One of the happy by-products of the Reagan years is the fading of a liberal fad of the 1970s which might best be identified as compulsive concern about creeping catastrophes. The liberals worry about many menaces: the ogre of overpopulation, running out of food, the starvation of millions, washing away the topsoil, extinction of various species, deforestation, giving up our automobiles because we are using up all the oil, sweltering in the “greenhouse effect,” and pollution from toxic waste.
What all these dire warnings of impending disaster have in common is that the people who promote them all offer the same solution: more governmental control of the economy and family affairs. These “threats” are part of a socio-economic doctrine based on the dogmas that natural resources are limited and diminishing, and that life is a zero-sum game in which one gains wealth only at the expense of others.
The creeping catastrophe ideology is a game plan for socialist control. Paul Erlich, author of the nonscientific book “The Population Bomb,” expressed this doctrine when he said that only a comprehensive program of government-planned and subsidized measures can protect the individual from his worst enemy — man himself.
The “bible” of this approach was a three-volume work entitled “The Global 2000 Report to the President.” It looked at world population, natural resources and environment, and came up with forecasts of a frightening future unless “vigorous, determined new initiatives” are undertaken. This was the social rationale of the Carter Administration.
The intellectual counteroffensive came in a book called “The Resourceful Earth,” a joint effort of the Heritage Foundation and the Hudson Institute’s famous futurist, Herman Kahn. It articulates the ideology that man has an almost limitless ability to create abundance out of scarcity.
“The Resourceful Earth’s” authors believe that people on the average live better because of population growth, which stimulates technological growth, thereby improving man’s standard of living and his ability to find new resources and options. In our modern world, mineral resources are becoming more abundant rather than more scarce (as American Industry proved after the Oil Embargo of 1973).
But there is one essential factor for success of the growth economy. Only in freedom can man’s creativity meet the challenges and find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow instead of the darkness beyond the horizon.
The famine in Ethiopia is not caused by overpopulation, but by the Communist government. Like the perennial “bad harvests” in the Soviet Union, it’s the politics that creates the scarcities of food, not the limits of the earth or the number of people. Food is always scarce under Communism.
A real sign that the liberal dogmas are cracking is the recent headline in the Washington Post, “Why do we still think babies create poverty?” The author, University of Maryland Professor Julian Simon, says that all statistical evidence proves that faster population growth absolutely does NOT slow economic growth.
Yet none of these studies is ever cited by the World Bank or other prestigious propagators of the overpopulation boogeyman. The United Nations and other foreign giveaway lobbies continue to promote the myth that population promotes poverty.
Anyone who saw Hong Kong in 1955 would have sized up its economic prospects as hopeless. Thousands of homeless refugees slept at night on the sidewalks or in small boats, with more refugees flooding in every day. Hong Kong is a small spot of land totally lacking in natural resources.
Yet, those pitiful people turned Hong Kong (which has 40 times the population density of Mainland China) into one of the most prosperous places in the world. All they needed was freedom. Other countries with high population growth accompanied by high economic growth are Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Ecuador, Jordan, and Brazil.
If the American colonists had not had a very high birth rate and high population growth, we would still be a weak little nation of about four million people huddled along the Atlantic coast. The dozen or so babies born to most of our ancestors proved to be our wealth, not our poverty.
The creeping catastrophe that poses the biggest threat to our future is a runaway big government in the hands of elitists with a no-growth view of the economy and the power to impose their own prejudices on the rest of us.
