Eurabia and Columbia ascendent

Mark Steyn is the man who sells the position on “It’s the population growth stupid” about why the Conflict with Islam will grow worse not better as time goes on in Europe. Here is his latest missive on that subject.

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birth rate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyper-rationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a twenty-first-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could only increase their numbers by conversion. The problem is that secondary- impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths—or, at any rate, virtues—and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

As many other books have covered well the bigger your welfare state the larger a pool of workers you’re going to need to make it possible. Just as very soon their will be a massive opening in the world of jobs as the boomers start to go off into retirement (which will lead to massive labor cost savings and economic growth.) Also leads us to a world of massive Immigrant labor. Jobs going to India is less worrisome as Indians going to America and U.K and taking jobs there at a much lower rate of pay.

It becomes very clear here to just who isn’t reproducing

Scroll way down to the bottom of the Hot One Hundred top breeders and you’ll eventually find the United States, hovering just at replacement rate with 2.07 births per woman. Ireland is 1.87, New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76. But Canada’s fertility rate is down to 1.5, well below replacement rate; Germany and Austria are at 1.3, the brink of the death spiral; Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1, about half replacement rate. That’s to say, Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22 percent, Bulgaria’s by 36 percent, Estonia’s by 52 percent. In America, demographic trends suggest that the blue states ought to apply for honorary membership of the EU: in the 2004 election, John Kerry won the sixteen with the lowest birth rates; George W. Bush took twenty-five of the twenty-six states with the highest. By 2050, there will be 100 million fewer Europeans, 100 million more Americans—and mostly red-state Americans.

The people who are closer to the leftist-marxist school of thought (though Bulgarian and Estonia are leaving that… even though they have had generations of it forced on them by the communists) are the ones who aren’t breeding. The people who speak of all cultures having an equal value (but ours is bad because we are oppressors) are voting with their feet in a literalist way.

Even if they avoid that, the idea of a childless Europe ever rivaling America militarily or economically is laughable. Sometime this century there will be 500 million Americans, and what’s left in Europe will either be very old or very Muslim. Japan faces the same problem: its population is already in absolute decline, the first gentle slope of a death spiral it will be unlikely ever to climb out of. Will Japan be an economic powerhouse if it’s populated by Koreans and Filipinos? Very possibly. Will Germany if it’s populated by Algerians? That’s a trickier proposition.
Best-case scenario? The Continent winds up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates.
Worst-case scenario: Sharia, circa 2040; semi-Sharia, a lot sooner—and we’re already seeing a drift in that direction.

When people talk to me of a collapse of the US as a power to Europe or China I just smile and nod. The world our parents left us will get much Stranger but the things that have made the US great are still lurching along.

Let us pray it never stops