IN THE UNITED STATES: TOO MANY PEOPLE

IN THE UNITED STATES: TOO MANY PEOPLE
A BOOK REVIEW


By Frosty Wooldridge
November 19, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

This past week, an email arrived that marks a poignant aspect of America’s greatest dilemma in the early years of the 21st century.

In this country, most of our citizens and all of our leaders stick their heads into the sand, bury their brains in mud and talk about everything but the overpopulation dilemma that defines America in the 21st century. Additionally, by avoiding it at all costs, it gains greater speed like a Rocky Mountain avalanche, like an asteroid headed for the center of our planet and like the Titanic speeding toward that fateful iceberg in the North Atlantic.

In spite of one of the most educated citizenry on the planet, our nation drives itself, at increasing rates of speed, over a cliff. Religious groups refuse to talk about it as if Galileo returned to expose their folly of thinking that the universe revolved around Earth. They placed him under house arrest for the rest of his life and he promised not to advocate the sun as the center of this solar system under threat of death.

Political groups avoid it like the plague. Yet it’s coming as surely as the dawn!

A lady named Jacqueline in Arizona wrote, “Consider my state, dry and water poor, which grew 40 percent between 1990-2000 with a 2000 population of 4,057,208. The 2006 estimate shows us at 6,166,318 population and no restraint in sight. It is not only the presidential candidates who refuse to discuss population, but environmentalists, political parties, and think-tanks much less the Catholic Church or other religious tribes to mention this so obvious problem.

“I recently held a meeting to talk about immigration and its relationship to how rapidly the U.S. is growing, and showed Roy Beck's VCR "Immigration by the Numbers.â€

If it were true that an increased population was the path to economic success, as many "social theorists" advocate, India and China would be incredibly wealthy. Norway, with a population of 4.5 million, would be horribly impoverished. Obviously, this is not the case. Norway for the last five years has led all countries in quality of life indicators.

But a lowpaid underclass can move some people ahead. Owners of industries employing them obviously benefit. But also an artificially swelling sector of "professionals" can derive a comfortable living during times of prosperity. in short: upward mobility. I think that a lot of American prosperity has depended on underclasses to move it to each new level. But ever since World War 2 the percentage of Anericans pursuing higher education---and thus entering the "service sector" of the economy--has risen astronomically. The appropriate balance of professionals to craftsmen that pushed the US into a dominant role in exporting manufactured goods has been upset; with more people seeking professional careers through a university education we need more low paid manual workers that yield enough profit to pay the salaries of the professionals.

As an example, in post World War 2 America there were only a few nationwide TV broadcasting companies. Now there are scores. There were relatively few special interest magazines: now there are hundreds. FM radio stations did not exist; now there arehundreds. All of these require an large number of service personnel. And since the members of this class do not produce a tangible product with what shall they be compensated?