PrintJanuary 30, 2009
Nancy Pelosi's neo-eugenics
Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, is no economist, judging by her comments made to ABC's George Stephanopoulus, in asserting population growth in the US would be a drag on economic growth. Population growth usually is an economic stimulant, especially in developed countries.
It always is a stimulant in developed democracies with private property rights and free markets. Otherwise we wouldn't have a consumer society. A vibrant economy depends on an abundant consumer class delivering healthy revenue streams to a diverse assortment of producers and, as we're learning all too painfully, a trustworthy credit system.
We already have evidence where low birth rates correlate with lagging GDP's such as in most European economies, placing extraordinary pressure on a dwindling supply of Gen X.Y and Zs to pay for expansive post retirement entitlements of their aging parents and grandparents. Moreover, European countries with low indigenous birth rates, resulting in shrinking labor pools, have resorted to immigration, which provides guest workers who also contribute to consumer demand. But immigration patterns have led to all sorts of assimilation difficulties, most notably among Muslims.
Disingenuousness on economics and population growth has been a steady Democrat Party diet for years. The Dems long have been the most athletic champions of uncontrolled immigration, arguing the merits of not just diversity, inclusivity and sanctuary from socio-economic oppression, but also robust labor pool more taxpayers and additional consumers (not to mention the means to deliver new Democrat party voters).
So why would Speaker Pelosi now claim a high birth rate creates the opposite effect?
The answer is actually not surprising, just appalling. The Dems, political tribalists posturing as independent intellectuals, captive of the abortion-on-demand and enviro-nihilist herd, have a pathological obsession with shoveling more government spending, i.e. taxpayer subsidies, into population control despite its apparent contradictions and moral failings. Speaker Pelosi's position, perhaps unwitting but undeniable, in its ugliest implication is directly linked to Margaret Sanger's eugenics movement of the 1920s. Sanger's "Planned Parenthood"was just a horrifying euphemism designed among other goals to selectively prune certain populations by design along racial, gender, age, intelligence, physiological and socio-economic lines.
This has been part of the Progressive socio-political doctrine since the 1920s, well documented by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism.
Yet there is a certain economic logic to the Speaker's theorem, if one takes account of the division of American society into tax payers and tax takers. The latter class consists of the growing population receiving government handouts in one form or another, a growing portion of them exempt from any federal income tax liability. She is tacitly acknowledging the fact that the welfare state is unaffordable -- especially when the middle class needs propping up.
Nancy Pelosi is offering us neo-eugenics, her final solution to the welfare state burden. Calling up the dark ideology of Margaret Sanger, Pelosi suggests we eliminate the people who might populate that permanent underclass.
The Speaker of the House is no moral theologian, having mangled Roman Catholic doctrine over abortion inviting a stinging rebuke from her own prelate, Archbishop Niederauer of San Francisco. Does Speaker Pelosi need another dose of knuckle rapping instruction in moral theology from the Roman Catholic Bishops? Sure, but don't expect it to do much good.
