You can barely take a casual stroll through cyberspace these days without tripping over some hot-off-the-press manifestation of blistering European anti-Americanism. Such a stark contrast to all the pious one-world anti-xenophobia cant that Brussels has spent that last decade or so assiduously peddling.
Since ‘xenophobia’ is regarded as a crime under the proposed European Criminal Code, it does make me wonder how they’re going to enforce it against the gangs of 35 year-old ‘students’ burning flags and screaming ‘Death to America’ on the streets of Berlin and Paris. I suppose the answer is, they’re not.
Which leaves the Americans to do something about it themselves. That is, if they are so inclined. While B-52s are still swooping over Baghdad, it is unlikely to be a top priority but if, at some point in the future, George Bush et al are minded to huddle in the War Room and cook up some delicious helping of Creme du Revenge, my advice would be, don’t bother:
Europe’s population could fall by up to 40 per cent by the end of the century because of declining birth rates and the tendency for women to have babies later in life, researchers have found.
For the first time in human history, the population has begun to experience what demographers call “negative momentum”, when a shrinking population goes into a spiral of decline. Wolfgang Lutz of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, says that Europe experienced a “flip” from positive to negative momentum in 2000 because fewer babies were being born to younger mothers
There is an element of pantomime here. While legions of moral busybodies in Brussels spend all the live-long day worrying about whether Dutch toe-nail growth conforms to European standards, somebody from the audience should be shouting ‘Look behind youuuuuuuuu’ as big, bad reality creeps up from the wings wielding a terminal two-by-four.
The huge social and economic costs of the shift to an ageing population, where one European worker would be expected to support two pensioners by 2065, could be offset if governments encouraged women to start families earlier, he said.
And how are governments going to go about that exactly? Oh, I sense a whole new ‘regulatory framework’ in the pipeline. The suggested solution does nothing except to perfectly illustrate the problem: to the European way of thinking, change must come from the top down or it will not come at all and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, which cannot be satisfactorily addressed by the appropriate form of state activism.
I do not suppose that it has even occurred to the authors of this report that government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem. The ubiquitous well-meaning interventionism of the kind they have invoked only comes with the kind of tax rates that price babies out of the family budget. It is almost like a prospector mentality; that curious messianic fever that causes otherwise intelligent men to sell all their belongings, hock the family silver and mortgage their houses to the hilt so that they can keep digging away in the unshakeable, quasi-mystical belief that the mother lode is down there somewhere. If only they can keep digging they are bound to find it and then everything will be well.
The calculations do not taken into account immigration from outside the EU but the scientists warn that policies designed to counterbalance the population decline by relying on foreign migrants could trigger their own social problems.
That’s because the kind of ‘immigration’ envisaged is not immigration at all. It is more like population replacement, a sort of demographic transfusion. Out with the tired, old blood and in with the new, young, vigourous variety. The mestizo zone that European paladins envisage will not be the vibrant melting-pot that quickens the continent and heralds in a new age of wealth and glory. Rather it will resemble a huge, open-air Retirement village with a native population of arthritic, dependent, grumpy pensioners being entirely supported by (and therefore at the mercy of) a working cadre of African metalbashers, Asian entrepreneurs and Middle-Eastern shopkeepers.
But, who knows, perhaps this is what they want. Perhaps it is already too late to reverse the trend. Maybe the die is already cast. In so far as any ‘European’ identity is publicly flaunted it is expressed in terms of a preference for ‘stability’ and the conscience-salving constructs of ‘social justice’. Yes, it all sounds so warm and comforting and I suppose it is warm and comforting as long as there is sufficient cash slushing around to pay for it. But as the civilisational credit-card tips over the spending limit, Europe’s planners and thinkers prefer to shut those alarming monthly statements in the draw and kid themselves that the reckoning will never come. After all, tomorrow is a brand, new spending day.
The future is not bright. They don’t need shades.
Given the decided tilting of France’s population to a rather irrational fanatical muslim group, the €U is headed to a ‘family portrait’ of quite unimagined visages.
Oooops…that was meant to read “EU” with the euro-sign as a substitute for the E…HTML seems to be a sometimes thing in commenting.
could be offset if governments encouraged women to start families earlier
50 years of radical feminism down the drain. So sad.
I don’t really know what’s so different with the situation of Europe vs. ethnic-European Americans; we’re just a lot better at accomodating immigrants and pulling them into our society. Otherwise, the US would be in pretty much the same boat.
Case in point: my wife and I plan not to have children. Partly, it’s that rearing a child doesn’t seem to me to be a pleasant or desirable thing (not that it doesn’t have its rewards, just that it’s not a net benefit).
Besides, children are just too expensive in a women’s-lib world. My wife and I can reasonably expect to make at least $200,000 a year apiece when we finally get out of medical school. After taxes, we could reasonably expect to keep about $120,000 of that apiece. If we have a child, we lose her income for at least 5-6 years in addition to having huge expenses. In a world in which women had no real career choices, childbearing made sense. As it is, we would take an immense hit to the bottom line.
Imagine, then, what it’s like for a family with two people making $30,000 a year apiece. On one income, we would have to live in a smaller house, take fewer vacations, eat out less. They would have to give up a great deal more. Once you tack on the expenses of children, it becomes a considerably less desirable thing.
I think the only way to reverse that is to make children capable of providing some form of economic contribution to the family. As it is, they take for about 20 years and provide nothing except emotional reward – for which diminishing returns sets in pretty quickly.
Devilbunny… i can’t work out if there are traces of irony in your statement or not….
for many contributors to this site, the prime human directive seems to be ‘make money’, or ‘ensure that you are as materially well off as possible’. Fair enough, if that’s the way you see it, but i always thought the primary idea behind seeking prosperity, security etc. was to ensure the propagation of your genes….
I’m speaking here as someone who’s quite undecided about the whole having kids business.
Europe’s population could fall by up to 40 per cent by the end of the century
Isn’t it fun to see the ‘turn of the century’ thing crank to life again. Didn’t take long, did it?
Somebody should collect all the things that were supposed to happen by the year 2000. In my school days, I learned we’d be entering a new ice age, flat out of oil and stumbling around in the streets starving to death.
I’m sure the predictions for 2100 will be equally accurate.
So what if the population falls 40%? We would be able to feed the populace without importing food. Even old fogeys can drive machinery, you dont load straw onto carts with a pitchfork anymore.
Ditto industry. The old were retired because a lifetimes hard work had f*cked them up and they were too weak to work, now you retire just because you reach a certain age.
Naw, let’s go ahead with the Creme du Revenge — specifically, allow any native-born European citizen under the age of 45 permenent resident alien status in the U.S. upon passing a background check.
After all, having the young move from Europe to America would accellerate the demographic trends.
These things do turn round though. For most of the twentieth century, Hungary was Europe’s only country with a falling population, for low birthrate reasons. It’s just turning round – the population should dip below 10 million in a couple of years and then slowly start to rise again.
Poland is already demographically younger and four times bigger than Hungary of course. Europe could get much bigger, if it can learn to stop being rude to the Easterners.
Just some thoughts: I suppose theres no correlation in your mind between GDP and the birthrate. Managerial Liberalism will not touch this issue with a shitty stick. We need Japanese/hong kong style ethno-centrism, at least in those countries the polititions and populace have no plans on replacing themselves with third worlders and creating multicultural utopias. I swear to god ive love to beat the shit out of hitler for forbidding any conversation on eugenics and enthno self preservation. And If the yanks here think there are safe they should look down to california or the expected growth of the countries population in 50 years to reach half a billion (mostly illegal mexicans), i hope you are looking forward to learning spanish. 🙂
Marks optimism is unbelievably naive and DevilBunny disgusts me by his materialism, I hope he dies old crying for his non-existant family to come see him in some ultra expensive nursing home staffed by strange foreigners who he cant understand.
Wow, it’s still being read, I think.
Interesting.
Stephen, I don’t like children, and calling me materialistic and selfish isn’t going to change that. By your logic, I should keep having children until the point at which I can no longer feed them – after all, it would be materialistic of me to have fewer. Every couple must choose when to stop having children. We do it at 0 kids. If you don’t like that, go have a dozen. I promise I won’t stop you. I’ll even pay for public schools that I have never and will never use.
By the way, I like Mexicans (and other Central Americans); in my experience, they’re ambitious and hardworking. I’ve already started learning Spanish; after all, it’s just one more language for American English to eat up.
The current problems of DINKies(Double Income No Kids like DevilBunny) is a massive social problem brought about by the new role of women in modern liberal democratic society. Postponing births till later in life is now a common trend and will lead to a crisis in the future as eventually the welfare state will likely collapse under the pressure of a ageing work-force supporting a larger group of elderly(1). Not that im afraid of the welfare state collapsing but rather the decline of european peoples as calls to replace them with viralent non-europeans follow to prop up the welfare state.
DevilBunny seems unaware of any connection between the causal reality of his and his partners choices and the future. His view of life that he doesnt ‘like children’ is just a reflection of societies current problems with rearing children., ie there is no capitalistic incentive towards having kids only perhaps a hope that some individuals will have the moral awareness and altruism towards the greater society as a whole. Unfortunately the Welfare state only rewards the most unproductive members of society to have loads of kids and creating a dysgenic cycle that decends the WEST towards Anomie. As a member of the medical community DevilBunny i find it strange that natural biological function of child rearing abhores you. Perhaps you think you are doing the world a favour by not reproducing and are thus a Nihilist.
Btw I like individual Mexicans, Muslims and Hindis but I dont want to live in a society that harbours blocks of them and caters for them by reducing the particularitys of my own Christian influenced democracy. Eg. (Happy Christmas becoming Happy Holidays, Victim culture based on resentment of the majority, Affirmitive Action sytems to balance out the fact that Other groups have different cultural/genetic standards of IQ and Work Ethic).
You actually think spanish will be eaten up by english? I dont think anyone believes this.
(1)http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-03/aaft-eph032103.php
PS:
“By your logic, I should keep having children until the point at which I can no longer feed them – after all, it would be materialistic of me to have fewer. ”
-devilbunny.
You try to obfuscate and distort my case. I never advocated overpopulation, just to have children is enough preferably at a replacement rate.
Boasting birthrates in russia
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=31&si=946233&issue_id=8973