Moore: Europe is dying — is America next?

Let s start with a very simple truism You can t have prosperity without people Human beings are the largest part valuable store because it is human ingenuity that creates captures and cultivates all other information We as human beings are the custodians and protectors of the planet not the destroyers of the planet as the radical environmentalists would have you believe The richer and more technologically advanced we become the more likely we are to avert a catastrophic event like a giant meteor crashing into the planet and destroying all life Which brings us to a potentially ruinous trend Multiple countries are literally running out of people In Europe births have fallen below deaths which is a terrifying glimpse into the future of a new dark age of the Western world Unless birth rates start rising and hastily Europeans are becoming extinct Negative population rise is a sure killer of prosperity and human flourishing It s also contrary to Christianity and majority of other religions which instruct us to be fruitful and multiply It s not just Europe Japan and Korea will cut their populations in half over the next years if they don t start moving away from one-child-per-couple rates of propagating Why are rich countries depopulating the planet For years people like Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb and governments around the world including our own warned that we all had a moral obligation to save the planet by having fewer babies There were periods of forced abortions forced sterilizations forced birth control and in advanced nations like the U S a cultural sneering at families with four or more kids That mendacious propaganda campaign worked all too well and look what it has wrought There are other explanations As we have gotten richer and especially as women s earnings have risen the cost of having a child in terms of lost income has risen I m NOT suggesting that women should be paid less People are marrying both at lower rates and later in life so the median year for a woman to have a child keeps rising leaving fewer fertility years left for multiple children The solutions to this complication aren t obvious Pronatalist administration policies like paying people to have kids and offering free child care have had spotty levels of success The U S has delayed the problem happening in Europe and much of Asia through immigration of young workers Not only do immigrants increase the population but they tend to have more kids than native-born Americans But even with immigration we in America have an obvious aging challenge Our schools and our clergy and our political leaders need to keep pushing the message that the greatest contribution men and women can give to saving our species is to have more kids as soon as viable Stephen Moore is a former Trump senior economic adviser and the cofounder of Unleash Prosperity which advocates for development freedom for all children