Right Pulse

In response to Cardinal Pell’s call for an increase in the Australian fertility rate, ‘your’ ABC recently reported:

…prominent economist Jeffrey Sachs says the global population is rising too dramatically.

“The planet, everyone can feel, is just right at the limits right now in terms of food, in terms of energy supply, in terms of land use,” he said.

Professor Sachs says population projections, which also take falling fertility rates into account, are already too high at around an extra 2.5 billion people by 2050.

“I do think that the world would be very wise on its own welfare and for saving the physical earth to be trying to stabilise through voluntary means the world’s population at around 8 billion, not the over 9 billion which is our current trajectory right now,” he said. “It’s a serious problem.”

Economic doom and gloom forecasts, how original. Thomas Malthus would be proud. People are always the problem for the left, never part of the solution. Can you feeeeel it? And you sure will if the fertility rate does not increase, with an increased tax burden to care for the elderly falling on a smaller group of workers. And speaking of Malthusian policies, study this article and then decide your feelings on the matter:

There is a little-known battle for survival going in some parts of the world. Those at risk are baby girls, and the casualties are in the millions each year. The weapons being used against them are prenatal sex selection, abortion and female infanticide — the systematic killing of girls soon after they are born.

According to a recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) State of the World Population Report, these practices, combined with neglect, have resulted in at least 60 million “missing” girls in Asia, creating gender imbalances and other serious problems that experts say will have far reaching consequences for years to come.

Mosher, the first American social scientist allowed into China, puts much of the blame on Beijing’s one-child policy, which took effect in 1979.

The policy encourages late marrying and late childbearing, and it limits the majority of urban couples to having one child and most of those living in rural areas to two. Female infanticide was the result, he said.

“Historically infanticide was something that was practiced in poor places in China,” Mosher said. “But when the one-child policy came into effect we began to see in the wealthy areas of China, what had never been done before in history — the killing of little girls.”

Have you felt it yet? The article goes on to deal with selective abortion and other gender selection practices.

However, China has pledged to keep its one-child policy in place until the year 2050, a policy which it admits is “related” to the large sex imbalances in the country.

“The implications are potentially disastrous,” Mosher said. “The answer is economic development, not restricting the number of people.”

Population growth is not a hindrance to economic development - it is essential to it - especially for Africa where the main factor endowment is their people because of the potential labour market it could represent to investors. Furthermore, rapid economic development coincided with rapid population growth in the UK and USA during the nineteenth century, and was an essential cause of the industrial revolution. The same could be said for the post-WWII economic and population booms.

The Heritage Foundation has a great talk on the issue by Steven Mosher. He discusses the shocking attempts by the UN and western governments to bribe developing countries into introducing abortion and sterilisation programmes. Including outlining legally enforced mandatory Chinese contraception and other female sterilisation practices, with the various criminal sanctions for women who avoid the practices. Listen to the talk and ask yourself this; why does the west and the UN want to control the third world population through sterlisation and like minded programmes?