Is “Ever After” Just Too Long? Marriage and Modernity (The Gore-y truth)

Albert Mohler blog ^ | June 8, 2010 | Dr. Albert Mohler

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“Forcing” people to have children is no better than forcing them not to like China.

Incentives, any economist will tell you, have predictable effects.

There are no incentives for having children --- and financial incentives are farthest from my mind. A culture that believes in and visualizes the future lives for that future and, in particular, procreates. We have at least two generations of people that have been raised with the idea that wherever we were going was wrong --- starting with our slave-owning Founding Fathers. Those same generations have been completely uprooted from the soil that produced it --- Western Civilization. As a consequence, most Americans don't know where they (their predecessort) have been and where they are going. They know (feel) that they cannot lead their children, being harldy able to manage own lives. They consequently don't procreate. This started with the French in 1880s, and now seen everywhere.

Back to incentives: provide a strong moral (in the traditional Western sense) upbringing, and you'll see a revival. I don't think the culture can supply the impetus from within, but a serious calamity (World War, a part of California becoming an island, massive African invasion of Europe, or some such thing) may lead people to rediscover their western roots.