rate falls, then even when practiced with the best intentions, the whole system becomes a massive Ponzi scheme. But how do you keep the birth rate high when taxes are high, higher education has become mandatory and a consumer society teaches people to reward themselves now, instead of deferring instant gratification until later?
And without a high birth rate, a major revenue gap opens up. If solvent long term funds were used to prepare for the gap, then the day of disaster could be delayed. But the same political elite that created the problem is also guilty of uncontrollably spending all those funds, and then holding out their hand for more.
In Europe, one answer has been more government subsidies for children. A typical statist solution that tries to use the unacknowledged source of the problem to create incentives to bypass its consequences. While subsidies can marginally increase birth rates, they do not address the real problem.
Taking away people's money and then paying them to go shopping in order to stimulate the economy is common enough in the United States. And it never works. You can't restore a healthy economy with subsidies and you can't restore a healthy birth rate with some social benefits. It's not just about the money, it's also about the culture that was created by those policies. A post-family culture.
So the other Western solution is to import immigrants from a different culture with high birth rates. Europe has all but destroyed itself with that approach, and America is speedily following along. Sure, the total birth rate numbers look good, and no one is supposed to care how many European countries are set to be Muslim by 2100.
But the economics of it still don't work because social utilization goes up drastically to pay for all those extra children, many of whom will never work legally, others who will take far more out of the economy than they will ever put back in. The cost of trying and then imprisoning a single criminal for a year is staggering. Those rapes, murders and drug deals don't just have a human cost-- they have a shocking economic toll. And throw in a major riot like in London and the economic damage adds up to the loss of entire major cities.
And there we are back again to Europe set for a Muslim majority, and America set for a Hispanic majority, and both are going completely bankrupt anyway.
Chinese leaders could have pointed all this out to Biden, but they find it easier to let our civilizations collapse in their own time, while the Century of China gets underway. China may never make it, its own economy is parasitically interlinked with ours and its centrally planned economics and social unrest will probably take it down before 2050. This would be nothing new for China which has gone down this way before. And dynasty or party, it has never really learned from its mistakes.
And Europe arguably has never learned from the mistakes of the Roman Empire, instead again overreaching its conquests, outsourcing its defense, showing weakness at the worst possible time, opening cities to barbarians and engaging in absolute folly in a crisis have been repeated. And the United States is following along.
Peering at the world through the spyglass of history, it would seem as if every people are repeating their old errors again. The State of Israel looks a lot like the latter days of its kingdoms, placing its faith in an untrustworthy power, Egypt and Rome, and allowing itself to be led to disaster by internal division and treason. The Muslim world is aching to revive the Caliphate with the same end results, cultural decay and collapse.
It's astounding that no one has learned anything in thousands of years except how to make a better smartphone. We can put people on the moon and make dinner in five minutes, but we can't stop destroying ourselves in cycle after cycle of history while finding creative ways to justify our suicides.
America doesn't need a One Child Policy, but it has one anyway that punishes childbirth among productive populations and rewards it among unproductive populations. That leads to a division of lower income populations into a working class and a welfare class. With the working class supporting the welfare class. Marriage is down among both classes. It's too expensive for the working class and too unnecessary for the welfare class. Why bother getting married when the local aid office is already your husband, wife and parents combined? The more children you have, the more the government takes care of you.
If China's One Child Policy is a moral horror, the Western One Child Policy is an economic and social horror that has already destroyed major European and American cities. And it's just getting started.
The left's fear and loathing of Western self-perpetuation translates into shrill agitation for population control. Which means more tax penalized one child or no child families in the West alongside ten child Bangladeshi families living off social welfare since tax penalties can't be expected to apply to people who don't pay taxes.
The countries worried about population growth have too little of it, and the countries that aren't worried about it have too much of it. Globalists dream of some UN administered worldwide population scheme, but if no major country was willing to turn over its nuclear weapons to the UN, how likely is it that they'll turn over their babies?
Ted Turner has praised China's One Child policy and suggested that tax penalties could be used to dissuade large families, along with Cap and Trade for babies to allow those families or countries who don't have children to sell their childbearing rights to more fertile people and places.
Turner's plan would allow Europe to sell its child credits to Africa, but how would Africa afford it? China would have an entirely new export in baby credits, but the main countries buying it wouldn't be able to pay for it either. There's something ghoulish about such talk of trading unborn babies between the continents, aborted Western and Chinese babies being sold as credits to create new babies in countries subsidized by Western aid.
But we're trading enough live babies already. There is a booming trade in Chinese and African babies being adopted by Western couples. As with other Western industries, the manufacturing is outsourced to China, while the Western consumer overpays for a product that seems convenient in the short term, but is highly injurious to him and his society in the long term.
The consequences of using the Third World as a baby manufacturing factory, through immigration or adoption, are the end of the First World. You can outsource your energy production to countries that hate you and finance a wave of global terrorism. You can outsource your manufacturing and industry to countries that hate you and lose much of your economy and gain a powerful new enemy. But when you outsource your population replacement to peoples that hate you-- then you're gone.
A country can survive anything but its own self-inflicted genocide. And low birth rates combined with population replacement amount to that. Suicidal genocide by a civilization that no longer thinks there's any reason to go on.
The West has subsidized population booms in the Third World with its medicine and its aid. Now it's subsidizing its own population replacement by them. Uncle Sam, John Bull and Madam Liberty are sitting in a skyscraper somewhere with pistols to their heads, cheerfully making plans for their farewell parties. The parties will have a very diverse invitation list. And the evening will end with the suicide of the cultures that contributed so much to the world in the last 500 years.
But the fecklessness of Western liberals and liberalized conservatives may stem their self-inflicted suicide. Before the populations are wiped out, the economies will be.
America and Europe are coming up against the impossibility of maintaining their governments and their economies at the same time. They will have to choose one or the other, and whichever choice they make will leave their countries much less attractive to immigrants.
Either the end of the social safety net or the end of economic growth will significantly reduce rates of immigration and even lead to the exit of some immigrants. It's already happening in America just on the current unemployment rates alone. A complete economic collapse would dramatically reverse the number of opportunistic immigrants who come for profits, rather than for freedoms. But this isn't any kind of solution, it's more like a suicide realizing that he can't hang himself and jump into the water at the same time. He'll have to choose one or the other.
But drowning a dog to kill the fleas on it is no answer. Even if you reduce the number of fleas, the dog is still dead. And it's not clear if the dog can be revived again. The Russian people have never recovered from the damage done to them by Communism. Neither have their birth rates. America isn't as badly off-- but many European countries may have passed the point of return. The easiest way to tell may be to see which countries have an active political movement dedicated to national survival and which don't.
The 2012 election looks set to come down to a contest between a
candidate who favors open borders and economic growth-- and a candidate
who favors open borders and big government. Lucky us. We'll get to
choose between a man who still wants us to have hope and faith in being
able to hang ourselves and jump in the lake at the same time-- and a man
who believes the future lies in jumping into the Rio Grande and
lowering taxes. As they say north of the border, Dios Bendice a Estados Undisos Mexicanos.
Not that it matters. The fleas aren't killing the dog, they're feeding off its self-inflicted wounds. And the wounds are economic and cultural. Japan kept out immigrants, but its low birth rate and falling marriage rate, under the shadow of a big government maintained recession puts it in the same club as the rest of the First World It may avoid filling its cities with Third Worlders doing manual labor and low level crime, and instead replace them with robots, but it's still on the path to extinction.
Meanwhile back in China, the Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, was explaining to his hosts who were trying to stifle their laughter, how unsustainable their system is.
"Poor dumb bastard," they think, "doesn't he understand that this is what drives our competitiveness. That Chinese parents push their child even harder to succeed when he is their sole source of support?
But how could Biden understand, what government control, estate taxes and the death of the family have robbed America of? Chinese families may have only one child, or two, but they still think in the long term. That child is their future. But Biden's own party is barely capable of thinking two weeks ahead. His opposition is hardly much better. Show me a Republican with a long term plan for the country, and I'll show you an unelectable candidate. Show me a Republican with short term solutions that ignore long term problems-- and I'll call him, Mr. President.
Having children is about thinking of the future. Cultures that stop thinking of the future, that cannot imagine the world going on after they die, find innovative ways to commit suicidal genocide. The left is right that having children is not selfless, it's long term selfishness. It's our willful desire to keep our blood and our people around on the planet long after we're gone.
Long term selfishness like that built this country. It built a lot of countries. It raised industries out of the ground and covered the continent with people. But when a culture loses its sense of long term selfishness, what replaces it is a short attention span and instant gratification. And as the economic reasons for having children vanish, and so does the structure of the family, the reasons for having children diminish. The biological need is replaced by housepets and casual sex.
China's competitiveness is personal, but it transcends the personal. Its leaders are venal, greedy and amoral-- but they also think of the future. American competitiveness is personal. It doesn't look to the future. Our companies are satisfied with making short term gains. Our politicians look for short term successes. Our culture seeks only to lock in the benefits of the present, while China sacrifices the present for the future. It does so in brutal and ugly ways, but you don't have to fight a duel nicely to win. You just have to play to win.
Children are the staying power of a nation. They are its long term projection into the future. When a nation does not think of the future, then it has no children and when a nation has no children, then it has no future.
Biden should have really been asking his question in Washington D.C. While America has no official one child policy, it has promoted a shift from family savings and support, to a government supervised safety net. Taxes have gone up, the single income family has become rarer and birth rates have dropped. Marriage and children have become more expensive, the former has dropped at a staggering rate among lower income families, and the latter has gone up leading to large numbers of single parents.
The modern state has all for intents and purposes tried to replace the family, providing an expensive cradle to grave social support network. A network that favors those most who work the least.
The government replaces fathers, mothers and children. Children are cared for by the government. So are their elderly parents. The utility of having children diminishes. And the entire system is funded by higher taxes and economic gimmicks that decrease jobs and diminish buying power which lowers the number of self-supporting families, and lowers birth rates in general and especially among the productive working class who usually provide the biological base for population expansion.
Boosting tax revenues means rewarding spenders over savers, which leads to a consumeristic society that drives even more people into the social welfare system. And even those who stay out of it and try to save, are operating in a system whose monetary policy and programs are set against them. The short term tax revenue gains and monetary policy gimmicks lead to much larger problem as again they create more dependency as everyone is forced into relying on the government social safety net.
Birth rate is the engine behind the social safety net. If the birth rate falls, then even when practiced with the best intentions, the whole system becomes a massive Ponzi scheme. But how do you keep the birth rate high when taxes are high, higher education has become mandatory and a consumer society teaches people to reward themselves now, instead of deferring instant gratification until later?
And without a high birth rate, a major revenue gap opens up. If solvent long term funds were used to prepare for the gap, then the day of disaster could be delayed. But the same political elite that created the problem is also guilty of uncontrollably spending all those funds, and then holding out their hand for more.
In Europe, one answer has been more government subsidies for children. A typical statist solution that tries to use the unacknowledged source of the problem to create incentives to bypass its consequences. While subsidies can marginally increase birth rates, they do not address the real problem.
Taking away people's money and then paying them to go shopping in order to stimulate the economy is common enough in the United States. And it never works. You can't restore a healthy economy with subsidies and you can't restore a healthy birth rate with some social benefits. It's not just about the money, it's also about the culture that was created by those policies. A post-family culture.
So the other Western solution is to import immigrants from a different culture with high birth rates. Europe has all but destroyed itself with that approach, and America is speedily following along. Sure, the total birth rate numbers look good, and no one is supposed to care how many European countries are set to be Muslim by 2100.
But the economics of it still don't work because social utilization goes up drastically to pay for all those extra children, many of whom will never work legally, others who will take far more out of the economy than they will ever put back in. The cost of trying and then imprisoning a single criminal for a year is staggering. Those rapes, murders and drug deals don't just have a human cost-- they have a shocking economic toll. And throw in a major riot like in London and the economic damage adds up to the loss of entire major cities.
And there we are back again to Europe set for a Muslim majority, and America set for a Hispanic majority, and both are going completely bankrupt anyway.
Chinese leaders could have pointed all this out to Biden, but they find it easier to let our civilizations collapse in their own time, while the Century of China gets underway. China may never make it, its own economy is parasitically interlinked with ours and its centrally planned economics and social unrest will probably take it down before 2050. This would be nothing new for China which has gone down this way before. And dynasty or party, it has never really learned from its mistakes.
And Europe arguably has never learned from the mistakes of the Roman Empire, instead again overreaching its conquests, outsourcing its defense, showing weakness at the worst possible time, opening cities to barbarians and engaging in absolute folly in a crisis have been repeated. And the United States is following along.
Peering at the world through the spyglass of history, it would seem as if every people are repeating their old errors again. The State of Israel looks a lot like the latter days of its kingdoms, placing its faith in an untrustworthy power, Egypt and Rome, and allowing itself to be led to disaster by internal division and treason. The Muslim world is aching to revive the Caliphate with the same end results, cultural decay and collapse.
It's astounding that no one has learned anything in thousands of years except how to make a better smartphone. We can put people on the moon and make dinner in five minutes, but we can't stop destroying ourselves in cycle after cycle of history while finding creative ways to justify our suicides.
If China's One Child Policy is a moral horror, the Western One Child Policy is an economic and social horror that has already destroyed major European and American cities. And it's just getting started.
The left's fear and loathing of Western self-perpetuation translates into shrill agitation for population control. Which means more tax penalized one child or no child families in the West alongside ten child Bangladeshi families living off social welfare since tax penalties can't be expected to apply to people who don't pay taxes.
The countries worried about population growth have too little of it, and the countries that aren't worried about it have too much of it. Globalists dream of some UN administered worldwide population scheme, but if no major country was willing to turn over its nuclear weapons to the UN, how likely is it that they'll turn over their babies?
Ted Turner has praised China's One Child policy and suggested that tax penalties could be used to dissuade large families, along with Cap and Trade for babies to allow those families or countries who don't have children to sell their childbearing rights to more fertile people and places.
Turner's plan would allow Europe to sell its child credits to Africa, but how would Africa afford it? China would have an entirely new export in baby credits, but the main countries buying it wouldn't be able to pay for it either. There's something ghoulish about such talk of trading unborn babies between the continents, aborted Western and Chinese babies being sold as credits to create new babies in countries subsidized by Western aid.
But we're trading enough live babies already. There is a booming trade in Chinese and African babies being adopted by Western couples. As with other Western industries, the manufacturing is outsourced to China, while the Western consumer overpays for a product that seems convenient in the short term, but is highly injurious to him and his society in the long term.
The consequences of using the Third World as a baby manufacturing factory, through immigration or adoption, are the end of the First World. You can outsource your energy production to countries that hate you and finance a wave of global terrorism. You can outsource your manufacturing and industry to countries that hate you and lose much of your economy and gain a powerful new enemy. But when you outsource your population replacement to peoples that hate you-- then you're gone.
A country can survive anything but its own self-inflicted genocide. And low birth rates combined with population replacement amount to that. Suicidal genocide by a civilization that no longer thinks there's any reason to go on.
The West has subsidized population booms in the Third World with its medicine and its aid. Now it's subsidizing its own population replacement by them. Uncle Sam, John Bull and Madam Liberty are sitting in a skyscraper somewhere with pistols to their heads, cheerfully making plans for their farewell parties. The parties will have a very diverse invitation list. And the evening will end with the suicide of the cultures that contributed so much to the world in the last 500 years.
But the fecklessness of Western liberals and liberalized conservatives may stem their self-inflicted suicide. Before the populations are wiped out, the economies will be.
America and Europe are coming up against the impossibility of maintaining their governments and their economies at the same time. They will have to choose one or the other, and whichever choice they make will leave their countries much less attractive to immigrants.
Either the end of the social safety net or the end of economic growth will significantly reduce rates of immigration and even lead to the exit of some immigrants. It's already happening in America just on the current unemployment rates alone. A complete economic collapse would dramatically reverse the number of opportunistic immigrants who come for profits, rather than for freedoms. But this isn't any kind of solution, it's more like a suicide realizing that he can't hang himself and jump into the water at the same time. He'll have to choose one or the other.
But drowning a dog to kill the fleas on it is no answer. Even if you reduce the number of fleas, the dog is still dead. And it's not clear if the dog can be revived again. The Russian people have never recovered from the damage done to them by Communism. Neither have their birth rates. America isn't as badly off-- but many European countries may have passed the point of return. The easiest way to tell may be to see which countries have an active political movement dedicated to national survival and which don't.
Not that it matters. The fleas aren't killing the dog, they're feeding off its self-inflicted wounds. And the wounds are economic and cultural. Japan kept out immigrants, but its low birth rate and falling marriage rate, under the shadow of a big government maintained recession puts it in the same club as the rest of the First World It may avoid filling its cities with Third Worlders doing manual labor and low level crime, and instead replace them with robots, but it's still on the path to extinction.
Meanwhile back in China, the Commissar of the Cracked Head Club, was explaining to his hosts who were trying to stifle their laughter, how unsustainable their system is.
"Poor dumb bastard," they think, "doesn't he understand that this is what drives our competitiveness. That Chinese parents push their child even harder to succeed when he is their sole source of support?
But how could Biden understand, what government control, estate taxes and the death of the family have robbed America of? Chinese families may have only one child, or two, but they still think in the long term. That child is their future. But Biden's own party is barely capable of thinking two weeks ahead. His opposition is hardly much better. Show me a Republican with a long term plan for the country, and I'll show you an unelectable candidate. Show me a Republican with short term solutions that ignore long term problems-- and I'll call him, Mr. President.
Having children is about thinking of the future. Cultures that stop thinking of the future, that cannot imagine the world going on after they die, find innovative ways to commit suicidal genocide. The left is right that having children is not selfless, it's long term selfishness. It's our willful desire to keep our blood and our people around on the planet long after we're gone.
Long term selfishness like that built this country. It built a lot of countries. It raised industries out of the ground and covered the continent with people. But when a culture loses its sense of long term selfishness, what replaces it is a short attention span and instant gratification. And as the economic reasons for having children vanish, and so does the structure of the family, the reasons for having children diminish. The biological need is replaced by housepets and casual sex.
China's competitiveness is personal, but it transcends the personal. Its leaders are venal, greedy and amoral-- but they also think of the future. American competitiveness is personal. It doesn't look to the future. Our companies are satisfied with making short term gains. Our politicians look for short term successes. Our culture seeks only to lock in the benefits of the present, while China sacrifices the present for the future. It does so in brutal and ugly ways, but you don't have to fight a duel nicely to win. You just have to play to win.
Children are the staying power of a nation. They are its long term projection into the future. When a nation does not think of the future, then it has no children and when a nation has no children, then it has no future.
Comments
Creepy Al Gore espouses forcibly sterilizing American women.
ReplyDeleteChinese eat aborted fetuses as a delicacy and murder baby girls and this filthy behavior is what Gore and Biden look up to.
.....And nations with high birthrates like most Islamic countries and the means to prevent their children from starving, even if barely, have no future either because of the mental shackles of their religion preventing these children from becoming of any use to humanity, so they might as well not be there. In short Daniel: see and except the paralel to nature in general, only a short time of bloom in every cycle of life and 1/2 - 3/4 of the cycle the system falls in decay and self-destruction so cleverly named depicted by the sages in the phoenix cycle. Difficult for us Jews to see things this way as we are the believers in a rising linear goal of life instead of the senseless spiral.
ReplyDelete"It's astounding that no one has learned anything in thousands of years except how to make a better smartphone."
ReplyDeleteActually, lots of people have learned a lot from the experience of a lifetime; the problem is that a new generation of ignorant children is always being born, and the older generation often lacks the strength of character to truly educate the young.
The first law of genetics is that if your parents never had children, neither will you.
ReplyDeleteAryeh Zelasko
Beit Shemesh
"Children are the staying power of a nation. They are its long term projection into the future. When a nation does not think of the future, then it has no children and when a nation has no children, then it has no future."
ReplyDeleteThis is the brutal truth, no more, no less."
It is indeed the brutal truth.
ReplyDeleteNot only will there be no Westerners but no Western culture because the new immigrants are rejecting it.
ReplyDeleteThe world is headed for misery as inferior and unproductive cultures are transplanted in the West.
Many non-whites think that geography is the reason whites succeed, totally ignoring the West's traditional respect for Christian ethics, logic, and scientific thought.
Now even we disregard and disrespect the blocks of our culture's foundation.
The last Western man need not turn out the lights; they will not burn much longer anyway.
Maybe this is Judeo-centric --I'm not really sure -- but it seems to me that throughout history in most cultures people had children for the sake of adding helping hands in the family fields, in the kitchen, etc. In other words, for the benefit of the parents. Among Jews, however, this was never so. Jews had the notion of life becoming better for their children than it was for themselves. In America, Jews no longer hold to this tradition, and instead tend to have no children, one child, maybe two, like the rest of the culture. In Israel though, birthrates, perhaps alone among Westerners, are up. Says something profound about having a Jewish state.
ReplyDeleteMakes me a proud American - I've had five children - so far.
ReplyDeleteGoodness, a child is expensive these days but a big, strong,loving family is the ultimate safety net.
They all turned out as nice people too! Not a loser in the bunch.
DG
ReplyDeleteThis is very depressing.
Do you see any way out of the mess (end of Western civilisation) that our idiot parasitic ruling class have created?
Assorted observations:
ReplyDeletePoliticians are a separate breed in America. On a non-scientific basis, because it is too much trouble to do the research, my impression is that our Senators and Congressional Representatives seem to have more than the replacement level of children (3+). This makes perfect sense, since they already feel that they are valuable additions to society.
Sultan Knish has outlined the direction that the segments of our population are taking. A la Cass Sunstein, we have fallen for the contingencies set for us so easily as to bring into doubt our ability to behave in a rational manner. The interesting thing of it is, though, that all we have to do is say to ourselves, "that's not how I want to behave" and the power of the reinforcement schedules to which we have been trained instantly disappears. Examples follow:
1) The birthrate among Israeli secularists has risen even though Israel tries to provide cradle-to-grave services. This trend is in sharp contrast to the Diaspora Jews who have forgotten how to raise children.
2) The US is in the middle of a back-to-the-land revolution. Urban gardens, and suburban chickens are pale effete reflections compared to those who are leaving American cities and buying two to ten acres of land to raise their families in rural settings.
3) There is a sharp increase in immigration from Western Europe to America and other similar states like Australia, Israel and New Zealand where families can be raised - in spite of Sultan's correct observations.
I pray for the welfare of Sultan Knish and his colleagues. When they point to our silly policies and behaviors, we may then change if we wish. Live long and prosper!
I wish you would stick to your articles of Islam instead of creating these tirades at the governments for issues they don't even have the full control of.
ReplyDeleteDid you ever mention the decline of birth rates in Atheist countries? What about mentioning Catholic families?
Yes you did mention the Muslims are overbreeders but that is because they force their women into being stay-at-home wives.
With the rise of feminism, women don't want to be relegated to being housewives and reproductive units.
As for the poor having so many children in Third World countries; well it's basically their pensions scheme. They have loads of children in the hopes that they'll look after them in old age.
Of course this is nothing but one giant Ponzi scheme with the need for ever-increasing youth in order to take care of the old, and the result is overpopulation.
It's the changes in society that are more accountable then the role of the Governments who heed the will of the people in a democracy instead of the opposite in an autocratic regime. And I wish you would have taken a more holistic approach.
Yes the market does provide the solution in the form of foreign brides which the pragmatic Asians have picked up on.
Rather then coerce women into staying at home and pumping out kids, at the cost of depleting the workforce and harming the economy.
They simply import women who are willing to do the jobs that the indigenous women won't.
I mentioned that it goes even as far as Japan, which covers the entire First World.
ReplyDeleteCreating 4 children or 8 to take care of two adults may lead to expanding population, but it's much less of a ponzi scheme than the completely unsupportable setup that I described.
Excellent article , You have combined it together well.
ReplyDeleteThis longterm view is very important.
Israel a beacon of light (and tolerance) surrounded by the darkness of primative backwardness with europe being overtaken by barbarians (Rome v2.0).
What will happen to the USA ? the next 30 years will tell.
some very good points regarding birthrates.
Historically it has usually been easier for the smart & hardworking to have more children, but these days it's easier for the stupid. (sorry I'm being blunt here)
Too many single mothers,broken homes and unemployed giving birth to children which are a burden on society. It can only go on for so long.
This is a interesting point '"Poor dumb bastard," they think, "doesn't he understand that this is what drives our competitiveness. That Chinese parents push their child even harder to succeed when he is their sole source of support?'
So they are focussing on creating more high-achievers where the west is encouraging under-achievers.
(Ignoring the situation in china's countryside,they are but tools for a different purpose)
Almost like china is creating two different classes on purpose.
Why such pessimism? Freedom and standards of living are increasing on average, in spite of the efforts of the collectivists. Finding the gloom and doom is supposed to be the preface to laying out the solutions:
ReplyDelete1. Hey hey, ho ho, Retire-ment is gonna go. Life extension is the free market solution to the age-heavy demographic chart, and the only one that will succeed. This is the century of the biotechnology revolution that will manipulate DNA like tinkertoys and cure the genetic disease called "aging."
2. Continual increases in productivity means that we don't need as many kids as earlier societies. When we strip out the perverse incentives of welfare, only motivated people have kids, and they put effort into raising them well. It's not so expensive: $2000 for a midwife, maybe $20,000 apiece for machine tools and welding gear, scuba diving training, pilot training, cross-country vacations, a few summer camps, and going camping or to the races, etc., a public education that's better than it used to be, and then you have the privilege of going broke when they go to college.
Sultan, I'm hitting the tip jar because you're a smart guy, but try to follow the problem with the solution.
The solutions are apparent from the statement of the problem, rebuild the family, think and plan for the future. Function as a nation instead of a halfway house.
ReplyDeleteLife extension is neat, but the body still has an expiration date and so does mental functioning. Maybe we can beat that one day, but assuming that we will is a little premature.
We don't need as many kids because we have lower death rates, but plenty of jobs still require hands on dirty work. And the amount of migrant labor and outsourced production, not to mention the premium income commanded by many physical labor jobs, some of which haven't changed too much in decades, shows that the basic formula hasn't changed.
Eliminating welfare won't mean that much of a lowering of the birth rate in non-productive populations, it will just mean more poverty there and a larger death rate. Which means the motivated kids will be the ones getting mugged by them.
Even if we dismantle the welfare state, we still need people. And they're going to come from somewhere.
I guess the commandment to be fruitful and multiply and fill up the land isn't enough for most people anymore. Personal finances aside, G-d didn't advocate population control and it's His planet - I would think He knows best what's sustainable.
ReplyDeleteI'm rereading this article, and it's amazing to me how you noticed the repeat of every empire in this generation. Why, it's almost as if there is a God running the show who is bringing everyone out for a last call!
ReplyDeleteLiberal Leader Justin Trudeau, the man who would be Prime Minister (of Canada), son of Pierre Elliot Trudeau Rips Off Canada (former Prime minister), said that he admires china for its dictatorship and the ability of such to get things done.
ReplyDeleteNot surprising, since PETRO admired both Mao and Fidel Castro, even bringing his children to visit Castro in Cuba as if they were best pals.
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