Appendix I

MALTHUSIANISM VS. COVENANTALISM

And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth (Gen. 1:28).

That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies (Gen. 22:17).

And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude (Gen. 32:12).

The message is clear: the primary blessing in history is an expanding population of covenant-keepers. Man's dominion assignment from God mandates population growth. God's covenantal promise to Abraham involved a multiplication of his heirs. World dominion and population growth are linked.⁽¹⁾

This fact is no longer taken seriously by most Protestant Christians. It is, however, taken very seriously by the zero population growth movement, which sees man as the cancer of the world. Man's dominion over nature is seen as the ultimate threat to nature. Bill McKibben has stated this theology well: "We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us."⁽²⁾ Nothing but man: this is blasphemy in the minds of modern pantheists and nature-worshippers.

Nature's meaning, like all meaning, is provided by God and His decree. Man is to represent God in history. Through covenant-keeping men nature receives its God-given meaning. This is why population growth of covenant-keeping men is so important. Man is to fill nature, thereby subduing it: for God's glory, in His name, and by His law. Such a view of man and nature is horrifying to modern, covenant-breaking man.

There is another factor to consider: the fixed number of demons. Satan's demonic followers constitute a numerically fixed host: no reproduction. Angels do not reproduce (Matt. 22:30). Therefore, as human covenant-keepers grow in numbers, the ratio of demons to covenant-keepers falls. The ability of Satan's host to influence events also falls. Like jugglers who try to juggle an ever-increasing number of oranges, so is Satan's host. The same is true of his earthly imitators, who adopt centralized economic planning as their means of prosperity and control -- above all, control. As British philosopher and radical Bertrand Russell openly admitted in 1923, "Socialism, especially international socialism, is only possible as a stable system if the population is stationary or nearly so. A slow increase might be coped with by improvements in agricultural methods, but a rapid increase must in the end reduce the whole population to penury, and would be almost certain to cause wars."⁽³⁾

 

The Legacy of Malthus

The legacy of Malthus -- or at least the Malthus of 1798 -- is still with us. He altered his thesis decisively after 1798, abandoning his scientifically unsupported rhetoric of a geometrically increasing human population bounded by arithmetical increases in food. His disciples, however, still cling to the myths of the original edition of his Essay on Population.⁽⁴⁾

Rev. Malthus was not committed to the Bible's message of the blessings of large families (Psalm 127) and the goal of population growth for covenant-keeping societies (Gen. 15:5). He was an opponent of what would be called the economics of growth. He contrasted Adam Smith's wealth of nations with what he called the happiness of nations, especially the laboring classes.⁽⁵⁾ He was concerned with improving what today is called the quality of life, which he, like his disciples, contrasted with "mere" economic growth. He defined economic growth in terms of an increase in the supply of things. Had he defined economic growth as "an increase in the number of choices at the same price as earlier," he would have had to modify his suggested contrast between the quality of life and economic growth.

Malthus worried greatly about population growth, not for what it supposedly will do to disrupt the environment, but because of the famines and wars that a growing population supposedly must produce in a finite world. He worried about the fate of man, not the fate of nature. While he would have agreed with the title of the book by Campbell and Wade, Society and Environment: The Coming Collision,⁽⁶⁾ his concern was with the environment's effects on society, not society's effects on the environment.

The Green movement, the ecology movement, and the zero-population growth movement are united in their commitment to the Malthusian mythology regarding the necessity for population control. But, unlike Malthus, they want the State to impose these restraints, including abortion.

The fundamental dividing issue between the biblical view of growth and the anti-growth movement's view of growth is eschatological. The Bible predicts the end of the world. Time is inescapably bounded. The Bible affirms the moral legitimacy of growth in history, but it also affirms that history is bounded. Those who reject the biblical doctrine of the final judgment at the end of time offer a rival scenario: unbounded time and bounded growth. They understand that we cannot have unbounded time and unbounded growth in a finite world. They prefer a worldview based on unbounded time. They are not committed to overcoming the environmental limits to growth. They are committed to overcoming the eschatological limits to time. Given the biblical doctrine of the post-judgment lake of fire (Rev. 20:9-10), this is understandable.

Christians who do not recognize the existence of this underlying eschatological dispute have been swept into the anti-growth movement by the power of its promoters' rhetoric, not by the logic of their arguments. It is time to consider not only the arguments of the anti-growth movement, but also its hidden agenda: elitist, coercive power over the decisions of the vast majority of producers, better known as consumers.

Malthus' First Edition's Slogan

Malthus' concern over man's growing population began in the generation when the growth of England's population became visible to social analysts. One of the most famous phrases in the history of economics is the statement in the first edition of Rev. Thomas Robert⁽⁷⁾ Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population (1798): "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio."⁽⁸⁾ On the basis of these two supposed laws of nature, he concluded: "By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind."⁽⁹⁾ But what is not generally known by those who cite Malthus' famous statement about comparative rates of growth, mankind vs. food supplies, is that he removed this scientific-sounding statement from later editions of his essay.

Like Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto (1848), Malthus' most famous work was initially published anonymously.⁽¹⁰⁾ Malthus wrote it as a reaction to some of the more optimistic speculations of several Enlightenment and utopian thinkers. In the lengthy original title of his essay, he specifically identified the Marquis de Condorcet and the egalitarian William Godwin, the poet Shelly's father-in-law. His father, Daniel Malthus, was enamored of Godwin's thesis; Malthus wrote his essay to show why he renounced both egalitarianism and the doctrine of inevitable historical progress.⁽¹¹⁾

Malthus was born in 1766 and died in 1834, the year Cyrus McCormick perfected his mechanical reaper, which led to the huge increase of grain production in the American Midwest. In 1798, the year of the Essay, Jenner introduced vaccination against smallpox.⁽¹²⁾ So, we see in Malthus' day the foundations of both an increase of life expectancy and an increase in food production. Both processes have continued unabated.

 

Overpopulation?

Condorcet had raised the specter of overpopulation in his book, the Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind [Spirit] (1795), written in 1794 while he was in hiding from Robespierre's Terror, and published the year after the deaths of both Condorcet and Robespierre.⁽¹³⁾ He believed in inevitable progress, but he recognized that there are limits to growth. There would come a time "when the increase in the number of men [surpasses] that of their means," with the result that there will be a "decrease in prosperity and population."⁽¹⁴⁾ What was his solution? The increase of progress in science and the arts. Mankind will learn that "if they have obligations towards beings who are yet to come into the world, they do not consist in giving them existence only, but happiness; . . . " There are limits on population, but these can be reached without that "premature destruction, so contrary to nature, and to social prosperity, of a portion of the beings who have received life."⁽¹⁵⁾ This, as Nisbet points out, is fairly close to the conclusion that Malthus was to reach in later editions of his essay.⁽¹⁶⁾

Godwin was a true utopian. He, too, recognized the problem of overpopulation. His solution, stated in Political Justice (1793), was to speculate that, in the future, mankind as a species would eventually attain immortality in this world, after which men will cease to procreate.⁽¹⁷⁾ That is, men will become like the angels. Christianity has always taught this regarding man's post-resurrection condition, but the theologians' expositions did not invoke either evolution or the idea of the perfectibility of man in history. Despite being the target of Malthus' essay, Godwin wrote him a glowing letter that congratulated Malthus, but he reasserted his faith that men would use their reason to supply a moral check on population growth. In subsequent editions of the Essay, Malthus gave full recognition to these moral checks.⁽¹⁸⁾ In subsequent editions, he moved from biological pessimism to a kind of moral optimism. Nisbet writes: "We find Malthus the pessimist succeeded by Malthus the social democrat and believer in the forthcoming improvement in the human condition."⁽¹⁹⁾ But it is the Malthus of 1798 who is remembered. It is that Malthus who is revered by the zero population growth cultists.

Concern over the expansion of human population was common among writers in the two decades that preceded the publication of Malthus' essay. In 1781, the Abbé Theodore Augustin Mann read a memoir to the academicians of Brussels. He raised the question of population stability. He concluded that there can be no famine-free stable equilibrium between human population and the food supply because environmental limits will eventually thwart good morals. "This equilibrium is evidently impossible among a people with good morals, because population naturally increases in an indefinite progression, while the means of subsistence are necessarily limited by the soil."⁽²⁰⁾ The limits of the physical environment are greater than the expansionary power of population growth, which he saw as the outcome of good morals. The Venetian monk Giammaria Ortes wrote a major study on population, Riflessione sulla Populazione delle Nazioni per rapporto all'Economia Nazionale (1790). He, too, argued that human numbers seem to expand geometrically, while the goods necessary to sustain life expand more slowly. There is a conflict between man and nature.⁽²¹⁾

The Darwinian Application

One of the oddities of intellectual history is that Marx rejected Malthus,⁽²²⁾ yet enthusiastically accepted Darwin.⁽²³⁾ Why should this be odd? Because Darwin's theory rests on Malthus' observation on the growth of species. Independently of each other, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin had accepted Malthus' thesis about population growth, namely, that a species will grow in number until its members run into an environmental barrier. They both concluded that a species survives when its members possess special characteristics that enable more of them to survive. The more progeny issued by a particular pair in a species, the greater the likelihood that one of these progeny will possess the specific characteristics required for survival. It was Malthus' thesis that led them both to invent their mutually announced theory of evolution through natural selection.⁽²⁴⁾ Wallace made the connection in 1858 while he was suffering a fever.⁽²⁵⁾ Darwin claimed later to have read Malthus' original 1798 essay in 1838. He, too, said that it led to his discovery of evolution through natural selection.⁽²⁶⁾

 

The Debate Continues

The debate between demographic optimists and pessimists has gone on ever since,⁽²⁷⁾ escalating rapidly after the mid-1960's. People ask: Can society escape the "Malthusian" disaster of famine? Concern over population growth escalated in the 1960's, especially when the counter-culture movement appeared around 1965. A major news magazine in the United States announced in 1965: "The World's Biggest Problem." It asked: "How can the world feed all its people, at the rate the population is growing?"⁽²⁸⁾ This article had been preceded by "World Choice: Limit Population or Face Famine."⁽²⁹⁾ Even National Review, then the most influential conservative intellectual magazine in the United States, got on the bandwagon in 1965.⁽³⁰⁾ In 1968, Dr. Paul Ehrlich's best-selling book, The Population Bomb, was published. In it, Ehrlich, a Stanford University professor of biology, warned prophetically (and utterly incorrectly): "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. . . ."⁽³¹⁾ A far better estimate of the threat of worldwide famine was made in 1969 by Harvard University nutritionist Jean Meyer,⁽³²⁾ who predicted that "food may at some time (20 or 30 years from now) be removed altogether as a limiting factor in population."⁽³³⁾ Meyer's viewpoint received very little publicity, although it was to prove correct within a decade.

The predicted famines did not occur in the 1970's or the 1980's. What did occur was a surplus of food. The apocalyptic critics in 1965 should have paid more attention to the statistics of food production. After 1950, worldwide grain production increased steadily. From 1950 through 1975, this increase was in the range of 25 percent to 40 percent per capita.⁽³⁴⁾ In the less developed countries (excluding Communist China), the increase was in the 13 percent range. Between 1950 and 1980, the world's supply of arable land grew by more than 20 percent, and it grew even faster in the less developed countries. From 1967 to 1977, the world's irrigated acreage grew by more than 25 percent.⁽³⁵⁾ The price of seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and farm equipment also dropped in this period, in some cases by as much as half.⁽³⁶⁾ In the 1980's, grain farmers all over the world suffered economic losses as a result of overproduction.

What also occurred was a dramatic fall of birth rates in undeveloped nations: a contraceptive revolution.⁽³⁷⁾ In 1979, Ehrlich referred back to his book and others like it that had prophesied rising birth rates in the 1970's: "But we were all dead wrong."⁽³⁸⁾ He still held that a crisis was coming: perhaps famine, or a pandemic, or nuclear war.⁽³⁹⁾ In 1980, he made a $1,000 bet with University of Maryland economist Julian Simon over the future price of five metals -- a bet on the limits to growth. Simon predicted that prices would be lower. He proved correct; Ehrlich paid off the bet in 1990. He could easily afford to pay off; in that same year, Ehrlich was granted a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation Prize and half of the $240,000 Craford Prize, the ecologists' version of the Nobel Prize.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Simon is unknown to the general public.⁽⁴¹⁾ The media are overwhelmingly behind the apocalyptics. Rival viewpoints on the population question, despite the overwhelming evidence, receive little attention from the major opinion-makers.

In 1942, Warren Thompson warned of the decline in the birth rate in Western Europe and its colonies, 1890-1940. "It is the most important demographic change of our time."⁽⁴²⁾ This decline in birth rates in the West has generally continued, although in the early 1990's, it was reversed in the United States.⁽⁴³⁾ By the late 1980's, there was no Western European nation except Ireland⁽⁴⁴⁾ with a birth rate anywhere near 2.1 children per family -- the family replacement rate.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Had Islamic birth rates been excluded, the birth rate figures would have been much lower in several nations. West Germany's birth rate had fallen so low by the late 1970's that the German population will die out in the year 2500 if the same birth rate is maintained.⁽⁴⁶⁾ By the late 1980's, a new warning was being sounded: European life spans were lengthening, birth rates were dropping, and government retirement programs were facing a looming crisis: too many recipients, too few taxpaying workers.⁽⁴⁷⁾ Yet the apocalyptics continue to warn of an impending explosion, a population bomb.

Global 2000

In 1980, a Presidential Commission reported to the President of the United States on the impending crises. Unlike most reports from Presidential commissions, this three-volume report received worldwide publicity. It was titled, Global 2000 Report to the President, but became known simply as Global 2000. It was a deeply political document. It was also a classic Malthusian document, meaning the 1798 Malthus, not the more mature Malthus. It warned on page 1:

If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. Serious stresses involving population, resources, and environment are clearly visible ahead. Despite greater material output, the world's people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.

For hundreds of millions of the desperately poor, the outlook for food and other necessities of life will be no better. For many it will be worse. Barring revolutionary advances in technology, life for most people on earth will be more precarious in 2000 than it is now -- unless the nations of the world act decisively to alter current trends.

Nothing like this has happened, as of 1994. Two comments are relevant here. First, there has been no revolutionary technological development, for example, along the lines of nanotechnology, where molecule-sized mechanical assemblers put together atoms and molecules in order to produce organic as well as inorganic substances in almost limitless quantities. This development, if it comes, will at last force a drastic revision of the legacy of Malthus. It looks technologically feasible sometime before the year 2070, but it has not happened yet.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Second, "the nations of the world" -- read: national governments -- poured tens of billions of dollars worth of aid into the third world in the 1980's, but in the handful of isolated socialist economies of Africa, things nevertheless grew worse.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Outside of these tiny socialist economies, which were also suffering from civil war, the predicted food crises have not taken place.

This absence of crises was predicted by a group of scholars in a book published in 1984: The Resourceful Earth.⁽⁵⁰⁾ This book received very little attention from the press. Its editors offered another scenario: "If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be less crowded (though more populated), less polluted, more stable ecologically, and less vulnerable to resource-supply disruption than the world we live in now. Stresses involving population, resources, and environment will be less in the future than now . . . The world's people will be richer in most ways than they are today . . . The outlook for food and other necessities of life will be better . . . life for most people on earth will be less precarious economically than it is now."⁽⁵¹⁾ Excluding the former Communist societies, this is surely the case in 1994. Unless the debt-based world economy collapses -- surely not a Malthusian limit to growth -- or unless AIDS or the killer tuberculosis strains that accompany AIDS carriers sweep away covenant-breakers by the billions, it is highly likely that the 1980-94 progress will extend to the year 2000 and far beyond. The limits to growth are not primarily environmental; they are covenantal.

The Malthusian apocalyptics in 1980 dismissed as irrelevant two centuries of economic and technological progress: 1780-1980. They also ignored earlier periods of population growth in European history. Economic historian Karl Helleiner writes: "The opinion, still widely held, that before the eighteenth century, Europe's population, though subject to violent short-run fluctuations, remained stationary over long periods, or was growing only imperceptibly, is, I believe, no longer tenable. There is sufficient evidence to indicate that those oscillations were superimposed on clearly recognizable `long waves.' At least two periods of secular increase can be tolerably well identified in the demographic history of medieval and early modern Europe, the first extending from about the middle of the eleventh to the end of the thirteenth, the second from the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the sixteenth, century. . . . In this sense the demographic development of the eighteenth century was not unique. What was unprecedented about it was the fact that the secular upward movement started from a higher level, and that it was able to maintain, and for some time even increase, its momentum. Population growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, unlike that of previous epochs, was not terminated or reversed by catastrophe."⁽⁵²⁾ Something changed after 1750. The world experienced what Adam Smith taught in The Wealth of Nations (1776): economic freedom produces rapid, long-term growth.

Economic freedom is necessary but not sufficient to produce long-term population growth. A religious worldview favorable to large families must accompany economic liberty. Men must believe what David wrote so long ago: "As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate" (Ps. 127:4-5). The issue here is world dominion under God. This faith has faded rapidly in the humanist West. With falling birth rates among the populations of the industrialized world, rates of population growth are headed lower.⁽⁵³⁾ When third-world nations industrialize, they almost certainly -- a very dangerous phrase in demographics -- will experience the same thing. (We must always add: unless people change their minds and then change their behavior.)

The Malthusians always talk about the burden of more mouths to feed. They never talk about the economic benefits of more hands to work and more minds to think creatively beginning two decades later.⁽⁵⁴⁾ They ignore the long-term capital returns from a fifteen-year or twenty-year capital investment in morality and education. That is, they are present-oriented and therefore lower-class social theorists.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Sadly, vocal Christian intellectuals in the late twentieth century have joined the camp of the Malthusians.

The Specter of Hunger Is Himself Very Thin

Are many people facing famine today? If so, what is the proper solution? If not, why are so many Western intellectuals convinced that famine is imminent? How could a supposedly serious pair of scholars have written a book in 1967 titled, Famine -- 1975!?⁽⁵⁶⁾ The famine never appeared. Instead, food prices fell. Per capita consumption of food rose. Yet the myth of looming food shortages continues to be believed. From 1798 until the present, Malthus' predictions have been refuted by the facts, decade after decade. The West has experienced a growing population with increasing per capita consumption of food. Yet the myth still flourishes in the West. That starvation is possible in a major war is quite possible. The question is: If we avoid such a major war, is a famine inevitable? The apocalyptics' answer: yes. This answer has been proven incorrect for over two centuries, but generation after generation of apocalyptics learn nothing from the evidence. Theirs is a religious worldview, impervious to the historical record.

 

An Age of Hunger?

Consider the anti-free market book written by a politically left-wing evangelical historian, Ronald J. Sider: Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger (1977).⁽⁵⁷⁾ This book was very popular among college-age Protestant evangelicals and neo-evangelical college professors for several years until the Institute for Christian Economics hired David Chilton to write Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators (1981). After that, Sider's name and influence faded rapidly.⁽⁵⁸⁾ The collapse of Communism in the late 1980's buried what little remained of his reputation as a social theorist -- a fate shared by many of his humanist peers. It was not that most of them changed their minds after 1989. Rather, the public started laughing at them. This drove them into a snit of silence.

Let us begin with Sider's initial assumption: our present age of hunger. The fact is, no era in man's history has been described more inaccurately as an age of hunger than the era in which Sider wrote his book. The near-universal conquest of hunger for most of the world's population, except those people caught in civil wars in backward African nations,⁽⁵⁹⁾ had been achieved by 1977. The 1980's accelerated this conquest. Like so many other academic jeremiads of the twentieth century, Sider's came after the supposed crisis had very nearly been solved⁽⁶⁰⁾ -- solved by free-market, profit-driven agriculture.

The extraordinary productivity of modern capitalist agriculture stands as a testimony to the possibilities for urbanization and suburbanization. Men prefer to live in cities and towns when they can afford to leave the farm. The division of labor -- social, economic, intellectual, cultural -- that urban life promotes makes almost inevitable net out-migration from exclusively rural areas. This is exactly what the jubilee land laws promoted. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have seen this development as never before in man's post-Babel history.⁽⁶¹⁾

Famine: Government-Produced

What about the supposedly near-starvation conditions of the politically designated third world?⁽⁶²⁾ The poorest nations on earth in 1983, the economies of sub-Sahara Africa, were producing on average 90 percent of the calories they needed. The three poorest nations on earth -- Mali, Ghana, and Chad -- produced two-thirds of the needed calories.⁽⁶³⁾ The common characteristic of these African nations is that their governments have placed controls on farmers: heavy taxation, controls against private exporting of crops, price controls on agricultural products, and government monopoly purchases at prices well below world market prices. This observation was made by English economist Peter T. Bauer two decades before Sider's book appeared.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Bauer is one of the foremost economic theorists in the area of economic development; he was elevated to the House of Lords for his work in the field. A century before Sider's book appeared, Cornelius Walford had identified the same causes of famine in history that Bauer identified: 1) the prevention of cultivation and the willful destruction of crops; 2) defective agriculture caused by the communistic control of land; 3) governmental interference by regulation or taxation; 4) currency restrictions, including debasing of coins.⁽⁶⁵⁾

Sider ignored all this or else was unaware of it in 1977. By 1984, he was no longer unaware of it, for Chilton had presented Bauer's evidence and supporting academic evidence.⁽⁶⁶⁾ Nevertheless, Sider's second edition in 1984 refused to respond to Chilton's line-by-line critique, despite the fact that the new edition's cover promised that the he would respond to his critics. He never mentioned a word about Chilton, Bauer, or Walford. This is not scholarship; this is naive socialist propaganda disguised as caring Christian scholarship.

In an important 1981 article, economist Nick Eberstadt noted that four myths contribute to our failure to deal with the intellectual problem of hunger, the myths of 1) widespread and growing hunger; 2) growing and inevitable agricultural scarcity; 3) ominous food deficits; 4) the superiority of socialist agriculture. He then went on to provide statistics to refute each of these four myths.⁽⁶⁷⁾ Sider promoted the first three myths and implicitly promoted the fourth by his attack on profit-seeking agriculture.

The worst famine in modern history, the Chinese famine of 1959-62, was caused by Mao's Great Leap Forward policies: a vast scheme of government-directed production. As many as 30 million people died as a result of this program. "Even as their policies were causing millions of their citizens to starve," Eberstadt writes, "China's leaders denied that there was a crisis, refused all offers of international aid, and exported food."⁽⁶⁸⁾ In the late 1960's and early 1970's, a million ethnic Ibos died in a Nigerian famine. This was government policy: the Islamic Nigerians were trying to eliminate the rebellious Ibos. Similar government policies led to famines in Ethiopia, East Timor, and Cambodia.⁽⁶⁹⁾ The problem of hunger is the product of population growth, the West's meat consumption, or the failure of modern agriculture. The problem is socialist economics. Sider and his intellectual peers are making this problem worse. The problem is not rich Christians in an age of hunger. The problem is isolated socialist economies in an age of capitalist prosperity.

 

Foreign Aid: Government to Government

Did the West do nothing while third-world residents starved? Hardly. In 1982, the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimated that the West sent about $18 billion to third-world countries. In addition, multilateral development agencies (government operated) provided an additional $8 billion. To that was added government and private investment and lending. The total, according to the OECD, was in the $80 billion range. In one year! These capital flows began in the early 1950's. From 1956 to 1982, the West sent $670 billion in aid (OECD estimate). In 1985 prices, this was over $1.5 trillion. Three-quarters of this money came from governments. Add to this the money sent from 1982 to 1985 plus the money sent in the first half of the 1950's, and the total is $2 trillion. How much wealth did this represent? The combined value of all farms in the United States and all stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1985.⁽⁷⁰⁾ But this enormous transfer of wealth was insufficient to stop the famines in sub-Sahara Africa, and so it was equally insufficient to stop the critics of capitalism, who called for more compulsory aid and more sacrifices by Western taxpayers. This points to a conclusion that Bauer had made decades earlier, but which is unacceptable to modern statists: the primary shortage of capital in backward societies is moral capital, meaning people's attitudes and beliefs.⁽⁷¹⁾ This crucial form of capital cannot be provided by government handouts.⁽⁷²⁾

Did the recipient governments use this money to strengthen agriculture? Not often. Politicians and bureaucrats wanted to bypass agriculture in order to become leaders of industrial nations. Industrial nations have more prestige and more modern weaponry. Third-world economic planning programs deliberately starved the agricultural sector. In Peru and Mexico, less than ten percent of gross national product was produced by farming in 1980, half of Germany's rate in the 1930's. Ecuador's percentage in 1984 was smaller than Holland's in 1950. Bolivia's rate was less than Greece's in 1984, yet Greece is considered a developed nation. Senegal, in the midst of the continuing Sahel famine, in 1984 produced at the same level of Japan in 1950.⁽⁷³⁾ The problem is not lack of foreign aid. The problem is the misuse of this aid by recipient politicians and bureaucrats.

 

Other Ignored Factors

One of the familiar arguments of the semi-vegetarian social critics of capitalist agriculture is that Westerners eat too much meat. If we just ate more vegetables, the freed-up food resources could feed the starving masses of the world. That is to say, if we ate less meat, our governments could tax the money we saved by eating soybeans and then send surplus soybeans to Africa (or wherever). I call this outlook soybean socialism.

Soybean Socialism

Sider's comments are typical. Notice his use of the pronouns we and our. "Undoubtedly the most striking measure of the gap between rich and poor is food consumption. . . . U.S. citizens consume almost five times as much grain per person as do the people in the developing countries. The major reason for this glaring difference is that we eat most of our grain indirectly -- via grain-fed livestock and fowl."⁽⁷⁴⁾ What these guilt-manipulating critics always fail to mention is that the recipient nations suffer from a far worse situation: their animals eat huge quantities of grain, yet they escape a similar fate at the hands of man.

The sad fact of the matter is this: animals in under-developed countries consume vast quantities of poorly stored food, especially grains. I have covered this in Moses and Pharaoh,⁽⁷⁵⁾ but some of the facts are worth repeating. The "sacred cows" of India eat a lot of grain, but nobody eats them. Estimates of the number of such cows in India range between 175 million to over 200 million. They eat enough grain to feed 1.2 billion people. Robert Sassone wrote in 1972: "This means that India produced enough food, so that if you moved the cows out, you could move everybody in from the continents of Antarctica, Australia, Africa and Europe. You could also move in everybody from most of the other nations in the world. Then all those people could eat better than the people of India eat today."⁽⁷⁶⁾ India's rats also eat. In the early 1970's, rats and cows together consumed half of India's agricultural output.⁽⁷⁷⁾ It would have taken a train 3,000 miles long to haul all the grain eaten by rats in India each year.⁽⁷⁸⁾ Rats in other nations are also big eaters. In one year, rats in the Philippines consumed over half the corn and 90 percent of the rice crop.⁽⁷⁹⁾ Is this the fault of the "monopolistic" West?

The Green Revolution

Then there is the "green revolution" that transformed Asian agriculture in the 1960's. That revolution is continuing. Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his high-yield dwarf wheat that rescued Asia from famine, in 1992 announced a program to save Africa from famine. With a grant provided by a private Japanese philanthropist, Borlaug's program was tried on 150,000 African farms. The results were spectacular: yield increases of 2.5 to one, 1986-1992. Even after civil war ended his work in the Sudan, the Sudanese still harvested 800,000 tons of wheat, up from 160,000 in 1986. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, himself a farmer, told the World Bank in 1992: "Dr. Borlaug's system works. I've been on the farms. I've seen it work."⁽⁸⁰⁾ Yet Sider in 1977 dismissed the green revolution as a temporary phenomenon because "fantastic population growth almost matched increased agricultural productivity. When droughts and floods struck in 1971 and 1972, hunger returned."⁽⁸¹⁾

A major problem with Sider's book is that he regarded short-term statistics produced by ideologically motivated pleaders as a convenient substitute for both economic theory and detailed historical research. Another major problem is that in the second edition, he refused to respond to the first edition's many errors pointed out in Chilton's Productive Christians. Finally, the third edition (1990) failed to respond to Chilton's third edition, which refuted Sider's second edition line by line. There is no mass starvation in the world, but there is a vast market for guilt among intellectuals.

 

Capitalist Guilt or Liberal Guilt?

Who is to blame for all this alleged starvation? Rich people in the West, says Sider. "Tragically, rising affluence in North America, Europe, Russia [!!!] and Japan had also tripled the cost of grain for export in the same short period."⁽⁸²⁾ What is Sider's solution to the "problem" of the North American "monopoly" over food? "A new food policy now is one way to avoid such a dangerous situation. The constantly growing demand for food must stop -- or at least slow down dramatically. That means reduced affluence in the rich nations and population control everywhere."⁽⁸³⁾

Sider's analysis rests implicitly on what Mises called the Montaigne dogma: an increase in one person's wealth always comes from a decrease in another person's wealth.⁽⁸⁴⁾ Such a view is opposed to the biblical idea that God rewards covenant-keeping societies, in part so that other societies will praise God and adopt God's laws (Deut. 4:5-8), thereby spreading wealth across the globe. Sider wants the West to feed the world's starving poor. But when he says "the West," he means Western governments. He means charity by compulsion -- the destruction of charity.

Western governments have done enough damage already. The series of famines that began in the Sahel region of Africa in the 1970's were caused by ill-advised government foreign aid projects from the West. These famines are continuing as I write this commentary. The Sahel region comprises about a fifth of the land area of Africa, stretching east to west, just south of the Sahara: from Mauritania on the west coast through Mali, Niger, Chad, the Sudan, and parts of Ethiopia and Somalia. The West's project managers sank deep water wells in order to increase the water supply for agriculture. The nomads of the region then abandoned centuries-old wandering routes and settled close to the wells. The result should have been predicted but wasn't: the nomads' animals overgrazed the areas near the wells, multiplied rapidly, thus bringing regional famine. Meanwhile, the world development organizations continued to sink more wells, spreading the famine.⁽⁸⁵⁾

The majority of the cases of starvation today are in sub-Sahara Africa, north of South Africa. Very few people live there -- fewer than a hundred million, with the AIDS plague rapidly spreading across the lower part of the that incontinent continent. How could the rest of the world be fed by the food supposedly forfeited by these people? Civil war is a major cause -- perhaps the major cause -- of starvation in Africa. The opposing military forces steal most of the food sent to civilians by foreign charities and civil governments. In December, 1992, the United States government sent 30,000 of its military troops into Somalia, under the authority of a United Nations task force, in order to stop the civil war from curtailing civilian food supplies sent by the West. The U.S. government implicitly acknowledged the source of the famine in Somalia: civil war, not the Montaigne dogma.

The West's consumption of food has had nothing to do with the agricultural crisis of sub-Sahara Africa. Poorly designed Western government foreign aid programs and domestic civil wars are the primary causes. Socialist agriculture, demonism, and God's curses are also relevant. What socialist critics refuse to consider is that socialism always produces low agricultural output. What humanists refuse to consider is that God brings terrible negative sanctions on those who worship demons. What Christian intellectuals refuse to consider is that they should avoid becoming apologists for propaganda from socialists and humanists.

There is no evidence that population growth today threatens per capita food consumption. Whether or not famine occurs will be decided by economic policy and the ability of civil governments to provide conditions of peace, where trade can take place without threat of violence. The world is not facing famine. The growth of free market institutions around the world has lowered the price of food, and has therefore lowered the percentage of people's incomes spent on food. What creates famine are such factors as government-imposed price ceilings on food, government controls over agricultural production, government restrictions on food distribution, and civil war. Where the free market flourishes, people do not starve. Rather, the market for weight-loss programs expands.

The New Tower of Babel

From at least the time when the late eighteenth-century French pornographer and communist propagandist Restif de la Breton wrote The Year 2000, the year 2000 has been the focus of humanism's eschatological concern.⁽⁸⁶⁾ The goal of the socialists and humanists has been to engineer a new world order, a rival of the new world order established by Jesus Christ.

One of the means of gaining public acceptance for the humanists' political new world order has been an appeal to the need to protect the environment, which is by nature international: moving fluids (air and water). These moving fluids can easily be used as "free" dump sites by those seeking to transfer private costs to others. (The other major appeal has been to disarmament.)

In 1970, a wave of excitement swept academia: Earth Day. This celebration was organized politically. Rallies were held across the United States and the world. This took place within weeks of the visible end of the counter-culture movement, which had begun between 1964 and 1965. This had been an era of cultural rebellion, intellectual transformation, sexual license, occultism, drugs, anti-war riots, and an economic boom which ended only with the recession of 1969-1970.⁽⁸⁷⁾ For six years, waves of protest swept the United States and the world. They ended one month after Earth Day: at Kent State University in Ohio, where a National Guard unit shot and killed several students during a protest. Overnight, the public manifestations of the counter-culture's revolutionary phase ended. But the world was no longer the same; much of the counter-culture had been permanently institutionalized and commercialized.

One American author more than any other gave an account of this movement: Theodore Roszak. In 1969, his book appeared, The Making of a Counter Culture.⁽⁸⁸⁾ It pictured a movement based on a philosophical rejection of the boundaries of Western rationality, morals, and behavior: beyond technocracy. Three years later, he wrote Where the Wasteland Ends.⁽⁸⁹⁾ The title of the second book is significant. The wasteland motif is significant. He returned once again to the contrast between two deeply religious symbols: the garden and the wasteland. The wasteland, he wrote, is what technology produces. It is the civilization of the machine.

The Establishment's New World Order

In between the publication of these two books, another author wrote an essay. He wrote it for the most influential journal in the world, Foreign Affairs, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations.⁽⁹⁰⁾ He wrote it for the April 1970 issue: Earth Day. The author was George Kennan, one of the six "wise men" who shaped U.S. foreign policy from the Great Depression of the 1930's through the 1980's.⁽⁹¹⁾ (As I write this, Kennan is the last surviving member of the wise men.) Kennan is the author of another article for Foreign Affairs, a 1946 anonymous essay that set forth the policy of containment: containing the Soviet Union geographically, a boundary strategy. This was the most influential and famous article on U.S. foreign policy written in the twentieth century. Kennan's 1970 article was titled, "To Prevent a World Wasteland: A Proposal."

This essay represented the assimilation of the counter culture's environmental vision by the masters of the technocratic Establishment. The Establishment's intellectuals had been ready and willing from the beginning to harness the pent-up forces of the revolt against the Establishment. They sought to re-channel these protests into rent-seeking, bureaucracy-expanding efforts to reduce human freedom. The State would be the beneficiary; those who controlled access to the most powerful positions within the State would benefit. The ultimate State is international.

Kennan began his observations with a quotation from the Secretary-General of the United Nations Organization, U Thant: "For the first time in the history of mankind, there is arising a crisis of worldwide proportions involving developed and developing countries alike -- the crisis of human environment. . . . It is becoming apparent that if current trends continue, the future of life on earth could be endangered."⁽⁹²⁾ Kennan observed that environmental problems normally become a concern first "within national boundaries. . . ." He immediately shifted his discussion to the international questions: polluted air, contaminated coastal waters, and wildlife.⁽⁹³⁾ These phenomena are not respecters of national boundaries. As it is in the Book of Leviticus, so is it in Foreign Affairs: a question of boundaries.

Kennan called for the creation of "a body fortified by extensive scientific expertise" which will be able to measure the adequacy of "a considerable body of international arrangements" that deal with the environment. So far, he insisted, "it is evident that present activities have not halted or reversed environmental deterioration." There is no reason to suppose that they will stop.⁽⁹⁴⁾ He described the features that this new co-ordinating body must have: 1) facilities for the collection and dissemination of information (i.e., tools of control and propaganda); 2) co-ordination of "research and operational activities"; 3) the establishment of international standards in environmental matters, purely advisory; 4) international action governing the high seas, outer space, the Arctic and Antarctic, and the stratosphere.⁽⁹⁵⁾ This fourth requirement "consists simply of the establishment and enforcement of suitable rules for all human activities conducted in these media."⁽⁹⁶⁾ In short, if a man breathes the air, swims in the sea, flies into outer space, or dwells on the ice caps, he is to be governed in all his activities by suitable rules. Kennan's proposal is messianic.

Messianic programs require messianic enforcers. Kennan's program is no exception. "Someone, after all, must decide at some point what is tolerable and permissible here and what is not; and since this is an area in which no sovereign government can make these determinations, some international authority must ultimately do so."⁽⁹⁷⁾ There must be an international treaty or convention. "But for this there will have to be some suitable center of initiation, not to mention the instrument of enforcement which at a later point will have to come into the picture."⁽⁹⁸⁾

Kennan called for a non-governmental agency of experts that can impose negative sanctions with civil authority. It must be a government beyond civil government and the boundaries of civil government. "This entity, while naturally requiring the initiative of governments for its inception and their continued interest for its support, would have to be one in which the substantive decisions would be taken not on the basis of compromise among governmental representatives but on the basis of collaboration among scholars, scientists, experts, and perhaps also something in the nature of environmental statesmen and diplomats -- but true international servants, bound by no national or political mandate, by nothing, in fact, other than dedication to the work at hand."⁽⁹⁹⁾

Russian Socialism

In January, 1994, a nationally circulated newspaper insert magazine, Parade, ran a three-page interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, the deposed ruler of the Soviet Union, who is the head of an environmentalist organization called the Green Cross. This worn-out Communist war horse is now proclaiming the Kennanist line in preference to the Leninist line. Collectivist that he is, his enemy is still the same: the American consumer.

If we're going to protect the planet's ecology, we're going to need to find alternatives to the consumerist dream that is attracting the world. Otherwise, how will we conserve our resources, and how will we avoid setting people against each other when resources are depleted? . . .

America must be an example to the world. America should do what we have done -- that is, to abandon any attempt to impose a certain model on other peoples. If we just say, "Xerox the American way and standard of living," then we must answer the question, "What do we do about the fact that 260 million people in America use 40 percent of the world's energy resources, and the 5 billion people in the rest of the world use what's left?" America must be the teacher of democracy to the world, but not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard. The world can't support that. Even now, only one third of the world's population is provided for adequately. We should, therefore develop other models.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

He calls for "a new consciousness based on environmental justice."⁽¹⁰¹⁾ There is no blueprint, but there must be action. A new evolution is upon us. "There is no clear answer, except that the old ideologies in our civilization must give way to the new challenges of our civilization. The growing environmental movement must be a vehicle for that."⁽¹⁰²⁾

What is worth noting is that only a few weeks before, on November 28, 1993, the New York Times "Op Ed" page published an essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in which he proclaimed an almost identical thesis. The article was titled, "To Tame Savage Capitalism." If any person was responsible for destroying the reputation of Soviet Communism in the West, it was he. His three-volume study, The Gulag Archipelago, chronicled the terrorism of Soviet Communism from Lenin to the 1960's, and he was generally believed by Western intellectuals, who had rejected similar reports for over half a century. He was exiled from the USSR in 1974. The critic of the Soviet Union has also been the critic of Western capitalism. He now joins hands -- or at least propaganda efforts -- with Mr. Gorbachev, the protegé of Mr. Andropov, the former head of the KGB, the Soviet secret police that Solzhenitsyn despised.

In his essay, Solzhenitsyn decried the spiritual vacuum in the former Soviet Union, a vacuum that capitalism cannot fill. This has been a continuing theme in his writings: the failure of secularism, East and West.⁽¹⁰³⁾ The West is now in trouble. It now faces "environmental ruin" and "the global population explosion." The third world constitutes four-fifths of mankind, and will soon constitute five-sixths. It is "drowning in poverty and misery," and it will soon "step forward with an ever-growing list of demands to the advanced nations." He, too, rejects the growth model of Western capitalism. "The time is urgently upon us to limit our wants." He attacked the United States without naming it for having resisted the demands of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. He did not mention what these demands were: to reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions by government edicts in order to reduce global warming.

There are four major problems here. First, there is no clear-cut scientific evidence of global warming. When the temperature changes of the world's oceans are included in the analysis, there is no evidence of directional change, 1890 to 1990. The evidence that tempertures have increased comes from temperature measurements taken at sites in or near cities, where temperatures have increased. In any case, the increase in carbon dioxide emissions accelerated after World War II, but temperatures have not risen since then.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ Second, the major sources of carbon dioxide emissions are natural, most notably from termites, which contribute some 14 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, compared to mankind's supposded output of five billion tons -- in an atmosphere of five quadrillion tons. Mankind's contribution is less than one millionth of the total atmosphere.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ Third, there is no evidence that global warming is a bad thing. Plant life grows much faster in a high carbon dioxide envirinment.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ (Scientific creationists have argued since 1961 that such envirionmental conditions probably existed under the pre-Flood canaopy, when men's life spans were far longer.)⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Fourth, it would be bad economics to invest heavily in anti-global warming technologies today when far cheaper technical solutions are likely to appear long before the supposed problem gets worse.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ (As for atmospheric ozone, there was no increase or decrease, 1978 to 1991.)⁽¹⁰⁹⁾

In 1977, Ballantine Books, a popular paperback book company in the U.S., published The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age. The book began with this warning: "There is growing consensus among leading climatologists that the world is undergoing a cooling trend" (p. 5). But there was no temperature evidence for this frightening scenario, either.

Like Gorbachev, Solzhenitsyn repeated the oft-quoted statistic that the U.S. is a huge consumer of the world's resources. Gorbachev used the 40 percent figure; Solzhenitsyn used 50 percent. Neither figure is accurate. The U.S. share of world output/consumption has fallen slowly but steadily as other nations have increased their output and hence their consumption of resources. In 1989, the latest year for available data, the U.S. share of world output was in the range of 26 percent.⁽¹¹⁰⁾

Solzhenitsyn complained: "When a conference of the alarmed peoples of the earth convenes in the face of unquestioned and imminent threat to the planet's environment, a mighty power, one consuming not much less than half the earth's currently available resources and emitting half its pollution, insists, because of its own present-day interests, on lowering the demands of a sensible international agreement, as though it did not itself live on the same earth. Then other leading countries shirk from fulfilling even these reduced demands. Thus, in the economic race, we are poisoning ourselves." We must therefore "learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria," or else "humankind" will "simply be torn apart, as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth."

He recommended no economic blueprint. Solzhenitsyn has resisted offering an economic blueprint -- which he sees as Western and hence unspiritual -- throughout his career. But he is opposed to capitalism.⁽¹¹¹⁾ He has long opposed industrial growth and the ideal of economic progress.⁽¹¹²⁾ He has cried out against the supposed depletion of economic resources.⁽¹¹³⁾ He warned years ago against imminent Malthusian disaster: ". . . in all cases the population will be overtaken by mass destruction in the first decades of the twenty-first century. . . ."⁽¹¹⁴⁾ He did predict in 1974 that the creative West would eventually "set about the necessary reconstruction."⁽¹¹⁵⁾ But he offered no blueprint for this reconstruction, any more than Gorbachev did two decades later. Both men perceive capitalism as morally bankrupt despite -- or perhaps because of -- its enormous economic success. They damn it as immoral, but they propose nothing to replace it. This opens the door to the creation of a socialistic New World Order in the name of third world poverty, environmental ethics, and overcoming the population explosion. This means a larger, more powerful State with the international authority to bring sanctions against those nations and individuals who violate the new ethical order. The mild socialist (Solzhenitsyn) and the mild Communist (Gorbachev) are strongly opposed to the free market. In this, they are not alone.

The Escalating War Against Christian Society

Shortly before he died, Professor Arthur Selwyn Miller of George Washington University completed the manuscript of a book, The Secret Constitution and the Need for Constitutional Change. It had been financed by the Rockefeller Foundation.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ He argued that the United States is governed by two constitutions, one formal and the other secret.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ The U.S. has always had an elite form of government, he said; "tiny minorities" make the basic decisions.⁽¹¹⁸⁾ This constitutional dualism is now leading to a constitutional crisis. We must now restructure the U.S. Constitution in order to gain consistency between the two systems, he insisted. But how can thus be done? "Extraordinary conditions demand extraordinary, even unique, remedies."⁽¹¹⁹⁾ These remedies include the following: enforced stabilization of population;⁽¹²⁰⁾ the restructuring of the economy;⁽¹²¹⁾ the elimination of the threat of nuclear war;⁽¹²²⁾ the redefining of national security as protection against "environmental degradation throughout the world";⁽¹²³⁾ the equitable distribution of material resources.⁽¹²⁴⁾ All of this will require the abandonment of Christianity:

The Biblical admonition that mankind should have dominion over everything that moves upon the earth (as well as matter that does not move, such as plants and minerals) must be replaced with a view that humanity has an inescapable "oneness" with nature and the natural world, and must act accordingly. Dominion under the tenets of Judeo-Christian theology has long been employed as a justification for relentless exploitation of the riches of the planet. This will have to be supplanted by an instruction, divine or otherwise, that humans must protect all of nature's creatures, large and small.

The finite nature of the planet Earth and its natural resources must be recognized. There are limits to growth. Anyone who thinks that economic growth can continue indefinitely, says Professor Kenneth Boulding, is either a madman or an economist.⁽¹²⁵⁾

Miller called for a Planetary Constitutional Convention.⁽¹²⁶⁾ (This was not a new idea; a similar call was made for similar official reasons in 1974.)⁽¹²⁷⁾ "The world is spinning out of control. Chaos masquerades as order. There is a demonstrable destructive logic to human systems. Already the terrible reactions to crises, near and far, are appearing." He listed crime, racism, famines, terrorism, and religious wars.⁽¹²⁸⁾ "Population cannot be brought under control, peace cannot be assured, pollution is not controlled, and poverty is everywhere. These situations signify a societal nervous breakdown."⁽¹²⁹⁾

The rhetoric continued to escalate. In 1991, the year before Earth Summit in Rio, the Trilateral Commission, headed by David Rockefeller, published a book through Oxford University Press: Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World's Economy and the Earth's Ecology.⁽¹³⁰⁾ The authors end their book with this rhetorical warning: "The Earth Summit will likely be the last chance for the world, in this century at least, to seriously address and arrest the accelerating environmental threats to economic development, national security, and human survival. It will certainly be the last major chance for the present generation of leaders and decision-makers to fulfill their basic obligations to their peers, today's youth, and future generations" (p. 128). This is the covenantal language of inheritance: point five of the biblical covenant model.⁽¹³¹⁾

The question is this: Does this rhetoric reflect the magnitude of the crisis? In the past, it has not. What about today?

 

Rhetoric and Reality

Kennan, Gorbachev, and Miller used the rhetoric of crisis to further their elitist political design. The humanists' apocalyptic rhetoric of inescapable crisis begins with the idea of absolute limits to growth. There is no doubt that there are limits to growth; the fundamental limit is God's final judgment. There are historical limits, too.⁽¹³²⁾ This is why there are prices. But to say that there are determinate limits to growth is very different from saying that any committee knows what and where these limits are, when they will call a halt to growth, and how society should operate after such limits are reached.

All talk about "spaceship earth" is specious and politically motivated.⁽¹³³⁾ It invokes a military-bureaucratic metaphor -- a spaceship -- to describe the decentralized decision-making of men and the unplanned coperations of nature.⁽¹³⁴⁾ Echoing Barbara Ward, Gorbachev used the now-commonplace imagery: Planet Earth and its crew.⁽¹³⁵⁾ But the symbol of a spaceship necessarily invokes the image of a captain. Denying the biblical doctrine of a sovereign, transcendent God -- the ultimate captain -- the socialist must identify other candidates for captainship. One thing is sure: those officers in the control room must be limited in number. They constitute an elite. All rule is hierarchical: either top-down (Ex. 1) or bottom-up (Ex. 18). But without a captain, the more that power is centralized, the greater the rewards for gaining absolute personal control, and the greater the risks of personal failure to do so. The worst will get on top.⁽¹³⁶⁾

Why talk about absolute limits today, when there are no signs that anything like such limits have been approached by mankind? In a world in which many prices fall⁽¹³⁷⁾ -- a world of expanding productivity, especially in agriculture -- the economist must discuss relative prices, not absolute limits to growth. There are limits at the margin: I must give up this in order to obtain that. But most of these limits are temporary. At some price, they can be overcome. The question is: At what price? The other question is: Who pays it? Economist Jacqueline Kasun writes, "The doomsday literature of limits is shot through with the conceit of absolute capacity, which is alien to economics. . . . In the lifeboat, human beings are pure burdens, straining the capacity of the boat."⁽¹³⁸⁾

The world is almost empty. Fly across any of it and look down. The population apocalyptics of today are like those late Renaissance-era Roman Catholic scientists who refused to look into Galileo's telescope. Sitting next to us on a cross-country flight, the population apocalyptics offer us the same challenge that Groucho Marx offered when caught in the act in a famous scene: "Are you going to believe me or your own eyes?"

Propaganda and Reality After 1960

The propaganda of "spaceship earth" escalated in the 1960's. An early example was The Population Explosion and Christian Responsibility, published in 1960.⁽¹³⁹⁾ From 1965 on, book titles heralded an age of limits -- not the traditional limits but absolute limits: Our Depleted Society,⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ Too Many Americans,⁽¹⁴¹⁾ Famine -- 1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive?⁽¹⁴²⁾ The Costs of Economic Growth,⁽¹⁴³⁾ The Biological Time Bomb,⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ The Limits to Growth (a best-seller),⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ The No-Growth Society,⁽¹⁴⁶⁾ The Overdeveloped Nations.⁽¹⁴⁷⁾ In 1972, a Presidential commission headed by John D. Rockefeller III, a long-time promoter of zero population growth,⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ was issued: Population and the American Future.⁽¹⁴⁹⁾

What was going on during the same period? By 1980, only about 2 percent of the world's population was threatened with dangerous hunger.⁽¹⁵⁰⁾ What about the incursion of the cities on agricultural land? Mythical. From 1950 to 1960, there was an increase of 9 percent in total arable land in the 87 countries studied, nations constituting 73 percent of the world's total land area. There was an additional 6 percent rise in permanent, arable cropland worldwide, 1963 to 1977, a United Nations study concluded. By 1980 in the United States, under 3 percent of the nation's total land area was used for urban purposes.⁽¹⁵¹⁾ In short, the rhetoric of imminent crisis was contradicted by the reality of per capita economic growth.

Consider the year 1971. The U.S. had increased crop production by 13 percent over 1970. Canada had harvested over 50 percent more wheat. India's output was so great that it had a surplus of eight million tons of grain. India gave Bangladesh ten percent of its surplus and averted a famine there.⁽¹⁵²⁾ India's food production outstripped its population growth after 1948. Even so, if they had slaughtered all of their non-productive sacred cows in 1971, India's farmers could feed at least 1.2 billion extra people.⁽¹⁵³⁾

Overcrowding? In 1970, all the people on earth and their homes and local parks could have fit on 15 percent of the land area of the United States. If these four billion people had been willing to live in the same density of population that they accepted in New York City, the entire world's population would have fit in the state of Montana.⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ (But they would not have enjoyed the winters.) It would have been possible to fit everyone on earth inside the U.S. with the same density of population that prevailed in the state of New Jersey: 1,000 persons per square mile.⁽¹⁵⁵⁾ It is worth noting that the politicians of New Jersey have named it the Garden State.

Ethics and Life Style

The twentieth-century West exported the means of increasing poor people's lives. The food problem has been overcome repeatedly since the late eighteenth century. In many backward regions, birth rates remained high, death rates fell, and populations increased. But birth rates fall as wealth increases, people move to the cities, and families' net economic costs of rearing young children rise. Human behavior changes. This has been a universal demographic experience in the twentieth century.

Those environmental determinists who have recognized that people do change their reproductive behavior have shifted the argument from population growth to style of life. The slowdown is insufficient. More is needed -- more of less. Less is more. "Small is beautiful," announced Buddhist, non-theistic social theorist E. F. Schumacher,⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ and humanists responded enthusiastically. Arnold Nash writes: "The initial issue is the kind of life that we want to live on this earth as distinct from the number of people who are to live this life."⁽¹⁵⁷⁾ He warns about an overcrowded earth which will bring "overwhelming chaos through the entire world in our social life. . . ." We are told that overcrowding in cities produces rising crime. The whole world may well be headed in the direction of Calcutta, "where more than half a million people eat, sleep, live, and die with no home other than the streets. . . ."⁽¹⁵⁸⁾ The critics never ask this question: Is what happens in a Hindu society representative of what must happen in a Christian, pro-growth society?

The problem with the city is not overcrowding as such; it is the widespread loss of faith that takes place in cities. The impersonality of the modern city raises the cost of policing crime; self-discipline becomes more important. The loss of faith produces evil consequences faster, since the costs of detection and policing are higher. But the problem is the loss of faith. It is the loss of faith and those communities that grow out of faith.⁽¹⁵⁹⁾ The medieval city was a covenantal association, based on common participation in the Lord's Supper.⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ The modern city is not.

The problem is not, as Nash and many other commentators have insisted, man's growing control over nature. Nash brings this covenant lawsuit against dominion man: "What man has been doing in upsetting so violently the world's natural ecology is simply a prolongation of what he has been doing from the very dawn of his history. He has been trying to change the world of nature."⁽¹⁶¹⁾ Man is polluting the world. He is poisoning the atmosphere.⁽¹⁶²⁾ "Mineral shortages will soon emerge."⁽¹⁶³⁾ And so on. Society and Environment: The Coming Collision announced the title of a 1972 collection of essays.⁽¹⁶⁴⁾ The End of Nature warned Bill McKibben's book title in 1989. Man the destroyer is destroying the natural world.

Step by step, the theology of the critics of economic growth has become more clear: radical humanism in an alliance with a new pantheism-animism. We are, in the words of Berit Kjos, Under the Spell of Mother Earth.⁽¹⁶⁵⁾ The literature of eco-animism is large and growing.⁽¹⁶⁶⁾ In June, 1992, the largest gathering of world leaders and media representatives since the founding of the United Nations Organization in 1945 met in Rio de Janeiro for the Earth Summit. Everything is moving toward a new Tower of Babel, all in the name of a common cause: to save the earth from man's productivity.

But where has this productivity come from? The ethical cause-and-effect relationship announced by God in His law is the answer. The growth of mankind's per capita productivity has come as a blessing from God in response to a growing willingness on the part of various societies to conform outwardly to His laws of private property and personal responsibility. Understand, this has not been merely a growth in productivity matching the increased numbers of men; it has been a system of increasing wealth per individual. The positive economic sanctions listed in Deuteronomy 28:1-14 have been experienced by the West for over two centuries. The power of our own hands has not produced this wealth (Deut. 8:17).

Conclusion

The ultimate resource in history is not man; on this point, Simon is wrong.⁽¹⁶⁷⁾ It is also not the good earth, as the eco-animists argue. The ultimate resource is the God of the covenant. But it takes God's grace, both special and common, to make this ultimate resource available to covenant-breakers. This gift of grace involves mankind's ethical transformation: the willingness and ability of large numbers of people to obey God. "For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them" (Eph. 2:8-10).

Society today suffers not from overpopulation but from overregulation. We suffer not from a growing scarcity of resources but from a growing scarcity of freedom. Freedom does not come at zero price. In this sense, it is not natural. It is the product of accurate economic thinking and moral self-restraint. When Malthus wrote of moral self-restraint he had in mind was sexual activity. The moral self-restraint we need today is political restraint.

The lure of Malthus' incomparably inaccurate prediction regarding the overexpansion of human population in relation to food has blinded generations of pessimists and economic planners to the truth. What is the truth? This: economic liberty, when coupled with future-orientation of the part of many members of society, can and does lead to less hunger, less poverty, and more choices. Maximum economic growth is achieved when large numbers of people in a society voluntarily adopt the following worldview:

1. Faith that this world is not random, that it is governed by permanent moral principles (i.e., a non-Confucian, non-pragmatic ethic).

2. Commitment to serving consumers as the highest authority (i.e., few government regulations passed in order to favor producers: anti-mercantilism).

3. A political commitment to uphold predictable civil laws that defend private ownership ("Thou shalt not steal").

4. A readiness to compete with all comers, i.e., open entry into the marketplace (anti-licensure, anti-bureaucracy).

5. Future orientation: optimistic people who are ready to invest (deferred consumption).

It is not the State's job to create widespread future-orientation; it is also not the State's job to subsidize the activities of others. The State's jobs is to bring negative sanctions against those who commit public evil. It is to defend the rights of owners over their property -- owners' rights, not "property rights."

The problem for underdeveloped nations is not that they have received too little economic aid from Western governments but far too much. They have adopted the false ideas of three or more generations of Western intellectuals who do not believe that individuals can and should regulate their own affairs, bear their own burdens, and reap their own rewards. Instead, the critics of freedom regard the State as a sovereign agent that possesses sufficient knowledge and sufficient creativity to produce wealth for all. What the State has done is to impoverish those who have few economic reserves to make up for the disastrous decisions of government economic planners.

The world does not need fewer people; it needs fewer bureaucrats.

Footnotes:

1. Gary North, Moses and Pharaoh: Dominion Religion vs. Power Religion (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), ch. 1.

2. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 58.

3. Bertrand Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization (2nd ed.; London: George Allen & Unwin, [1923] 1959), p. 273.

4. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (New York: Penguin Books, [1798] 1982).

5. Ibid., ch. XVI.

6. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1972.

7. He was not called Thomas; he called himself Thomas Robert or T. Robert: William Petersen, Malthus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 21.

8. Malthus, Population, p. 71.

9. Idem.

10. Antony Flew, "Introduction," ibid., p. 9.

11. Ibid., pp. 9-10.

12. Petersen, Malthus, p. 2.

13. Condorcet died a suicide. He poisoned himself with jimson weed the night he was arrested and put into prison. This was the account provided by his friend André Morellet, Mémoires inédits de l'Abbé Morellet de l'Académie Francaise (10th ed.; Paris: Ladvocat, 1822), ch. 24; cited in Petersen, Malthus, p. 41.

14. Cited by Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), p. 212.

15. Idem.

16. Idem.

17. Ibid., p. 214.

18. Ibid., p. 217.

19. Ibid., p. 218.

20. Cited by Charles Emil Stangeland, Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population: A Study in the History of Economic Theory (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, [1904] 1966), p. 323.

21. Ibid., p. 336.

22. Ronald L. Meek (ed.), Marx and Engels on the Population Bomb (rev. ed.; Palo Alto, California: Ramparts, 1971).

23. Marx to Engels: Dec. 19, 1860; Marx to Lasalle: Jan. 16, 1861. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, 1846-1895, edited by Dona Torr (New York: International Publishers, 1935), pp. 126, 125. In 1866, Marx switched his allegiance to a crackpot ethnologist and racist, Pierre Trémaux. Marx to Engels: Aug. 7, 1866. Engels dismissed Trémaux. Engels to Marx: Oct. 2, 1866. Cited in Nathaniel Weyl, Karl Marx: Racist (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1979), p. 72.

24. They co-authored an essay, "On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties. . . ." Linnean Society Papers (1858); reprinted in Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Philip Appleman (New York: Norton, 1970), pp. 83-97. Darwin cited Malthus: p. 83. On the Darwin-Wallace discovery, see Arnold C. Brackman, A Delicate Arrangement: The Strange Case of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (New York: Times Books, 1980).

25. Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life, 2 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905), I, pp. 361-62.

26. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Glouchester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, [1959] 1967), p. 66.

27. E. P. Hutchinson, The Population Debate: The Development of Conflicting Theories up to 1900 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

28. U.S. News and World Report (Oct. 4, 1965).

29. Ibid. (June 14, 1965).

30. "The Population Explosion," Special Article Section (July 27, 1965).

31. Paul Ehrlich, "Prologue," The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, [1968] 1970).

32. Meyer later became the president of Tufts University.

33. Jean Meyer, "Toward a Non-Malthusian Population Policy," Columbia Forum (Summer 1969), p. 5. This is published by Columbia University.

34. The United States Department of Agriculture estimated 40 percent; the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated less than 30 percent.

35. All of these figures are found in Nick Eberstadt, "Hunger and Ideology," Commentary (July 1981), p. 43.

36. Ibid., pp. 43-44.

37. Steven W. Sinding and Sheldon J. Segal, "Birth-Rate News," New York Times (Dec. 19, 1991).

38. Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, "What Happened to the Population Bomb?" Human Behavior (Jan. 1979), p. 88.

39. Ibid., p. 92.

40. John Tierney, "Betting the Planet," New York Times Magazine (Dec. 2, 1990), pp. 52-53. Gold was in the $350/oz range.

41. Their debate went back to the original Earth Day in 1970, when, at a faculty party, Simon tossed a drink in Ehrlich's face. He called Ehrlich the author of work that lacked substance or scholarship. Ibid., p. 53.

42. Warren S. Thompson, Population Problems (3rd ed.; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1942), p. 188.

43. By 1992, the U.S. birth rate had climbed to 2.05 children per family, up from 1.8 in 1987, much to the surprise of population forecasters. Lucinda Harper, "Census Bureau Lifts Population Forecast, Citing Fertility, Immigration, Longevity," Wall Street Journal (Dec. 4, 1992).

44. Ireland in this period experienced a rising population: 1.5 percent per year. "Irish Economy Dips After Big Decade," New York Times (Dec. 25, 1981). It is the one West European nation with young people visible.

45. This includes both southern and northern Europe: "The Missing Children," The Economist (Aug. 3, 1991).

46. John Vinocur, "West Germans, Birth Down, Ponder Future, or Lack of It," New York Times (April 28, 1978).

47. "Grappling With the Graying of Europe," Business Week (March 13, 1989).

48. Erik K. Drexler, Engines of Creation (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1986); K. Eric Drexler and Chris Peterson, Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1991).

49. See below, "Foreign Aid: Government to Government."

50. Julian L. Simon and Herman Kahn (eds.), The Resourceful Earth: A Response to Global 2000 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984).

51. Simon and Kahn, "Introduction," ibid., pp. 1-2. Elipses are in the original.

52. K. F. Helleiner, "The Vital Revolution Reconsidered," in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (eds.), Population in History (London: Arnold, 1965), p. 86.

53. An "echo effect" can persist for several generations: despite birth rates below the family replacement rate of 2.1 births per family, total population continues to grow because of high birth rates in the past. A rising number of marriages produces a rising population even though family size decreases.

54. Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).

55. Class position is best understood in terms of time perspective, not money. See Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), ch. 3.

56. William and Paul Paddock, Famine -- 1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive? (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).

57. Co-published by the neo-evangelical Protestant Inter-Varsity Press and the liberal Roman Catholic Paulist Press.

58. A second edition was of Rich Christians was published by Inter-Varsity in 1984, one which promised on the cover to respond to Sider's critics. Inside, there was no reference to David Chilton's refutation, or to a dozen other published critics. Sider simply stonewalled; his influence began to disappear almost immediately. He rapidly fell out of favor with his left-wing evangelical supporters when he came out publicly against both abortion and homosexuality in the mid-1980's. The third edition of Rich Christians (Waco: Word, 1990) also makes no reference to Chilton.

59. And, in the 1990's, in civil-war torn regions of former Communist domination in Europe and Asia.

60. "The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk." -- Hegel.

61. For evidence from the United States, see Jack Lissinger, Regions of Opportunity (New York: Times Books, 1986), Part 1.

62. The concept of the "third world" is uniquely political. It refers to those nations that seek government-to-government foreign aid. P. T. Bauer writes: "The Third World is the creation of foreign aid: without foreign aid there is no Third World. The concept of an underdeveloped world eventually to become the Third World was invented after the Second World War. It did not exist before then. From its inception, the unifying characteristic has been that the Third World is in practice the aggregate of countries whose governments demand and receive Western aid. In all other ways the unity or uniformity is pure fiction." Bauer, Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 87.

63. The World Bank, World Development Report 1986 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 234-35, Table 28; cited in E. Calvin Beisner, Prospects for Growth: A Biblical View of Population, Resources, and the Future (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, 1990), p. 127.

64. P. T. Bauer, Economic Analysis and Policy in Under-Developed Countries (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Commonwealth-Studies Center, published by Duke University Press and Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 83-84. Bauer published a detailed study of these government marketing boards as early as 1954: West African Trade: A Study of Competition, Oligopoly and Monopoly in a Changing Economy (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, [1954] 1963), Part 5.

65. Cited in E. Parmalee Prentice, Hunger and History: The Influence of Hunger on Human History (New York: Harper & Bros., 1939), p. 4.

66. David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators: A Biblical Response to Ronald J. Sider (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1982), pp. 127-31, 134-35, and especially 139, where he cites Walford's four causes of famine.

67. Nick Eberstadt, "Hunger and Ideology," Commentary (July 1981). Eberstadt was at the time a visiting fellow at Harvard University's Center for Population Studies.

68. Eberstadt, "Famine, Development, & Foreign Aid," Commentary (March 1985), p. 26.

69. Ibid., pp. 20-21.

70. Ibid., p. 28.

71. P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 78-79.

72. Gary North, "Free Market Capitalism," in Robert Clouse (ed.), Wealth & Poverty: Four Christian Views of Economics (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1984), pp. 27-65.

73. Eberstadt, "Famine, Development & Foreign Aid," p. 29.

74. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 42.

75. North, Moses and Pharaoh, pp. 341-42.

76. Robert L. Sassone, Handbook on Population (2nd ed.; Author, 1972), p. 53.

77. Robert M. Bleiberg, "Down a Rathole," Barron's (Aug. 11, 1975), p. 7.

78. The estimate of Dr. Max Milner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Over 40% of the World's Food Is Lost to Pests," Washington Post (March 6, 1977).

79. Idem.

80. Richard Critchfield, "Bring the Green Revolution to Africa," New York Times (Sept. 14, 1992).

81. Sider, Rich Christians, p. 17.

82. Idem.

83. Ibid., p. 214. This statement is missing in the 1984 edition.

84. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 660.

85. Claire Sterling, "The Making of the Sub-Saharan Wasteland," Atlantic Monthly (May 1974).

86. Robert A. Nisbet, "The Year 2000 and All That," Commentary (June 1968).

87. Gary North, Unholy Spirits: Occultism and New Age Humanism (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1986), pp. 6-11.

88. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969).

89. Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972).

90. On the influence of the C.F.R. and its parallel organizations throughout the Anglo-American world, see Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 950-55.

91. They were Dean Acheson, Charles Bohlen, Averill Harriman, George Kennan, Robert Lovett, and John J. McCloy. Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).

92. George Kennan, "To Prevent a World Wasteland: A Proposal," Foreign Affairs, XLVIII (April 1970), p. 401.

93. Idem.

94. Ibid., p. 402.

95. Ibid., pp. 404-5.

96. Ibid., p. 405.

97. Idem.

98. Ibid., p. 406.

99. Ibid., pp. 409-10.

100. Colin Greer, "The Well-Being of the World Is at Stake," Parade Magazine (Jan. 23, 1994), pp. 5, 6.

101. Ibid., p. 6.

102. Idem.

103. A. Solzhenitsyn, "The World Split Apart," his 1978 lecture to the graduating class of Harvard University, in Solzhenitsyn at Harvard (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980), c. 3.

104. Wilfred Beckerman and Jesse Malkin, "How much does global warming matter?" The Public Interest (Winter 1994), p. 4.

105. Peter Sawyer, Green Hoax Effect (Wodonga, Victoria, Australia: Groupacumen, 1990), p. 20.

106. Research findings on this subject are available from Dr. Arthur Robinson, Oregon Instutute of Science & Medicine, P. O. Box 1429, Cave Junction, Oregon.

107. Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1961), pp. 404-405.

108. Beckerman and Malkin, pp. 13-16.

109. Chart, Access to Energy, 21 (Nov. 1993), [p. 4]. See also Rogelio A. Maduro and Ralf Schauerhammer, The Holes in the Ozone Scare (Washington, D.C.: 21st Century Science Associates, 1992).

110. Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1993 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Government Printing Office, 1993), Table 1388: Gross National Product in Current and Constant (1989) Dollars. Some 60 nations are compared with the U.S. There are other, smaller nations not listed in the table whose output would add to the total. This would reduce the U.S. share. Exchange rate correlations are complex; it may be that the actual share of U.S. productivity is underestimated, thereby making the U.S. share of world production higher.

111. On Solzhenitsyn's anti-capitalist economic views, see Mark W. Hendrickson, The Titan and the Marketplace: The Economic Thought of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, International College, 1981), written under Hans Sennholz.

112. Solzhenitsyn, Letter to the Soviet Leaders (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 22.

113. Ibid., p. 23.

114. Idem.

115. Idem.

116. Arthur S. Miller, The Secret Constitution and the Need for Constitutional Change (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1989), p. ix.

117. Ibid., p. 2.

118. Ibid., p. 3. The most detailed treatment of this minority control is found in Philip H. Burch, Jr., Elites in American History, 3 vols. (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1981). Miller relied on this study: p. 3.

119. Ibid., p. 135.

120. Ibid., p. 81.

121. Ibid., p. 84.

122. Ibid., p. 86.

123. Idem.

124. Idem.

125. Ibid., pp. 86-87.

126. Ibid., p. 73.

127. Alfred L. Webre and Philip H. Liss, The Age of Cataclysm (New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam's Sons, [1974] 1975). This book was based on New Age religion: Edgar Cayce's predictions. Part II, ch. 3. The book included sections on Survival and Regeneration (Part III) and The Future World Society (Part IV). This section included the following chapters: Chaos, Millennium, The Federalist Party, A New Constitution, and Global Society.

128. Miller, Secret Constitution, p. 72.

129. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

130. By Jim MacNeill, Pieter Winsemius, and Taizo Yakushiji, who obviously represented the three blocs of the Trilateral Commission: North America, Europe, and Asia.

131. Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), ch. 5.

132. Gary North, "The Theology of the Exponential Curve," The Freeman (May 1970); reprinted in North, An Introduction to Christian Economics (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), ch. 8.

133. Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); Garrett Hardin, Exploring New Ethics of Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle (Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1973).

134. Gary North, "The Mythology of Spaceship Earth," The Freeman (Nov. 1969); reprinted in North, Introduction to Christian Economics, ch. 23.

135. Parade (Jan. 23, 1994), p. 5.

136. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944), ch. 10: "Why the Worst Get on Top."

137. Assumption: a fixed money supply.

138. Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population: The Economics and Ideology of Population Control (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), p. 32.

139. By Richard M. Fagley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).

140. By Seymour Melman (Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1965).

141. By Lincoln H. Day and Alice Taylor Day (New York: Delta, 1965).

142. By William and Paul Paddock (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).

143. By Ezra J. Mishan (New York: Praeger, 1967).

144. By Gordon Rattray Taylor (New York: New American Library, 1968.

145. By Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III (New York: Universe Books, 1972).

146. Edited by Mancur Olson and Hans H. Landsberg (New York: Norton, 1973).

147. By Leopold Kohr (New York: Schocken, 1977).

148. John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), ch. 23.

149. New York: New American Library, 1972.

150. Eberstadt, "Hunger and Ideology," Commentary (July 1981), p. 43.

151. Julian Simon, "Worldwide, Land for Agriculture Is Increasing, Actually," New York Times (Oct. 7, 1980); cited by Kasun, War Against Population, p. 37.

152. Sassone, Handbook on Population, pp. 51, 52.

153. Ibid., p. 53. In the 1970's, India tripled its food production by adopting free markets in agriculture. Science (Aug. 3, 1984), p. 463.

154. Ibid., p. 98.

155. Ibid., p. 100.

156. E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper Colophon, [1973] 1975).

157. Arnold S. Nash, "Food, Population and Man's Environment," in Ronald H. Preston (ed.), Technology and Social Justice (Valley Forge, Pennsylvania: Judson Press, 1971), p. 326.

158. Ibid., p. 327.

159. Jane Jacobs' criticisms of modern city planning are on target: the devastation of urban planning that destroys older neighborhoods. See especially her Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1971). On the economic viability of cities, see Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969); Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (New York: Random House, 1984).

160. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), p. 1247. This was part of Weber's incomplete Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, written shortly before his death in 1920.

161. Nash, "Food," p. 327.

162. Ibid., pp. 327-28.

163. Ibid., p. 328.

164. Edited by Rex R. Campbell and Jerry L. Wade (Boston: Allyn and Bacon).

165. Victor Books, 1992.

166. Norman Myers (ed.), Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1984); Frank Barnaby (ed.), The Gaia Peace Atlas (New York: Doubleday, 1988); Judith Plant (ed.), Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism (Philadelphia: New Society Pubs., 1989); Anuradha Vittachi, Earth Conference One: Sharing a Vision for Our Planet (Boston: New Science Library of Shambala, 1989).

167. Simon, Ultimate Resource.

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