Posted on 01/06/2006 1:56:39 PM PST by Caleb1411
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Great post!
That was a piece worth reading...
It's still a balancing act. While I don't conform to the European model, overpopulation is a problem in developing countries (Africa and the ME), and thus to human happiness and survival.
Look at China, unable to feed her own massive population-which makes her very vunerable.
The US needs to be self sufficient in food production without destroying our soil and water.
I for one am not looking forward to a more crowded America. 500 million is too many.
Lost me right here, I'm afraid. Swell as 4-H and Home Ec. training may be, there is no Constitutional authority for Federal government involvement in these areas.
Have you been to the Midwest lately?
Nope, I live in Cali, which may explain why I think there are way too many people here already!
The notion that endless rapid population growth is anything but a pyramid scheme is very dangerous. If the average woman was having 7-9 children, the planet would become one big hellhole in short order. The fact that this family pattern worked very well for a short time in certain parts of the world, when huge tracts of unused arable land were available, is not an indication that it would work now. People can argue about exactly how long it could go on before the point of near-universal misery set in, but it obviously couldn't go on for very many generations. Space on Earth is finite, and pulling 1/2 the educated people in the developed world out of the labor force so they can devote full time to bearing and raising hordes of children, would result in a dramatic slowing of progress in critical areas like agricultural efficiency, while the need for food exploded geometrically.
If the population of the mid-West is increased by 20 times over the next few generations, while the population of already densely populated metropolitan areas also increases at that rate, just where is the food for all these people supposed to be grown?
And especially vulnerable to continuing oppression by a communist/socialist regime. They are shutting down the websites of people who publish any criticism of the government or any reports of the few little uprisings that occurs. But everyone is too busy trying to scrape together tomorrow's meal to bother protesting about it.
Overpopulation equals totalitarian socialist government. Anyone who doesn't grasp that is very, very dangerous to the cause of freedom.
We're nowhere close to that. The average American woman is having more like 2.1, and it's the influx of immigrant women from the Third World that is keeping that up.
The average Spanish woman is having 1.2. The average woman in Tokyo is having less than one, and the population of Japan is now officially recognized to be declining.
Societies that refuse to reproduce -- and that means 2.2 to 2.4 kids per woman, roughly -- die out or are infiltrated and overwhelmed by other societies that reproduce more efficiently. That's not Christian dogma, it's Darwinism, and it's something that Darwin got right.
And underpopulation in Europe will equal totalitarian Muslim government. Underpopulation here will, in the long term, is making the US a Latin American country. Latin American countries are not known for their freedom, their political stability, their devotion to the rule of law, or their wealth.
Your neo-Malthusian rhetoric does not account for the realities on the ground.
OR invasion of other, less populated countries without food/population problems.
Hence, concern over excessive growth in the ME and China.
Is that you, Rev. Malthus? We were all supposed to have starved to death in the 19th Century, remember?
No, failing to control borders is what's leading to the problem in Europe. They have the ability, but not the will, yet. Outlandish overreproduction in 3rd World countries is fueled in no small part by Western nations' lack of resolve to stop subsidizing it. Stop relieving the internal pressure in those hellholes by letting millions of them overrun our countries, stop sending food and medicine -- it only expands the scale of the suffering, does nothing whatsoever to alleviate it, stop sending money except to the extent that it has enforceable strings attached which prevent it from be used for anything that doesn't reduce the brith rate and improve education level.
LOL! I've lived in places like that, too. Still, lots of California is empty. If you look at a population-distribution map, the United States is like a land-archipelago ... "islands" of population density, of various sizes, in a great empty sea.
I understand that many people simply don't want to live in, say, Wyoming, but that doesn't mean it's not big, empty, and habitable.
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