Building Cathedrals
Check out this excellent piece from First Things, entitled Demographics and Depression by David P. Goldman. Way to go, child-laden young families… it seems the economy depends on us. Our present financial crisis is a result of too many small families with few children and too many single-parent families. Our Creator’s plan for human life and love turns out to be the only way to sustain a society economically. Imagine that.
Here are some excerpts, but do take the time to read as much of it as you can, for full explanations and the hard data:
Life is sacred for its own sake. It is not an instrument to provide us with fatter IRAs or better real-estate values. But it is fair to point out that wealth depends ultimately on the natural order of human life. Failing to rear a new generation in sufficient numbers to replace the present one violates that order, and it has consequences for wealth, among many other things. Americans who rejected the mild yoke of family responsibility in pursuit of atavistic enjoyment will find at last that this is not to be theirs, either.
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…The problem is that the families with children who need to spend never were formed in sufficient numbers to sustain growth.
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We delude ourselves when we imagine that a few hundred dollars of tax incentives will persuade individuals to form families or keep them together…
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It was always morally wrong for conservatives to attempt to segregate the emotionally charged issues of public morals from the conservative growth agenda. We know now that it was also incompetent from a purely economic point of view. Without life, there is no wealth; without families, there is no economic future. The value of future income streams traded in capital markets will fall in accordance with our impoverished demography. We cannot pursue the acquisition of wealth and the provision of upward mobility except through the reconquest of the American polity on behalf of the American family.
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