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Posted on 05/11/2011 1:20:59 PM PDT by wagglebee
May 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Warren Buffett apparently thinks you can have too many customers. Several years ago, I went toe-to-toe with Buffett — and won. The occasion was the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. I had introduced a resolution designed to stop company funds from being spent on population control and abortion campaigns.
Buffett, you see, was convinced that there were too many people on the planet and, as the company’s majority shareholder, he was using company money to try and reduce their number. Buffett is not a religious man, so I made the argument in economic terms that any businessman could understand. The Omaha Civic Auditorium was packed with over 10,000 shareholders when I arrived, many of whom Buffett had made wealthy over the years. I was a little nervous about how they would respond to my suggestion to end their chairman’s private war on people. I needn’t have worried.
I told them how the Population Research Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the case for people as the ultimate resource. “The population bomb was one of the myths of the 20th century,” I said. “Our long-term problem is not going to be too many people but too few people.
“It should be self-evident that Berkshire-Hathaway, like the economy as a whole, is dependent upon people,” I explained. “It’s people who produce the products and services of the various companies we own, and it’s people who buy them. Now you may think that there is a superabundance of people and that we’ll never run short, but this is not true. Europe and Japan are literally dying, filling more coffins than cradles each year.
“Charitable contributions to simple-minded population control programs are not ‘investing in humanity’s future.’ They are compromising humanity’s future, and putting a roadblock in the way of future economic growth. There is no ‘global share buyback’ in store for those who fund population control programs, because such programs will rob the world of future consumers and producers and threaten to shrink the economic pie.”
I had won over the crowd, which erupted in sustained applause. But Buffett cast the deciding vote, and my resolution went down to defeat. Still, I count it a victory because not long afterward Berkshire Hathaway announced that the chairman would henceforth be donating his own money, rather than the company’s, to his favorite causes in the future. Buffett, along with other true believers in the overpopulation myth, remains convinced that population growth is the root of all our problems. Is there overcrowding and air pollution? Blame it on too many people. Are there food shortages and urban poverty? Again, blame it on too many people. In their dismal calculus, more people equal less prosperity. The world, in their view, is simply too crowded; their solution to its real and imaginary woes never varies: reduce the birth rate.
In fact, population growth has been the primary driver of progress throughout human history. While it’s true that a growing population leads to shortages of certain raw materials, goods and services, these will always prove temporary in a free market economy. Innovators will come forward to extract more raw materials or find cheaper substitutes, while entrepreneurs will find ways to produce more goods at lower costs and to distribute them more efficiently to the public. At the end of this creative process — if it’s not interrupted — you will have more goods available at lower prices precisely because you have more people.
Dying populations have the opposite effect. Japan has been languishing under a demographic recession since the 1990s and the government has run up the national debt to 200% of GDP, while deflation is eroding the value of real estate, stocks and other forms of property. There are simply too few customers for all of the goods and services that Japan is producing.
Europe, too, is looking less attractive to investors because populations are dying there as well. Greece is on the verge of bankruptcy because it has fallen over a demographic cliff.
There is an old book, written in the 1920s by an American businessman, called 400 Million Customers. The author saw China then, as many people still do today, as a huge, untapped market. Ironically, the Beijing regime was bragging recently about having reduced China’s population growth by 400 million over the last 30 years. Let’s leave aside the fact that these numbers were achieved by forced abortions, sterilizations and a massive contraceptive campaign.
Think about China’s astonishing economic performance (its annual GDP growth over the past three decades is close to 10%) once the Communist Party stopped trying to control all economic activity. Think of the tremendous work ethic of the Chinese people and their dedication to educating their children. Think of the labor shortages that are now cropping up across the country because of the cruel knives that have taken the lives several hundred million unborn children in recent decades.
Think on these things, and then ask yourself: Is China really better off because it has eliminated 400 million of the most intelligent, hard working, and entrepreneurially minded peoples the world has ever seen? Has China’s Communist leadership lost its collective mind? They have eliminated 400 million customers.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of “Population Control: Real Costs and Illusory Benefits.”
This article has been re-published from Legatus Magazine with permission.
I noted an odd factoid about Buffett in an article recently referenced on FR. Buffett reportedly spent a lot of his time in church figuring out the average life spans of hymn authors from the biographical data in the church hymnal, and apparently thought they tended to be disappointingly brief. So, Buffett apparently concluded, if you’re devout enough to want to write a hymn you probably aren’t going to live long. Too bad he didn’t understand that some of the most beautiful art in the world is born of suffering.
Well said.
Life is suffering. There is value and good in suffering. If people like Buffett understood this they wouldn’t be choosing to kill people over permitting them to overcome suffering.
It’s also the same rationale that is used to toss out the lives of disabled people like me. Not like we could actually amount to anything, eh?
Suffering often occurs when good and evil approach in opposition. I don’t agree with people who believe that suffering should be sought out on principle, because it seems to need no help to occur — but if humanity shied away from all suffering, it would be shying away from many occasions where good can otherwise press through evil.
I think there is some biblical justification for seeking out suffering. Look at Christ and his 40 days in the desert. There are times when it can be profitable to the Faith.
What Jesus sought was the Father’s will, that is always clear from the gospels. So when the Father told him to go into a place where he would suffer, Jesus obeyed. A Christian life that (by definition) pushes against Satan always will see some suffering in the course of its mission. I part company with pious masochists, however.
Probably not. I presume you think illegal immigrants having 9 kids that all grow up to be on welfare is a good thing?
I’m a jerk or the freeloaders?
I think “free loaders” were in a different container (duck’n & runn’n)
I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk, or imply that I am somehow agreeing with Buffet, because I am not. Good conservative families aside, look who is having kids in the US...I am just not sure those kids are going to grow up with American values.
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Read post 30.
I saw you mention on another thread a while back that Japanese people don’t have many kids because they can’t afford to feed them or house them in tiny apartments. And many are aborted, which is awful.
What I am pointing out is that some people don’t care and pump a bunch of kids out because Daddy Government will take care of them...not a promising future at all.
If he’s so interested in the "estate" tax, why doesn’t he set an example and give half of his fortune to the IRS?
I’m sure Warren Buffet and his fellow liberal billionaires have tons of their money invested in tax free municipal bonds.
Income taxes and estate taxes are for us “little people.”
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