Starvation and Socialism
8th December 2013
SF author John C. Wright connects the dots.
Both Murder Incorporated and Paul Ehrlich are wrong and for a simple reason: overpopulation is not a number, it is a ratio between the productive capacity of the individual and the drain that individual represents.
If each new baby is a new pair of hands to work, a new brain, and if each new baby over his lifetime produces more than he consumes, then looking at each new baby as a new mouth to feed is folly.
The argument turns on what constitutes a resource. Is copper? You cannot eat it. Yet a man who works in a copper mine produces more than he consumes, and the world would be poorer, not richer, if he were absent. Is oil? Before Standard Oil put the price of oil within the grasp of the common man, oil found on land was a detriment, not a benefit, because it might make crops harder to raise. What about a man who writes science fiction novels, investigates news stories, writes computer manuals, or practices law. I have done all these things. Have I contributed more to the wealth of the world or taken more than I contributed?
If I am taking more than I am contributing, why does any one PAY ME ANYTHING? And yet I am productive enough that I can support five dependents, plus creditors plus the tax man. Through the tax man, I support about as many people as are in my family. In round numbers, there are ten people resting on my work, that is, consumers who are not presently productive. Eliminate me through abortion or contraception, and you eliminate one pair of hands, or, looking at it another way, you increase the unfed mouths by ten.
In the final analysis, there is no such thing as a resource. The amount that we take from nature in the raw is so small as to be below calculation. Oil is worthless without human work, and so is soil, and so are fish in the stream. The question of how to turn a useless material like oil into a substance that serves a human need is a question of human ingenuity.