Check out this excellent piece from First Things, entitled Demographics and Depression by David P. Goldman. Way to go, child-laden young families... it seems the economy depends on us. Our present financial crisis is a result of too many small families with few children and too many single-parent families. Our Creator's plan for human life and love turns out to be the only way to sustain a society economically. Imagine that.Here are some excerpts, but do take the time to read as much of it as you can, for full explanations and the hard data:
Life is sacred for its own sake. It is not an instrument to provide us with fatter IRAs or better real-estate values. But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life. Failing to rear a new generation in sufficient numbers to replace the present one violates that order, and it has consequences for wealth, among many other things. Americans who rejected the mild yoke of family responsibility in pursuit of atavistic enjoyment will find at last that this is not to be theirs, either.
...
...The problem is that the families with children who need to spend never were formed in sufficient numbers to sustain growth.
...
We delude ourselves when we imagine that a few hundred dollars of tax incentives will persuade individuals to form families or keep them together...
...
It was always morally wrong for conservatives to attempt to segregate the emotionally charged issues of public morals from the conservative growth agenda. We know now that it was also incompetent from a purely economic point of view. Without life, there is no wealth; without families, there is no economic future. The value of future income streams traded in capital markets will fall in accordance with our impoverished demography. We cannot pursue the acquisition of wealth and the provision of upward mobility except through the reconquest of the American polity on behalf of the American family.
4 comments:
JM, such an interesting topic and one that has seemed to stir many circles.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/viewarticle.php?selectedarticle=2009.05.01.002.pdart is an article along the same lines written by a former Witherspoon Institute Post-Doc and Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst. He writes in reference to Pelosi's claim "Family planning services reduce costs", a statement that received extremely negative public reaction worldwide. I think the two complement each other well. Thanks for sharing this!
I just read that article and found it interesting due to its abundance of common sense. After all, we need only to look to history to see what made America great in the first place.
JM,
Thanks for this link. Excellent article. I particularly liked the discussion of "tax incentives" for families. There are none!
I had a professor in law school who asked us to name one law that actually benefitted those parents who raised their family in a responsible way. Since tax policies don't really help Americans with families (those taking a free ride and never having children are currently greatly advantages by our tax system), not one person could think of a single law or economic policy that benefitted responsible parenthood. It seems this has all reared its ugly head in the current economic crisis.
And as an aside, I have recently been reading a bit about the decline in birth rate both here and in Europe. At present, much of European culture will be dead in just 50 years. The replacement fertility rate (per couple), is 2.1. A rate of 2.3 is necessary to have economic and cultural growth. The rate in Europe is 1.4! The U.S. rate has continued to decline and is presently 2.1--it is only this high thanks to the Latino immigrants. By 2050, almost all Western European nations will be primarily Muslim.
These sorts of numbers and our current economic crisis should themselves be proof that contraception has done nothing to benefit our society! We are contracepting ourselves out of existence, and in the meantime, the government continues to fail in pursing tax policies that help those families raising our next generation.
Thanks for the link JM. I read it with great interest and my resolve to read First Things on a regular basis has been strengthened.
Post a Comment