For many years now I have taken a rather unfashionable position on Free Republic to the effect that population growth, mostly done by virtue of immigration both legal and illegal, is not good from a conservative point of view. I just found this reply I posted in 2012 which considers the connection between population growth (which more than doubled in my lifetime alone), and liberty:
Let us consider the idea of installing [millions of people] in one state and I will show you a dystopia rivaling our worst prisons. State control of everything would be mandatory; there will be no liberty. Everything, and I mean everything including air, light, water and exercise space for children would be rationed. The more density the less quality of life, the more density the less liberty.
The absolute number of people competing for space on the highways, for public services, for a hearing in our courts, our fish stocks, our beaches, our waterways, our land-use, all compete against one another for these resources. Inevitably, the government must arbitrate among these competing claims. Inevitably, those free beaches will be denied you and you will lose that liberty, just as you have lost your liberty to freely fish, to hunt, to build on your own land, to visit our national parks, to maintain animals on your property, etc. Do you really think your right to drink soda from a 16 ounce cup is in jeopardy in sparsely populated North Dakota as it is in densely populated New York City? Do you really think in a society of 310 million people we can survive without zoning laws limiting your right to use your property? You just lost liberty. It was not so when I was a youngster with 140 million people.
This is not a conservative question, we don't have to deny that there is insufficient habitable and desirable land for the doubling of American population every fifty years in order to maintain our conservative credentials. I don't know where this notion that growing population is good comes from among conservatives. Is it because misguided conservatives do not want to admit a predicate that allows for abortion? Is it because there is a Roman Catholic tradition that does not want to admit a predicate for birth control? Is it to sustain the Wall Street Journal's editorial approach of open borders? Is it because there is a misguided conservative tradition that no land use controls can be accepted even when we need actual protection from our neighbors?
The idea of Jeffersonian democracy, the idea of the New England Cracker Barrel democracy, only works when there is sufficient space for man to live independent both of his neighbor and the government. Double your population and halve your liberties
