Thursday, November 08, 2007
Strange Inversions [John Derbyshire]
Iain:
[You] Countries with access to affordable energy tend to have highly educated, liberated populations who can provide more to the economy than their children (the proletariat, as it used to be called, ceases to exist).
[Me] So that's why Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Mexico are so stable and prosperous!
Seriously though, population policy—like environmentalism, with which it is closely linked—is one of those areas where the political Left and Right find themselves in strange inversions. An environmentalist might be a pony-tailed, Birkenstocked lefty tree-hugger with an Impeach Bush-Cheney bumper sticker. Or he might be a crew-cut bow-hunting survivalist who can't wait to tell you about black helicopters. It's a confused zone.
Both the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth used to be immigration-restrictionist. Then in the mid-1990s, after some very nasty infighting, both groups lurched over to open-borders positions. Roy Beck wrote a brief account here.
That transformation was one of the most striking cases of political correctness trumping common sense. Preserve the wilderness... stabilize the population... open the borders... Uh-huh.
Never underestimate the power of political correctness.
11/08 11:21 AM
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