By Benjamin Wetmore
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
Elon Musk said America and the West have a depopulation problem. He’s right.
For decades we’ve been told there’s an ‘overpopulation’ problem. It’s a ridiculous concept.
The pretension of knowing how many people the planet can support, sometimes called its “carrying capacity” is one that pretends that technology doesn’t innovate, that prices don’t fluctuate, and that everywhere is the same as everywhere else.
Following the false god of ‘overpopulation,’ the Chinese pushed the one-child policy back in the 1980s until 2015. The result was a greatly aged population as well as a gender imbalance where girls were more often aborted than boys.
This was the future Planned Parenthood arguably advocated, lobbied for, and still hesitates to condemn. India followed the same pattern and has many of China’s population problems in this regard.
You don’t generate prosperity on a pile of infant skulls. You don’t build wealth by executing motherhood. There’s just zero logic for why a country with no famines, and with widespread prosperity, would enact policies to limit its reproduction.
Every argument against children as a social and economic good easily falls apart.
It ultimately comes down to the media and culture’s amplification of the most toxic ideas and values possible. Our media elites find it fashionable to treat children as the greatest inconvenience, as the reason a lawyer won’t make partner, as the reason why a woman will never be the CEO.
Short-term thinking is the mark of unsophisticated animals. Long-term thinking is the hallmark of humanity. By sacrificing children for short-term profits and promotions, our country is destroying America’s foundation.
It’s fashionable among elites to think that immigration can solve all the problems of our man-made maternity famine. However, the brain drain that benefits America and takes doctors and lawyers away from developing countries is hurting the development of those countries as well. It’s promoting poverty in developing nations while reducing professional wages in America.
The aggressive depopulation agenda pushed since the end of World War 2 makes no sense in rich countries able to afford and support children. The average GDP per capita in America, the amount of wealth generated by each person, is nearly $60,000 in the United States.
That’s nearly double the Polish per capita GDP, which is about $30,000. Poland’s GDP is about double that of Brazil, which is about $15,000 per year. Brazil’s is about double that of Bolivia, which is about $7,500. Bolivia’s GDP is almost double that of Cambodia, which is $4,000. Cambodia’s is about double that of Uganda, which is about $2,000 per year.
America produces thirty times more wealth per person than Uganda. Having more American babies will not impoverish a poor nation like Uganda. If anything, it will likely lead to more wealth, $50 billion a year, that America is so generous in donating to developing countries.
Part of the mentality that justifies policies against American maternity is that needy children, those in poverty, homeless, etc., are somehow displaced or deprived as a result of more children. But the regions of the United States with the highest birthrates are often the ones with the least poverty and the least social problems. Children help focus a community on the parks, schools, and crime rates that make for stable and cohesive communities.
For centuries, economist Thomas Malthus predicted how many human beings can the environment sustain. This is often called the ‘carrying capacity’ of the globe, nation, state, and local area. Malthus originally thought the planet could not handle more than a billion people. All the dire predictions about overpopulation, globally and by specific country, have been proven wrong.
Now, in the name of environmental consciousness, potential parents with enough money to raise children say they want to protect the planet by not having children.
Extremist left-wing politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez amplify these ideas by saying climate concerns are valid reasons to not have children. You can see their poor reasoning that there are enough or even too many children today, so they should be delayed or denied until major social problems are solved.
Yet, as seen in history, the poor will always be with us. There will likely always be homelessness. Given the moving goalposts on allegations of climate change for 50 years, no doubt we will always have a ‘climate crisis’ of one sort or another. There will always be an excuse for pro-abortion politicians to advocate for the deliberate destruction of unborn children.
Ultimately, there is simply no argument that justifies ripping a child apart limb by limb while screaming in utero because of macroeconomics. It’s just hard to justify the realities of abortion, the agent of depopulation, because there aren’t enough soup kitchens.
Perhaps we can’t solve these problems as a society because we keep aborting the empathetic children of those who would staff those soup kitchens, the children who would become the champions of climate change, or who would invent miracles or grow wealth to solve poverty.
If 60 million surgical abortions hadn’t been performed in America since 1973, social security would be solvent. Our entire society would be radically different. Instead, we chose empty playgrounds and silent parks.
You can’t both care about humanity and relish denying it to babies. Killing kids because they’re inconvenient is arguably worse than any ancient society infatuated with infanticide. At least the ancients could blame superstition for their crimes.
America needs more children. It needs to grow to continue to lead the world and fight for freedom and liberty domestically and abroad.
Musk is right that depopulation is a major problem, and will continue to be, but it is a symptom of larger social and spiritual problems within our country.
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