I repeat: Take. Them. At. Their. Word. And govern your response accordingly.

They Might Want You to Eat Bugs, But They Would Prefer You Weren’t Here at All
Back in January, I did a story on Jane Goodall. Someone I thought was the epitome of the schweet, uber feminine British flower, who spoke softly and risked her life nobly doing things like saving chimpanzees.

A heroine of my youth. Who just wishes there were less of us ruining the world she loves.

“We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.”

That infamous little snippet was from a discussion at a WEF gathering. The same WEF/Davos conferences for which Klaus Schwab has now removed all the videos that were once available to skewer them with on Twitter. It turns out the most elite, richest, and privileged geniuses among us have very thin skins when it comes to the peasants using their own self-congratulatory recordings to eviscerate their big plans and mock them mercilessly.

But the fact of the matter is, they don’t like us very much and would be thrilled to have fewer of us both to control and despoiling their precious Gaia. Life would be better all around.

Proponents of the idea that the world would be a better place sans a significant amount of the current population have a name unto themselves – it’s “Malthusians.” It springs from a late 18th, early 19th Century English economist named Robert Malthus, who believed that over-population was literally the bane of the Earth.

Dishonorable mentions for Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ idiot Michael Mann and overpopulation sub-genius Paul Erlich follow, a trio sans brio who, between them, share the inglorious distinction of having been conclusively proven all wet more times than the separate-but-equally-wrong unholy triumvirate of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin has. Then, Beege provides a link to the coup de grace for the whole sorry crowd.

If by fiat I had to identify the most consequential ideas in the history of science, good and bad, in the top 10 would be the 1798 treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, by English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus. On the positive side of the ledger, it inspired Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to work out the mechanics of natural selection based on Malthus’s observation that populations tend to increase geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16…), whereas food reserves grow arithmetically (2, 3, 4, 5…), leading to competition for scarce resources and differential reproductive success, the driver of evolution.

On the negative side of the ledger are the policies derived from the belief in the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse. “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race,” Malthus gloomily predicted. His scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations’ family size, including forced sterilizations.

Science writer Ronald Bailey tracks neo-Malthusians in his book The End of Doom (St. Martin’s Press, 2015), starting with Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller The Population Bomb, which proclaimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Many doomsayers followed. Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, for example, declared in 1995, “Humanity’s greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.” In a 2009 Scientific American article he affirmed his rhetorical question, “Could food shortages bring down civilization?” In a 2013 conference at the University of Vermont, Ehrlich assessed our chances of avoiding civilizational collapse at only 10 percent.

The problem with Malthusians, Bailey writes, is that they “cannot let go of the simple but clearly wrong idea that human beings are no different than a herd of deer when it comes to reproduction.” Humans are thinking animals. We find solutions—think Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. The result is the opposite of what Malthus predicted: the wealthiest nations with the greatest food security have the lowest fertility rates, whereas the most food-insecure countries have the highest fertility rates.

Among a plethora of other examples, Ehrlich’s famous losing bet springs immediately to mind:

The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely-followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, “to stake US$10,000…on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.”

Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.

No more snow; London and NYC underwater no later than 1990/2000/2005/2010/2020 etc etc due to rising sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps/glaciers; nonexistent global warming; the hoary old “peak oil” myth; unbreathable air; acid rain; mass starvation across the developed world; killing floods, drought, tornadoes, and hurricanes all inexorably worsening, year after year; calamitous shortages, scarcity, impoverishment, famine, and war—only shitlib Chicken Littles could be wrong again and again and again about absolutely everything, and yet still unblushingly insist that they’re the smartest people in the room anyhow…no matter what room they happen to be in at the time.

Funny, innit, how all these disparate problems always seem to have the selfsame solution: more government, less freedom, more sacrifice and deprivation, more want. For YOU, that is, not for them. Never them, perish the thought. Why, one could almost be forgiven for wondering whether they might be wrong about that, too. But nah, that couldn’t be, it’s unpossible. Right?

RIGHT?!?

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