Population Control is Awesome
Well, maybe it’s not awesome, but I do think it’s something we should start talking about in these here U Ses of A. How many people should be allowed to exist in one geographical area before we feel that we’ve overtaxed the resources available to us? At some point, we’re going to run out of oil, and then we’re all screwed. Is it really that terrible to suggest that there might be an ideal family size for our society, and having more children beyond that number is “detrimental” to the well-being of society? The more people that exist in a limited area, generally speaking, the higher the poverty rate. The higher the population and poverty rate, the more dangerous life is for everyone (crime goes up, disease goes up, traffic fatalities go up, etc.). If oil crashes, won’t this be magnified?
Last time I checked, our brilliant leaders in Washington weren’t providing much leadership in the way way of alternative fuels and nutritional improvement for society. According to its mayor, New York is going to be an utter crap hole in a few years, and other parts of the country already are or are getting there (have you ever been to Los Angeles or New Orleans?). Look at India, China, and many of the Middle Eastern countries. They have huge populations, the majority of which are probably under 30. That’s going to be a major problem in a few decades. Literally huge: unemployment, fires, revolution, anal rape, permanent rush hour, and so on.
If we were to implement population control, it might stall an increasingly decreasing quality of life in the US. And then hopefully, science will catch up with the socio-economic situation and we’ll all be better off, Jetsons-style: flying cars, houses in the sky, 7-course nutrition pills, and sexy robots in maid uniforms.
I know, I know: people will freak out if we ever tried to do something like this. But really, why does someone need to have 11 kids? It makes no sense in today’s day and age. Three of your kids are not going to die from skurvy, indians, or indian pirates with skurvy, so you don’t need to replace ‘em when they die. I swear to Bob though: if your kid dies fording a GD river on the way to Oregon, you are more than welcome to have another kid. Until then, keep your junk in your pants after kid number 2.
Your much more comfortable, lower-tax, pirate-free, oil-guzzling old age will thank you for it.
Here’s what I think, daggummit: A lot this damn country is empty! Know all those square states that have a population lower than the number of fans at a Chargers-Raiders game (the number of Raider fans, that is)? That’s land just waiting to be exploited! If we want to procrastinate, why not go there?
So here’s what I think. There’s this government program I dislike called Teach for America. It’s there to snap up college kids that are still wet behind the years and don’t know they’re getting horn-swoggled, and to pretend that they’re fixing the problem with inner city schools. What they do is they speed you through the credential and hiring process so that all you need is a BA in the spring, and you can teach, at full salary, in the fall. The catch is you have to teach at one of the worst schools in the country (and you can pick) for two years. After that, you’ll have your credential and two years teaching under your belt, and you can leave. What they hope is that the kids in the program will think it’s too much work to leave, and they’ll stay–and it works (one of my girlfriend’s friends now lives in Arizona because that’s where her two year program was. I mean, Arizona!).
So here’s my question: Why not do that with everything else? Go to LA, New York, NOLA, Houston, and Miami and offer incentives to live in places like Wyoming, Montana, and Nebraska? Offer job-placement services, cheap housing (since any housing out there will be cheap, anyway), and other things like that. Additionally, this could work to help alleviate the immigration problem. Right now, we’ve got a quota, and a waiting list, and that’s it. So for those that immigrate legally, once their quota’s up, they go straight to a major metropolitan area. So why not do this: Set up a waiting list–like a four year waiting list. Tell those immigrating that if they want to come to the US, they have to sign up, and wait four years. HOWEVER, if they would like to agree to live and work in a place like Montana or Wyoming for two to four years, they have the option to enter the country right away.
Ta da!
Now, of course, the Republicans would complain about policing, the new bureaucracy (lord, how they despise new bureaucracy!), and that these people would simply move out to major metropolitan areas after the time limit. The same exact arguments can be made for Teach for America. And I’m sure they do train some bad teachers that shouldn’t be teaching, and that a number of teachers do leave their home school after two years. What they don’t count on, though, is that familiarity is often more important than living in a better place. And if they’ve got a job and cheap housing in a crime-free area, why would they want to leave? They can, of course, but I’d bet you’d get a lot more people settling in the underpopulated states than we have now.
So, that’s my idea. Send it off to the government. Tell them I give it my seal of approval.
Comment by Dave — 19 December, 2006 @ 17:44
Two problems with this:
1. People moved to those “square states” to get away from people. It’s unfair to stack their states with people just because other areas are overcrowded.
2. That still doesn’t solve the problem of finite resources. The more people there are, regardless of where they live, the more drain there is on non-renewable resources. At the moment, that’s primarily petroleum, but it also extends to things like steel (which has an exorbitant price right now).
The goal here is to stabilize and reduce demand for such resources until we have a way to replenish or substitute for them, and until we have a way to reduce their impact on an increasingly unhealthy planet.
Essentially, what I”m arguing is that we have already reached and passed the sustainable population for the planet with the resources and technology we have. We need to stop having so many kids until we can get a handle on what two centuries of heavy industrialization and population growth will mean for the future.
Comment by jake — 26 December, 2006 @ 16:29
this is one thing they can’t possibly blame the gays for!
Comment by Bob — 3 April, 2007 @ 20:33