Families are key to our nation’s (and other nation’s) economic survival. The whole mantra that “it is the economy stupid” has just been supplanted. Culture issues impact economic issues – that was wisdom that seemed to be sorely lacking in our last election. The only person I heard link the two during the last campaign was Rick Santorum.
Bill Frezza is a venture capitalist and fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He wrote a op/ed at Real Clear Markets asking “will aging childless voters enslave my future grandchildren?” If entitlement spending continues on its current course then yes. We are “abstaining” ourselves (from marriage and families) into fiscal oblivion. He writes:
If demography is destiny, democracy is toast-at least those democracies where citizens can vote themselves a living at someone else’s expense. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to see that governments’ addiction to intergenerational income redistribution is not sustainable unless someone keeps supplying babies at an accelerating pace….
….The burdens of providing for the aged are larger than ever thanks to the greater longevity that modernity accords. But the necessity and personal pride that drove the elderly to provide for themselves for as long as they could has been replaced by the invention of a universal “right of retirement” irrespective of an individual’s means.
This “right” to stop working for the last 10, 20, or even 30 years of our lives is secured and supported through an electoral system under which politicians promise old-age entitlements in return for votes. The system subsists on coercive taxation, money printing, and borrowing from the future. Ballooning centrally owned liabilities are perched atop a demographic pyramid with a base that must continue growing to avoid Ponzian collapse.
….This powerful shift in our cultural foundations is meticulously outlined in a recently released study titled “The Rise of Post Familialism: Humanity’s Future.” Its many chilling charts and graphs show how country after country across the developed world is hurtling toward population implosion.
It takes a live birth rate of 2.1 children per woman to maintain a stable population. Birth rates across Southern Europe have plunged below 1.5, and are expected to drop even further as Euro Zone economies continue to contract. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan are converging on birth rates closer to 1.0, literally halving their population each generation. Even the Black Plague didn’t do that.
This mentality along with the population control experts who are trying to tamp down how many kids we have will eventually lead to economic disaster – unless entitlement spending is reformed and we stop buying the nonsense that traditional marriage and family is not a vital institution for our society. That’s not even to mention the 50 million people not with us who have been aborted since 1973 – and that’s just in the United States.
HT: Maggie Gallagher