“If I am suspicious about their motives, I am absolutely paranoid about their methods. “
I am paranoid too (/sarc off)
To be serious, I don’t consider you all that paranoid. Especially since I graduated from environmental studies and came to a pretty much similar conclusion.
As far as the American population has come, however, I do have some disagreements. First of all, I do acknowledge that America is not Europe. However, a great deal of America’s growth is now due to immigration, and our national fertility rate is barely above replacement, and likely to cross that line of 2.1 into population decline within the next 20-50 years. Additionally, it’s not just the United States, but immigration will also drop off as a means of following suit with the declining fertility and declining populations in Latin America. With Latin America declining, this destroys the motives of plenty of individuals to really bother illegally immigrating into America. So in essence, we’re already balancing on a fine line between actual population growth and population decline already, without the need for any draconian population controls. When people cry population control, they do so redundantly.
I agree for the most part with property, in fact, the motive to profit is perhaps the most beneficial motive a person can actually possess. Both for self, as well as for society as a whole.
“If you think you can maintain conservative values in the teeth of runaway population growth you are naïve. It is not by accident that the left is flooding our country with poor people who make demands on politicians who are only too eager to satisfy them out of your pocketbook, your lifestyle, and your property.”
Sounds to me like a slower version of the Reichstag Fire, (i.e. perpetuate a disaster to blame on a scapegoated group and glorify yourself as a hero).
The argument often voiced by conservatives is that we need population growth to maintain a vigorous economy. They might cite Japan as an example which has been in the doldrums going out nearly 2 decades with a population that is aging and shrinking. There is intimidation to equate the two.
I do not accept the view that we need to engage in an immigration/population Ponzi scheme in order to maintain a growing economy. That is what we say about Social Security. In effect we divide the cost of maintaining our seniors by an ever shrinking workforce and despair at the arithmetic.
Instead, we should analyze these problems in terms of productivity of our machinery rather than productivity of our workers. Inevitably, we are going to have to substitute robots for people as we have already done in the world of information technology. The downside of the present system is to encourage sending our jobs to India and China. I think we have somehow got to think in terms of production overall instead of production per man-hour. We already have the tools, such as return on capital etc. but we are not employing them in the policy making arena.
Essentially, I am asking why should we try to maintain our population? Why not let it shrink? I sure would like to be able to use the nation's highways without traffic jams, or visit a national park without waiting in a queue.
Why not?
