Essays in Idleness

Elon Musk, one of our tech billionaires, was in Italy over the weekend, preaching to the Italians on the importance of generating babies. He especially recommended little Italians, to diffuse the waves of immigrant North Africans, but without stressing this demographic point. Verily, even the Mussulmans need to have babies more frequently, in Mussulman countries, on present trends. Mr Musk has done an admirable job of generating babies himself, as some childless people in the media point out.

Giorgia Meloni, prime ministrix of Italy, and the prime ministers of two other small European countries, Britain and Albania, also attended this spectacle, at which they accepted applause for Europe’s first programme to pay for the repatriation of surplus immigrants. This, as well as subsidizing women to make babies. Governments eventually charge taxpayers for all the public services they provide, including the debt service.

But there are inexpensive, indeed free ways to achieve the preferred demographic results. This would begin by cutting taxes to the point where women would have the leisure to find husbands, who could spare them the nasty slave-wage jobs which force them out of their homes. For the last century or so, women have been compelled to work by (“democratic”) government edict; not even men should be coerced in this way.

As Donald Trump tried to persuade European governments to increase public spending on defence, to 2 percent of GDP, and additional spending is quite whimsical (defence being the only expenditure of the state that isn’t naturally municipal), I recommend that European governments get by on 2 percent of GDP for everything. The United States is an august superpower, however, and might have to set its compulsory poll tax a bit higher, at, say, 3 percent. The rest would be retained by the people who earn it, who could then afford not only babies, but eleemosynary activities. They could even give alms to all the unemployable former bureaucrats.

This leads me to step two of my recommendation. We need Christianity even more than we need tanks and missiles (though of course we can afford both). Babies will arrive when we recover our lost faith. May I suggest the Roman Catholic form, which is Christianity par excellence; or failing that, the Greek, Coptic, Armenian, &c, salutary rites.