The Reason Foundation is a libertarian think tank in Los Angeles. Over the years, it has made a name for itself as an advocate for the proliferation of destructive products in society. Their top priority is the legalization, to get all narcotic drugs legalized. This is an agenda they share with another fine libertarian outfit: the Cato Institute. The Reason Foundation has now added another socially corrosive item to its list of policy virtues: depopulation. In a sprawling commentary, senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown proposes that low fertility rates and a shrinking population of humans on Earth are good and that we should just learn to live with it.
Brown does not explain why it is better with fewer humans on the planet, though it is worth keeping in mind that this is an argument shared by many people in the ‘green Left’ who believe humans pollute the planet by their mere existence on it. There is no way of telling to what extent Brown shares the enviro-left’s hostility to human life, though judging by Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s previous writings about abortion, it seems likely that her views at least overlap with those of the far, anti-life Left.
As for fertility rates, Brown insists that they are in decline, especially in Europe. She provides no empirical evidence to back up her statement; had she done so, she would have saved herself some trouble. Or, as good old Stanton Friedman used to say: get your facts in line before you put your mouth in gear.
The plain truth, namely, is that fertility rates are on the rise all over Eastern Europe, in Russia, and in Germany.
Facts be damned, Brown goes on to consider the possibility of solving falling birth rates with more immigration. Apparently, the theory behind this is that women in Europe and America can cut down on their child-rearing, while women in other, poorer parts of the world should ramp up their reproduction. They should have enough kids to export as population replacement to wealthier countries, as well as have enough kids to sustain their own countries.
After all, if depopulationists like Elizabeth Nolan Brown are to be satisfied, poor-country mothers must make sure that their own countries prevail demographically. If they did not, America’s depopulationists would have no place to exploit for their future immigration needs.
Brown goes on to lament that fertility rates are falling in her supply countries of choice, whereupon she resorts to the conclusion that we should simply get comfortable with the fact that the human population is shrinking.
To be fair to the esteemed Reason editor, the reproduction of the U.S. population is indeed a problem. The big economically redistributive spending programs that account for about 70% of U.S. government spending are constructed based on the very premise that the tax base grows over time. This means a slow but steady inflow of new taxpayers into the workforce.
With a shrinking population, the opposite happens. The combination of fewer taxpayers and growing entitlement spending is a more acute problem from a fiscal viewpoint than from a demographic perspective. It causes a permanent or structural budget deficit. This deficit costs the federal government a lot of money.
It is not immediately clear what the Reason Foundation wants to do about this problem. The welfare state has never caught much of their attention. That is too bad, since it happens to be the main reason why America’s public finances are in such bad shape.
There is no improvement in sight—on the contrary, the cost of the federal debt continues to rise. This week the Federal Reserve raised its interest rates again, taking its lead federal funds rate to a bracket between 5% and 5.25%. This rate is raising the cost of the U.S. government’s debt: in the past two weeks, several auctions on Treasury securities have produced a yield (interest rate) of 5% or more.
At present, the U.S. government is paying 2.48% on average on its debt. This is up from 1.87% on October 1st, the start of the 2023 fiscal year. Although interest rate costs are not rising as fast now as they did last fall, there is still a risk that the total cost for this fiscal year will reach $1 trillion. That would have a significant psychological impact on U.S. policy and, among other things, bring the fertility-rate debate to the forefront.
The only positive side to a shrinking number of children would be that the demand for teachers in America’s public schools would go down. There would be fewer opportunities for politically radical socialists to preach their ideology of choice to kids.
The problem with the radicalization of America’s schools has now reached a level where the teachers’ union for an entire state throws out all pretenses of being non-partisan. The Colorado Education Association, a teachers’ union in the U.S. state of Colorado, has come out as an unabashed socialist campaign group. They recently decided and openly declared—on behalf of their 39,000 members—that capitalism is bad and socialism is good, and that they intend to work to crush the latter in favor of the former.
Parents who for some reason are worried that their kids might be indoctrinated in school, might actually have the solution at their fingertips. They could pen a proposal to their representatives in the Colorado state legislature that all teachers should be given the opportunity to teach abroad for a year. The teachers would be offered the choice between three countries: North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Those who do not experience enough of the socialist disaster during that year would be offered assistance with permanent emigration.
Speaking of the need among some people to repeat the mistakes of the past: the saga of Bud Light and its recent public-relations disaster is being amended with another chapter. After Belgian-owned American beer producer Anheuser-Busch did commercials with a so-called transgender man and suffered a monumental sales drop as a result, Smirnoff Vodka has decided to see if they, too, can run their business into the ground by doing exactly the same:
Another beverage company, this time vodka retailer Smirnoff, has hired a trans woman and drag queen as one of its paid partners in recent weeks. Several Instagram posts from drag queen and trans woman “Maxine LaQueene” features the official “Paid Partnership with Smirnoff” tags, denoting that the major liquor retailer has hired the biological male for promotional material.
For some reason, this reminds me of that scene from the British sitcom The Young Ones where Vyvyan is on a train and reads a warning label: “Do not lean out of the window.” He adds “I wonder why” and sticks his head out.
There are still some people who would metaphorically stick their heads out the window in next year’s U.S. presidential election. One-third of American voters still approve of how President Joe Biden is doing his job. According to Breitbart, independent voters who do not identify as either Democrats or Republicans, have for the most part abandoned the president, but three in ten are apparently still behind him.
Almost four in five of the independents think that Biden is “a weak leader.”
They are correct, of course, and it looks like the president’s own advisers have come to the same conclusion. According to some news stories, Biden will not be debating his challengers in next year’s presidential primary elections.
That may be all it takes to ensure that Biden only gets one term as president. It looks increasingly likely that he will be challenged by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The nephew of President John F. Kennedy has spoken a great deal lately, and every time he does, he sounds like an old-school, America-loving Democrat. (Remember those?) Kennedy expresses outrage over the Biden administration’s disastrous open-borders immigration policy. Referring to an illegal immigrant who killed a family in Texas recently, Kennedy explains:
In a surprisingly blunt tone, Kennedy also noted that “we have chaos at the border” and that human traffickers and other criminals take full advantage of it.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an intellectual oddball, but a respectable one. He did not shy away from opposing vaccine mandates during the epidemic, a position that earned him significant derision at the time.
America needs more oddballs like Mr. Kennedy, people who are interested in the world around them and who want to participate in its preservation, reform, and betterment. Unfortunately, the willingness among America’s youth to do so does not appear to be at its high point at the moment. The focus of the intellectual elite of the younger generation, i.e., those who graduate college, appears to be squarely on their own identity.
This identity craze has now reached the point where universities are bringing back pre-civil rights, southern-state segregation at their graduation events. What used to be a manifestation of unity, where all the graduating students were celebrated together by faculty and parents, regardless of personal character traits, has become the latest iteration of apartheid in American society. From the Washington Times:
Universities are expanding their menu of optional graduation events focused on participants’ identities and segregated by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and even income. Georgetown University, the University of Oklahoma, Illinois State University and Grand Valley State University in Michigan are among the growing number of schools holding special ceremonies for Black graduates in upcoming weeks as the academic year winds down. Dozens of campuses have added special graduations for LGBTQ students, illegal immigrants and Pilipinx—the new, gender-neutral term for Filipinos favored by progressives—in recent years.
There was a time when America considered itself a melting pot, where people from all over the spectrum of the human race came together in a culture of freedom, opportunity, and self-determination. Back then, segregation was frowned upon and everyone’s organic integration into America was considered a virtue.
Fortunately, some people still celebrate the melting-pot concept. A community of Romanians are proud to be integrated into the trucking industry in America, and to support each other they have just created their own organization. From Romania Insider:
The first association dedicated to the Romanian and Moldovan trucking community in North America was launched this past weekend.
Called ROMOTANA, the organization for truck drivers and trucking company owners of Romanian and Moldovan heritage brings together representatives from more than 2,000 trucking companies.
Other than that, Romanian media is fairly silent on what is happening in America. They share their silence with Icelandic media, whose attention to U.S. news and events is low in frequency and self-congratulatory in content. Illustrating these points, the latest story on America in English-speaking Iceland Review dates all the way back to 2021 when the publication proudly declared that Norsemen settled in North America a millennium ago. Their article reported on the findings by a group of scientists, who had been able to date the Viking settlement on Newfoundland to 1021 A.D.
It is unclear if the Vikings forayed deeper into the American continent. However, it is intriguing to ponder what the current United States and Canada would have looked like, had they built more colonies further west and south.
One thing is clear, though. If America had been settled by the Vikings, Joe Biden would not be president of the United States today. That thought, right there, is worth a beer. But not a Bud Light.
The America Report: Birth Rates, Interest Rates, and More Bud Light Moments
The Reason Foundation is a libertarian think tank in Los Angeles. Over the years, it has made a name for itself as an advocate for the proliferation of destructive products in society. Their top priority is the legalization, to get all narcotic drugs legalized. This is an agenda they share with another fine libertarian outfit: the Cato Institute. The Reason Foundation has now added another socially corrosive item to its list of policy virtues: depopulation. In a sprawling commentary, senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown proposes that low fertility rates and a shrinking population of humans on Earth are good and that we should just learn to live with it.
Brown does not explain why it is better with fewer humans on the planet, though it is worth keeping in mind that this is an argument shared by many people in the ‘green Left’ who believe humans pollute the planet by their mere existence on it. There is no way of telling to what extent Brown shares the enviro-left’s hostility to human life, though judging by Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s previous writings about abortion, it seems likely that her views at least overlap with those of the far, anti-life Left.
As for fertility rates, Brown insists that they are in decline, especially in Europe. She provides no empirical evidence to back up her statement; had she done so, she would have saved herself some trouble. Or, as good old Stanton Friedman used to say: get your facts in line before you put your mouth in gear.
The plain truth, namely, is that fertility rates are on the rise all over Eastern Europe, in Russia, and in Germany.
Facts be damned, Brown goes on to consider the possibility of solving falling birth rates with more immigration. Apparently, the theory behind this is that women in Europe and America can cut down on their child-rearing, while women in other, poorer parts of the world should ramp up their reproduction. They should have enough kids to export as population replacement to wealthier countries, as well as have enough kids to sustain their own countries.
After all, if depopulationists like Elizabeth Nolan Brown are to be satisfied, poor-country mothers must make sure that their own countries prevail demographically. If they did not, America’s depopulationists would have no place to exploit for their future immigration needs.
Brown goes on to lament that fertility rates are falling in her supply countries of choice, whereupon she resorts to the conclusion that we should simply get comfortable with the fact that the human population is shrinking.
To be fair to the esteemed Reason editor, the reproduction of the U.S. population is indeed a problem. The big economically redistributive spending programs that account for about 70% of U.S. government spending are constructed based on the very premise that the tax base grows over time. This means a slow but steady inflow of new taxpayers into the workforce.
With a shrinking population, the opposite happens. The combination of fewer taxpayers and growing entitlement spending is a more acute problem from a fiscal viewpoint than from a demographic perspective. It causes a permanent or structural budget deficit. This deficit costs the federal government a lot of money.
It is not immediately clear what the Reason Foundation wants to do about this problem. The welfare state has never caught much of their attention. That is too bad, since it happens to be the main reason why America’s public finances are in such bad shape.
There is no improvement in sight—on the contrary, the cost of the federal debt continues to rise. This week the Federal Reserve raised its interest rates again, taking its lead federal funds rate to a bracket between 5% and 5.25%. This rate is raising the cost of the U.S. government’s debt: in the past two weeks, several auctions on Treasury securities have produced a yield (interest rate) of 5% or more.
At present, the U.S. government is paying 2.48% on average on its debt. This is up from 1.87% on October 1st, the start of the 2023 fiscal year. Although interest rate costs are not rising as fast now as they did last fall, there is still a risk that the total cost for this fiscal year will reach $1 trillion. That would have a significant psychological impact on U.S. policy and, among other things, bring the fertility-rate debate to the forefront.
The only positive side to a shrinking number of children would be that the demand for teachers in America’s public schools would go down. There would be fewer opportunities for politically radical socialists to preach their ideology of choice to kids.
The problem with the radicalization of America’s schools has now reached a level where the teachers’ union for an entire state throws out all pretenses of being non-partisan. The Colorado Education Association, a teachers’ union in the U.S. state of Colorado, has come out as an unabashed socialist campaign group. They recently decided and openly declared—on behalf of their 39,000 members—that capitalism is bad and socialism is good, and that they intend to work to crush the latter in favor of the former.
Parents who for some reason are worried that their kids might be indoctrinated in school, might actually have the solution at their fingertips. They could pen a proposal to their representatives in the Colorado state legislature that all teachers should be given the opportunity to teach abroad for a year. The teachers would be offered the choice between three countries: North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela.
Those who do not experience enough of the socialist disaster during that year would be offered assistance with permanent emigration.
Speaking of the need among some people to repeat the mistakes of the past: the saga of Bud Light and its recent public-relations disaster is being amended with another chapter. After Belgian-owned American beer producer Anheuser-Busch did commercials with a so-called transgender man and suffered a monumental sales drop as a result, Smirnoff Vodka has decided to see if they, too, can run their business into the ground by doing exactly the same:
For some reason, this reminds me of that scene from the British sitcom The Young Ones where Vyvyan is on a train and reads a warning label: “Do not lean out of the window.” He adds “I wonder why” and sticks his head out.
There are still some people who would metaphorically stick their heads out the window in next year’s U.S. presidential election. One-third of American voters still approve of how President Joe Biden is doing his job. According to Breitbart, independent voters who do not identify as either Democrats or Republicans, have for the most part abandoned the president, but three in ten are apparently still behind him.
Almost four in five of the independents think that Biden is “a weak leader.”
They are correct, of course, and it looks like the president’s own advisers have come to the same conclusion. According to some news stories, Biden will not be debating his challengers in next year’s presidential primary elections.
That may be all it takes to ensure that Biden only gets one term as president. It looks increasingly likely that he will be challenged by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The nephew of President John F. Kennedy has spoken a great deal lately, and every time he does, he sounds like an old-school, America-loving Democrat. (Remember those?) Kennedy expresses outrage over the Biden administration’s disastrous open-borders immigration policy. Referring to an illegal immigrant who killed a family in Texas recently, Kennedy explains:
In a surprisingly blunt tone, Kennedy also noted that “we have chaos at the border” and that human traffickers and other criminals take full advantage of it.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an intellectual oddball, but a respectable one. He did not shy away from opposing vaccine mandates during the epidemic, a position that earned him significant derision at the time.
America needs more oddballs like Mr. Kennedy, people who are interested in the world around them and who want to participate in its preservation, reform, and betterment. Unfortunately, the willingness among America’s youth to do so does not appear to be at its high point at the moment. The focus of the intellectual elite of the younger generation, i.e., those who graduate college, appears to be squarely on their own identity.
This identity craze has now reached the point where universities are bringing back pre-civil rights, southern-state segregation at their graduation events. What used to be a manifestation of unity, where all the graduating students were celebrated together by faculty and parents, regardless of personal character traits, has become the latest iteration of apartheid in American society. From the Washington Times:
There was a time when America considered itself a melting pot, where people from all over the spectrum of the human race came together in a culture of freedom, opportunity, and self-determination. Back then, segregation was frowned upon and everyone’s organic integration into America was considered a virtue.
Fortunately, some people still celebrate the melting-pot concept. A community of Romanians are proud to be integrated into the trucking industry in America, and to support each other they have just created their own organization. From Romania Insider:
Called ROMOTANA, the organization for truck drivers and trucking company owners of Romanian and Moldovan heritage brings together representatives from more than 2,000 trucking companies.
Other than that, Romanian media is fairly silent on what is happening in America. They share their silence with Icelandic media, whose attention to U.S. news and events is low in frequency and self-congratulatory in content. Illustrating these points, the latest story on America in English-speaking Iceland Review dates all the way back to 2021 when the publication proudly declared that Norsemen settled in North America a millennium ago. Their article reported on the findings by a group of scientists, who had been able to date the Viking settlement on Newfoundland to 1021 A.D.
It is unclear if the Vikings forayed deeper into the American continent. However, it is intriguing to ponder what the current United States and Canada would have looked like, had they built more colonies further west and south.
One thing is clear, though. If America had been settled by the Vikings, Joe Biden would not be president of the United States today. That thought, right there, is worth a beer. But not a Bud Light.
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