STEPHEN MOORE: Europe Is Dying – Are We Next?

Let’s start with a very simple truism: you can’t have prosperity without people.

Human beings are the most valuable resource, because it is human ingenuity that creates and cultivates all other earthly resources. We as human beings are the custodians and protectors of the planet, not its destroyers, as the radical environmentalists would have you believe.

The richer and more technologically advanced we become, the more likely we are to avert a catastrophic event like a giant meteor crashing into the planet and destroying all life.

Which brings us to a potentially ruinous trend: many countries are literally running out of people.

This alarming chart on births and deaths in Europe is a terrifying glimpse into the future of a new dark age of the western world, if birth rates don’t start rising — and quickly. Europeans are becoming extinct.

Negative population growth is a sure killer of prosperity and human flourishing. It’s also contrary to Christianity and most other religions, which instruct us to “be fruitful and multiply.”

It’s not just Europe. Japan and Korea will cut their populations in half over the next 80 years if they don’t start moving away from one child per couple rates of propagating.

Why are rich countries depopulating the planet?

For 60 years, prophets of doom like Paul Ehrlich (“The Population Bomb”) and governments around the world — including our own — warned that we all had a moral obligation to save the planet by having fewer babies. There were periods of forced abortions, forced sterilizations, forced birth control, and — in advanced nations like in Europe and the U.S. — a cultural sneering at families with four or five or six kids.