And then we could watch them all die of thirst and starvation, those who have not been murdered after we deposit them in a semi-desert, densely populated, without water and fertile soil. In only a few years our world is no longer Russ' world.
We are in the age of satellites, hypersonic missiles, and drones. The wars in Ukraine and Iran demonstrate that we are beyond the age of industrial warfare in which human bodies are not needed by the numbers, like ammunition. A mass of bodies subject to the draft will become less and less an indicator of national security and more and more a target and a liability.
We are not in the age of the Industrial Revolution in which we need bodies to work the production lines, farm the soil, transport the goods and provide a market for the efforts of the masses. Digitized production might well exceed demand, if we can figure out how to distribute oversupply to those who do not produce and still retain a democratic, capitalistic society.
We are entering an age in which populations will not be an asset but a liability, a body of demand for the production of goods and services done by robots, either owned by a few who are the objects of a Marxist expropriation, or the newly idle mass that must be sustained by the distribution of wealth.
The impetus over the centuries to increase population came in large part out of the need to provide for one's retirement. We are entering an age in which living 150 years is not perhaps out of the ordinary. We need a new paradigm for that age as well as for new military age and the new industrial age. Producing fairly employable people as a solution to Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Producing more people to clean bedpans for the superannuated is a Ponzi scheme too.
That new paradigm need not include, and should not include, population growth without end. There is much to be said about the Jeffersonian idyllic view of government and life enjoyed in a world of open spaces.
The population United States has more than doubled in my lifetime and the quality of that life has not doubled. Enough already!
