January 8, 2001
Volume 3/ Number 1
Dear Colleague:
Americans are healthier, wealthier, and more numerous than ever before, the latest census shows, yet the population control movement, in the name of a false environmentalism, continues to demand that we cut back our numbers.
Steven W. Mosher
President
America’s Blessings
The first results of the Decennial Census of 2000 are now in, and they bode well for the American people and their continued prosperity. During a decade when the populations of other industrialized countries were stagnant or falling, U.S. numbers grew by 13 percent. This modest increase in numbers means that future generations of Americans will enjoy a better quality of life.
In absolute numbers the population has grown from 248 million in 1990 to 281 million in April 2000. Much of this increase is attributable to immigration, rather than natural increase, which would be preferable on many counts. Still, it is better to welcome strangers into our midst than to reject them, as Japan does. In the Land of the Rising Sun, an anemic birthrate and an inbred antipathy to new immigrants are combining to produce economic malaise and depopulation1.
Those who equate a larger population with a larger environmental “footprint,” as the current catch phrase goes, are oversimplifying. Our collective shoe size may be a multiple of our numbers but it is divided by our wealth. And while our numbers have increased over the past few decades, our means have increased at an even faster rate. A robust economy is a huge stimulus toward conservation and provides the wherewithal to prevent pollution.
While the news coverage of America’s modest population increase has been positive, the reaction of some groups has been predictably dyspeptic. Negative Population Growth, a group which would like to cut the U.S. population in half (yes, I said in half) called the new numbers “alarming and shocking.” What was truly alarming and shocking, however, was NPG’s proposed remedy: a national population policy.
For anyone familiar with China’s one-child policy, NPG’s proposal that we set “overall U.S. population goals” is chilling. For it was precisely this—the setting of overall population goals—that resulted in the tragedy of China’s one-child policy, as Communist Party bureaucrats sought to meet the goals handed down to them by the Chinese leadership. Soon the Chinese government was dictating to couples the number and spacing of their children, aborting and sterilizing all who didn’t conform to the plan.
The woman in charge of Chinese family planning, Vice Premier Chen Muhua, publicly stated in 1979 that “China is a socialist country. We should be able to control reproduction under a state plan the same way we control the production of steel and bicycles.”
But America has never had economic central planning, which robs both producers and consumers of their freedom. Reproductive central planning would be equally inimical to liberty.
Why weren’t the American people given some say, NPG asks petulantly, in “whether this kind of staggering growth is desirable?” They were. American parents are still free to decide for themselves the number and spacing of their children. Most still decide to have two, despite the anti-people propaganda that pervades the public square.
Our current modest levels of population increase should keep the U.S. economy humming along in the years to come. Immigration, a vital part of keeping America strong, should continue. Young couples should not be made to feel guilty about starting a family. Be fruitful and multiply. It’s good for all of us.
Notes
1. PRI Weekly Briefing, Vol. 2. / No.11, Land of the Setting Sun,https://www.pop.org/briefings/index.html
