Decomposing In A Limited World

posted at 5:25 pm on July 9, 2009 by Doctor Zero
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Earlier today, Ed highlighted this interesting quote from an interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, originally posted on the New York Times website:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Justice Ginsburg’s liberal and feminist credentials are impeccable, and she could fairly claim to be one of the architects of modern liberal thought, having co-founded the Women’s Rights Law Reporter while a professor of law at Rutgers in the early 70s. Her candid statements on the eugenics aspects of Roe provide a window into the liberal mind, through one of its most enduring neuroses: population control.

Overpopulation is a constant fear of the Left, stretching back to the dire philosophy of Thomas Malthus, the nineteenth-century Anglican clergyman, who believed the wealth and technology of advanced societies would lead inevitably to exploding populations, with resulting famine and shortages of raw materials: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” Malthus was a profoundly influential writer. Not only did his writings shape the thoughts of other scholars in his century, particularly Charles Darwin, but you can see his dead hand reaching out from Barack Obama’s economic policies. Malthus would have thought the soaring energy prices, and permanent economic recession, from the cap-and-trade bill are nothing more than a small step in the right direction.

Malthus used his pen to draw the outer boundaries of the liberal imagination. None of the socialists, fascists, communists, or other materialists who followed have ever been able to cross those boundaries. The grim logic of limited space and finite resources haunts the design of every collectivist utopia. The size of the world is fixed, and its natural resources are limited, so every new human born into an industrial society is one more locust nibbling away at the rotting corpse of Mother Earth. Each population increase brings a nation, and the world around it, one step closer to running out of food and living space. The Malthusian looks out his window and sees a small planet drowning in a sea of humanity. He knows that one day, the last drop of oil will be pumped from the ground, and the last forest will be cut down to build the final high-rise condominium. He believes that day is right around the corner.

This obsession with limited resources and zero-sum math runs through liberal economic theory. The amount of land and resources in the United States is fixed. The population keeps increasing. A limited pool of food, housing, medicine, and employment must be distributed among the population. Who else but a wise and benevolent state, run by highly educated and civic-minded liberals, could possibly manage that division in a fair and equitable manner? It certainly doesn’t make any sense to let a bunch of greedy rich guys parcel out the nation’s wealth. They’ll just keep it all for themselves.

You can find this kind of thinking behind every liberal policy. It is the electric current that leaps between the neurons of the socialist mind. Rich men “steal” their wealth from the rest of us – every dollar in a millionaire’s pocket is a dollar that he took from the deserving poor. The most infamous recent expression of this idea was Barack Obama’s unintentionally candid admission to Joe the Plumber, during the 2008 campaign, that he thought his job as President would be to “spread the wealth around.” The net worth of America is a fixed number in the minds of liberals. The only way they can imagine creating more wealth is to steal it from the future. The idea behind Obama’s reckless deficit spending is to inject a pile of cash into the heart of today’s moribund economy, and the only way to get the cash is to borrow it from foreign investors, and leave our children to settle the bills, plus interest, when they come due.

Justice Ginsburg’s remarks on Roe vs. Wade echo a common sentiment among pro-choicers: it’s wrong to bring more children into this overcrowded, cruel world. Environmentalists will occasionally refer to American babies, in particular, as larval parasites the world is better off without, since Americans consume such an outrageous share of our precious and limited natural resources. Part of the attraction of this kind of dismal thinking is that it absolves one of responsibility for the future. The machinery of prosperity is winding down anyway, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it – we had to burn through our limited resources eventually. You’re not being selfish by refusing to cramp your lifestyle with child-rearing – you’re a noble hero, because you’re leaving the next generation with a couple less mouths to feed!

Two centuries of absolute failure have not dimmed the allure of Mathusian philosophy. It’s a failed idea because it overestimates the strain humanity places on the world, and underestimates the creativity and resourcefulness of free men and women. Viewing the rest of the human race as a virus flatters the liberal’s sense of superiority, because he has the superior wisdom to see those dwindling forests and shrinking oil reserves. He’s an enlightened steward of a fragile planet, not a primitive religious zealot rutting away in a trailer park, spawning the next generation of SUV drivers. He votes for politicians with detailed plans for redistributing wealth in the name of social justice… not corporate puppets selling fairy tales about opportunity and economic growth. The conservative bears witness to the wonder of human ingenuity, and the amazing possibilities that await even children born into humble circumstances. The liberal does not believe in such wonders.

Justice Ginsburg says she eventually realized her perception of abortion, as a means of controlling “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of,” was wrong. Living things grow. Dead things wither. A vital and living America can grow far beyond the limits of liberal imagination, in both prosperity and population. The dead-end social and economic theories of the Left are not concerned with encouraging growth. They believe their duty is to manage a graceful decomposition.

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