Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with a zero population growth philosophy. The real issue is how you implement it. Depriving liberty should never be an option. On the other hand, taking away freebies, supplements and incentives sounds good to me. Regulating immigration so that it acts as a positive force for our nation was the norm until the 60’s. Then it was morphed into a policy of ‘anything goes’ regardless of it’s effect on the nation.
I believe it.
There are a lot of anti-human people in this world, and many of them think they're conservatives.
For one thing, you should take a close look at the people and organizations who support such philosophy, and then you'll get a clue.
Also, any philosophy that takes people as a neutral or liability rather than an asset is completely at odds with reality, including a mountain of empirical data. In a sense, probalems get solved when we have more people around to solve them.
In the US, we are already slightly below a zero population growth rate. In most of the developed world, the birth rates are much lower and the "rate of growth" is highly negative.
I guess we've been inundated with "population explosion" propaganda for so long we are unable to recognize it when the explosion becomes an implosion.
I was reading an SF novel recently where only one woman in 10 gave birth, and pregnant women were hunted through the streets by murderous mobs, yet somehow the "population explosion" was continuing. Not very scientific, I fear.
Before social security, people had incentive to have and raise productive members of society: it was their retirement plan. These days parents get little back for raising their children to succeed. If the government paid a small commission to parents for taxes paid by their children, and took away a bit of social security if their children ended up a burden in jail, suddenly you'd see parents being more careful about who they have children with and how much effort they put into their upbringing.
The irony is, we’d have to have an upswing in the birthrate for Americans (born in the USA) to reach mere replacement: ZPG. The entire increase in US population is due to immigrants and the first-generation children of immigrants.
And I love the well-raised children of immigrants.
This is an indictment of Americans, with our 0 or 1 or 2 child families. No children, no future.