Canadian Cincinnatus

The growing political viability of solutions to the West’s demographics death spiral

In a couple of posts (here and here), I pondered the pro’s and con’s of Mark Steyn’s thesis that the West is dying a not-so-slow death because of a lack of babies and is threatened to be overrun by hoard of more fecund barbarians.

In my article against the Steyn hypothesis, I stated that he is making the same mistake that Paul Erlich made in his book The Population Bomb. That is, that both are extrapolating existing exponential trends (all demographic trends are exponential) into the future and you can’t do this for very long because real physical trends inspire counteractions that soon swamp the dominant forces of the day. In this article, I posited one such policy counterforce:

Today’s demographic declines are a direct result of government policy – the welfare state. In the past, everybody had an incentive to reproduce. Your kids were your pension. It is still the same way in the third world where childless couples are pitied. Who will look after them when they are old? As a result, fertility rates there remain high (though they are slowly declining as the globalization decried by Naomi Klein spreads prosperity throughout the world). The contrast with the first world couldn’t be greater, where having children is an act of economic madness. It costs an average of $250,000 raise a child, to say nothing of the loss of personal freedom. To see the flaw in our arrangement, one only needs to ask, who is the state? The answer - when you are old - is all the people who are children today. So, from the perspective of society, it does make economic sense to have children. The difference between yesterday and today is that in the past, personal and societal aims were aligned. Today, thanks to the welfare state, they aren’t.

How does the government fix that? By ending social security as we know it. Replace guaranteed pension plans for all with a system that rewards people who have lots of children with pensions and penalizes those who don’t. 

Changing the pension system so that people with lots of children retire earlier and with more generous pensions while DINKs (Dual Income No Kids) toil away into their old age because they failed to create their replacements – doesn’t sound too politically doable does it?

Think again.

My homeland, Estonia, like most European countries is suffering from demographic decline. But because Estonia is a former Soviet country, the people there were immunized against political correctness by the overbearing Soviet super-political correctness (which must have rubbed off on me). For years, the country has had an open and uninhibited public discussion on the demographic state of the Estonian people. But in spite of that, I was still surprised to see this online poll in one of Estonia’s top newspapers, The Postman, two weeks ago:

 
 

This is a screen capture of the poll (which has long since expired). For those who don’t read Estonian, the translation of the Gallup poll question is, “Should the size of a person’s pension from now on depend on the number the children that person had?” The public’s answer was 54.5% yes. This is in a country where big families have always been rare. The article beside it reads, “Children would save Esonia from its pension problems.” 

What is happening here is that the sheer force of an exponential trend is inspiring an equally forceful counter. This is why the population bomb of the sixties turned into a bust. Take another failed prognostication. In the 1960’s, the famous (and justly great) economist Friedrich von Hayek looked at the relative size of Catholic and Protestant families and predicted that within two generation Catholics would swamp Protestants. Never happened. Why? Because when the West entered its post-Christian phase, Catholic atheist had even fewer children than Protestant atheists.

None of this is to say that Mark Steyn has not shed light on a very serious world-historical force (demographics) freighted with Big Consequences (i.e. civil war in France). He has, no question about it. It is just that there are countervailing forces that he hasn’t mentioned because, for now, they are almost imperceptible.

The fall of the Berlin Wall

Yesterday evening, I was in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, attending a rally commemorating the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. As a person of Estonian heritage, the emotions this anniversary elicited were mixed.

(Incidentally, representatives of all three federal parties were there and spoke. David Miller was nowhere to be found even though the event was held in front of his city hall.)

On the positive side, the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolized the fall of Communism and the regaining of independence by my homeland, was without question the single most positive political event that has impacted my life. As Reason magazine noted, the defeat of communism was the most liberating moment in all history.

 On the negative side, the freedom and independence of all the new Eastern European republics has never been in more danger than now. One the one side, you have a ruthless KGB thug occupying the Kremlin. As the Economist reported, the Russians recently completed huge military maneuvers in White Russia, whose only obvious purpose was to practice reinvading and recapturing Eastern Europe.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the White House is occupied by a man who seems to possess deep leftist sympathies and who, in 9 months of office, has already compiled a lengthy record of ignoring the aspirations of freedom loving people around the world – in Iran, where he has determinedly ignored the Iranian people and their still ongoing Green Revolution; in Honduras, where he has sided with a Chavez-like thug over the forces of constitutional order; and most relevantly, in Eastern Europe, where he unilaterally pulled the missile shield out of Poland and the Czech Republic (without even giving them the courtesy of advance notice), opposes the entrance of the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO; and now has turned down an invitation to attend a ceremony in Berlin commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the Kremlin, such symbolism is noted.

What to do?

First, hope and pray that in 3 years, Barack Obama will be replaced by a responsible adult who actually believes that freedom is a good thing.

Two, the countries of Eastern Europe have to realize that the Lord helps only those who help themselves. NATO is developing a rapid reaction force. The Eastern European wing of NATO has to establish a rapid reaction force of its own, composed of only Eastern European armies, a force that has only one purpose - to defend the sovereignty of Eastern European countries. Their first act should be to hold exercises of their own, to counter the ones that Putin just held. The guiding principle of Eastern European countries in these perilous times should be the saying by Benjamin Franklin, “We hang separately, or hang together.”

AS AN ASIDE: Washington University in St. Louis shut down a rally commemorating Berlin Wall anniversary because it was "too offensive".

With Obama’s victory, I fear for my homeland Estonia

Having an Estonian background, I sincerely worry at Obama’s foreign policy naiveté.

While I may be wrong (and sincerely hope I am), Obama has already hinted with the Georgia crisis that he is one of those dewy-eyed, peace-at-any-price types who make the perfect foil for an unprincipled predator like Vladimir Putin. When Putin tested the West with the invasion of Georgia on the opening day of the Beijing Olympics, Barack Obama’s first response was to talk about the need for both sides to get together to settle their misunderstandings. What a fool!

To the participants in this event, there were no misunderstandings. Russia wanted to get as much as it could from Georgia and Georgia wanted to keep as much as it could. The issue could not be more crystal clear to them. On a larger scale, Russia is testing the West to see what it can get away with. Putin has made perfectly clear his desire to restore the Russian Imperium. The only person who failed to understand what was going on was Barack Obama.

It was only when John McCain came to the spirited and uncompromising defence of Georgia that Obama was shamed into standing up for Georgia. In this crisis, Barack Obama’s conduct reminded me of nobody more than Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier in the Munich Crisis, who in their zeal to appease Hitler at the Munich Conference and so avoid war, treated the Czechoslovakian Prime Minster as almost more of a troublemaker than the Fuhrer. The same process of vilifying the victim (which Barack started out participating in) could be seen operating in the Georgia crisis.

Barack Obama clearly believes in the moral-equivalence theory, that is, that the use of violence is deplorable no matter who does it. In other words, his morality does not distinguish between the violence perpetrated by a victim defending himself and the violence of an aggressor attacking the victim. The only people who could believe something this silly are those who have grown up in such luxury that they have never been mugged by reality. There are many such people in North America and Western Europe. The conditions in places like Hawaii have been so good for so long that many people who grew up there simply cannot imagine anything bad happening to themselves.

The people of Eastern Europe have never had this luxury.

According to this  news item, the Soviet Union, er, I mean the Russian Federation, didn’t wait too long after Obama’s victory to act.