U.S. population may hit 400 million by 2043
I first posted this a couple of years ago. Alas it is only more drearily true today:
THE POPULATION OF AMERICA HAS DOUBLED IN MY LIFETIME
If you have lost control of your local school system and you believe it is because liberalism is triumphing over conservatism, you are right but you have identified the symptom and not the cause: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you have lost control over your own real property, if your rights to manage, improve, and develop your property have passed over to bureaucrats, if you can no longer choose whom to rent to or whom to sell to, if you have lost confidence that your deed in fee simple absolute will protect you against a venal government or one wholly given over to interest groups, and for all of this you blame liberalism, you have identified the symptom but not the cause: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you are a rancher who has lost his rights to graze his cattle upon lands licensed to his family for generations, if you're a fox hunter who has been deprived of his sport, if you must wait three hours for a tee time, if you have given up taking the family to the Jersey shore because the travel time now exceeds three hours, if, after hours of travail, you finally arrive at the Jersey shore with your family and you find your neighbors to close, too numerous, polyglot, and uncongenial, know this;The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
If you look at Broward and Palm Beach counties in Florida as-miracle of the jet age-suburbs of New York City, and you watch helplessly as the politics of these counties veer ever farther left potentially dragging all Florida and, with Florida, the soul of the Republican Party in America with them, be advised: The population of America has doubled in my lifetime.
Here is another along the same lines:
A few posts back one can read an article about a neighborhood uproar over the conversion of a horse ranch into a an upscale housing development. The author and the posters lament the loss of open green spaces. No one apart from me, your humble reactionary, sought to connect our feverish conversion of open spaces into more modern and admittedly upscale Levittowns with our quarter century policy of virtually open immigration.
How many tens of millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, have come to America in the last quarter century? How many millions of children have they brought into our society? Presumably there were all housed. The earlier generations, financially better established no doubt, do what Americans have always done as an immigrant wave occupies the cities, they move out to the burbs and seek higher quality housing, especially housing with cul-de-sacs.
The greater issue here is not cul-de-sacs, nor preservation of horse farms discussed on the earlier thread, but who gets to decide how we control our land-use. If you are a conservative you ought to consider that your freedom to use your land is you see fit, to build on a cul-de-sac or to maintain horses, or even dogs, is much less in a society with 300 million people than it was in a society of only 140 million people which was our population at the time of my birth. Your individual property rights must inevitably give way to the sheer weight of numbers.
If you are a conservative who values your property rights, you should be as aggressive in fighting immigration, both legal and illegal (although not limited legal immigration based on skills), as you all are in defense of a Second Amendment right to bear arms.
And a final post:
Have you ever heard me claim that we could not feed the teeming billions? The question, of course, is rhetorical and the answer is no. I am no Malthusian. However, the population of US has doubled in my lifetime and I do complain about the absence of parking spaces, free driving lanes, open beaches, and open spaces.
But I do not complain about intrusive government trying to regulate conflicting claims of private property vs. public use while I stand silent on the issue of population growth. If you condone such growth please do not trouble the rest of us with rantings about intrusive government because government will inevitably become intrusive as your growing tribe by its very presence circumscribes my freedom.
As a conservative, I know from the Goldwater days what it is like to fight hopeless fights. Guess what, the era of big government is not over. It is not just our growing addiction to the teat which makes conservative concepts like states rights and limited government quaint, it is a rapacious and burgeoning population whose claims for more and more cannot be resisted by resort to old conservative truisms. And so it goes with land use controls. What are you going to do about traffic problems? More government controls. Do you really think your rights to use your private property will enable you long to operate a plant with noxious effluents when mothers downstream have the vote, even if the mothers are conservatives? Do you really believe that a few thousand ranchers in Wyoming can long dictate the use of federal lands against the claims of teeming millions in the cities who have engaged lobbyists like the Sierra Club to get the feds to regulate its own lands for their benefit?
Our problem as conservatives is hopeless if we permit ourselves to be washed away by a tsunami of clamoring demands from a population literally growing out of control.
