Essays in Idleness

We hear, more and more frequently, about the population crash “that is coming,” because urban people don’t want to have children. By “urban” I mean those who live in vast conurbations, where most people live these days. It is only a century or two since this began to happen, and when only a city or two was so large that one could not walk out of it. Soon, there will be no country in the world in which urbanites are not in the majority, and very much in the majority of most. Moreover, an increasing proportion of the country bumpkins are not really rural. When they get money they buy pretty cottages with all the urban conveniences, including nearby supermarkets. They do not contribute to agricultural productivity, as the great majority of citizens once did. Almost everyone makes money either from the government, or by doing something that is “private” and equally unnecessary.

Note: this much could be said without even referring to statistics, the way city people do. My country-boy preference is for real things, not numbers. (Although I really live in a huge, and very ugly, conurbation.)

An incidental discovery of the government intervenors, who are everywhere, is that women can’t be bribed to have more children. Some poor immigrants can be bribed, but not for long. Soon, most Western countries will be filled with poor immigrants in cities, while the countryside is depopulated. Who has not realized that children are an unrewarding expense? Ah well, the welfare state will be vomiting more money into the problem, as it expands. And then, thanks to inflation, the welfare state will collapse.

My view of this is the same as my view of America, after Kommie-la and Tampon Tim have won the November election. The catastrophic effects of this are easily predictable, but as Mencken would say, the Americans will have got just what they voted for, good and hard. For urban people believe in words, not things, and prefer comfortable, and fanciful, lies.

But what does this matter if the world is depopulating? To a free people — inwardly and actually free and agrarian — this is a problem that will go away. Modern urban people will have exterminated themselves (how sad!), leaving the farmers and fisherfolk to get on with it.