Post-Christian radical individualist society hits its biological dead end
The design flaw of the radically secularist welfare state is that it depends on a religious society birth rate to sustain it
Mark Steyn - May 17, 2004
Four years ago, I caught Alan Keyes, the magnificently conservative African-American speechifier and perennial Presidential candidate, at a campaign stop in New Hampshire. "My friends," he began, "we stand at the brink of the abyss."
Wow! What a great opening, I thought. But perhaps not the best campaign slogan. Not exactly "It's morning in America" or "A thousand points of light", is it? Democratic politics requires the candidate on the stump, even when on the brink of the abyss, to keep his sunny side up and whistle a happy tune. And that goes double for conservatives.
But those of us in the media are under no obligation to ac-centchu- ate the positive. And so I confess I was a little surprised when The Globe and Mail rounded up the latest grim statistics on Canada's birth rate--it's the lowest since records began, it's fallen 25.4 per cent since 1992, the current fertility rate of 1.5 births per couple is well below "replacement rate"--and then concluded with a singalong chorus of "Happy Talk":
"Luckily for our future economic and fiscal well-being, Canada is well-positioned to counter the declining population trend by continuing to encourage the immigration of talented people to this country from overcrowded parts of the world."
Phew! So there's nothing to worry about, eh? We stand at the brink of the abyss but we can fill it up with immigrants and continue on our path to the sunlit uplands. Thank goodness for that. Lucky, aren't we?
Most 20-year projections--on economic growth, global warming, etc.--are almost laughably speculative, and thus most doomsday scenarios are, too. The eco-doom-mongers get it wrong because they fail to take into account human inventiveness: "We can't feed the world!" they shriek. But we develop more efficient farming methods with nary a thought. "The oil will run out by the year 2000!" But we develop new extraction methods and find we've got enough oil for as long as we'll need it.
But human inventiveness depends on humans--and that's the one thing we really are running out of. When it comes to forecasting the future, the birth rate is the nearest thing to hard numbers. If only a million babies are born in 2005, it's hard to have two million adults enter the workforce in 2025 (or 2033, or 2037, or whenever they get around to finishing their Anger Management and Queer Studies degrees). We're at that moment in the movie where the countdown's begun and we have a choice of trying to defuse the bomb or accepting our fate.
The chaps at the Globe seem to have plumped for the latter. The design flaw of the radically secularist welfare state is that it depends on a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. The tax revenues that support its ever growing numbers of the elderly and retired have to be paid by equally growing numbers of the young and working. So, if Canadians can no longer be bothered having children, where's that workforce going to come from?
Page 1 of 3