HS 256 – Why We Don’t Need Population Control with Steven Mosher

 

Steven Mosher is the president of Population Research Institute and has personally witnessed forced abortions in China. He talks on the population control issue and how our economies have gotten better with the raise of more people in this episode of Holistic Survival.

 

Key Takeaways:
2:00 – Steven saw women arrested for being pregnant in China.
3:50 – China has eliminated 400 million people from their population and they are now suffering for it.
7:25 – The elite would dictate who stays and who goes if population control became a reality.
14:51 – Who would want to go back to 1927 where there was 2 billion people and the per capita income was only $500 a year?
18:25 – The real environmental problem is not caused by people, but by poverty.
23:25 – The United States is a unique country and has saved the world from tyranny three times.

 

Mentioned In This Episode:
pop.org

 

Tweetables:
“If a tiny elite can dictate to us how many children we have or not have, then we are no longer free.”

“The Russians are now paying a one-time bonus of $12,000 to every couple who brings a child into the world in Russia.”

“If you set about eliminating people, you only make the problems worse.”

 

Transcript

Jason Hartman:
It’s my pleasure to welcome Steve Mosher to the show. He is president of the Population Research Institute and he’s author of Population Control: Real Cost, Illusory Benefits and it’s a pleasure to have him on the show today. Steve, welcome, how are you?

Steven Mosher:
I’m fine, thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Jason:
Good, good. It’s good to have you. Maybe I should have said Steven in your intro, but I’ll call you Steve if you don’t mind. Tell us a little bit about how you became interested in this topic. I mean, you were a witness to forced abortions and so forth, weren’t you?

Steven:
Well, I was. I was the first American social scientist allowed to go to the People’s Republic of China when we established diplomatic relations with that country back in 1979. I was at the time at Stanford University. I was teaching a Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley and I can read, write, and speak Chinese. I was surprised as anyone would be when I found myself in China and in the midst of the most horrific barbaric population control program the world has ever seen. I saw women who were 7-8-9 months pregnant who were arrested for a crime. The crime? Was being pregnant without permission because the one child policy had just been announced and women carrying second, third, and fourth order of children were declared to be carrying illegal children and those illegal children were ordered to be terminated.

So, the women were arrested. They were taken to clinics, they were given lethal injects into the womb, into the unborn child itself, and the children were then removed often by Caesarean section abortions. I was present in the room as these dead and dying babies were being removed from their mother’s stomach by caesarean section abortion and the women afterwards, of course, were then sterilized, so they would not come back two or three years later carrying another illegal child. They were permanently taken out of the business of reproduction by the state.

So, I was an eye witness to this barbaric one child policy and of course it changed my views on the whole population question. I went to China thinking that China probably did have too many people. I left China thinking that the government of China was totally out of control and in the years since have been convinced that China has done precisely the wrong thing by embarking the one child policy. China has eliminated 400 million people from its population on the grounds that China was overpopulated.

Well, China today, 30 years, 35 years after the one child policy began is no longer a poor backward agrarian country. It’s a country with a robust economy. The second largest economy in the world. It’s a country where they now have a nation wide labor shortage. Why? Because they have eliminated 400 million people from their population. It’s a country where future economic growth is going to be compromised because they know have a shortage of young workers coming in to the work force, building homes and cars, buying homes and cars, driving the economy forward. So, they’ve quite nearly shot themselves in the foot by this over zealous horrific population control policy that they’re still continuing today.

Jason:
In about 10-15 years, we’re going to see some horrific results of this policy because China’s economy is already tenuous, but it’s going to suffer some serious problems as there are just not enough people to support the aging population. Not they are big into social programs over there, but it’s really this view that humans, Steven, are a cost and this is what scares me about the environmental movement is that this Malthusian idea that humans are the scourge of the earth, that they’re not a resource, that they’re just a cost, that they’re just terrible, polluted, and the funny thing is, I don’t see many of the people who profess this ideas committing suicide. I don’t see many of them taking their own lives. I guess they don’t view themselves as a burden to the earth, they just view everybody else that way. Your thoughts?

Steven:
Yeah, that’s what population control is all about. It’s always about the majority targeting the minority. The religious majority targeting the religious minority, the ethnic majority targeting the minorities, the rich targeting the poor; the haves targeting the have nots. That’s the way it has always been. The idea is never that the people carrying out the program are the problem. The problem is always the others, however the others might be defined to be, but yeah, China has setup a huge demographic trap for itself and it is falling into it year by year as we get closer to the aging and dying off of the Chinese population.

They have other problems as well. I mean, they have 30 million young men in China in their 20s and 30s who will not be able to get married, because their brides were killed years ago in the one child policy. I mean, (#6:04?) panacide or sex selection abortion, the selective elimination of little girls before they’re born by abortion. So, that’s another problem and then of course we now have the beginning of massive euthanasia in China were the elder who are considered to be non-productive and a burden on society, Hitler would have called them useless eaters, are now going to be lined up and eliminated by the millions by a state that doesn’t value them.

Jason:
Unbelievable. It’s such an oxymoron that communism is such a, it’s got to be the biggest evil humanity has ever created, big government, communism, socialism, it’s a matter of degree only. It always leads to the same thing and I used to say that it’s responsible for the deaths of 200 million people, but it’s really a lot more than that when you take into account the forced abortions. I wasn’t even counting that. I was just talking about Stalin now, you know, of course, Hitler, that was the socialist party was the name of it. Everybody seems to forget that. It’s always the elite class, you know, with no value for human life. It’s just amazing, isn’t it? We just see kind of resurgence of that idea that a tiny elite should control the lives of the rest of us in the rational environmental movement and the population control movement, because again, if a tiny elite can dictate to us what kind of cars we drive and what kind of homes we live in and what temperature we set our air conditioning unit at and how much water we drink and what kind of food we eat and how many children we have or not have as the case may be, then we are no longer free, then we’ve lost our liberty entirely.

Jason:
So, on your website you say this interestingly, you say people, not population. Can you expand on that idea?

Steven:
Well, look, there are two views of human beings. One view you already, you already reminded us of and that is that human beings are seen as pest, as a scourge on the planet, they’re seen as carbon emitters, they’re seen as polluters, the most, the least charming way I’ve ever heard children described and this was by a British head of a radical environmental group was carbon emitters, he said, “We should reduce the number of little carbon emitters being born.” And of course, when I think of a new born baby, I think of a human being with a creative intelligent who when educated and when they grow ill bring his intelligent to work to help make himself his own lively hood in the world to help make his own family life better, to help his community, to help his country. I think people as every stomach coming with two hands attached. I think if every mouth is being backed by a creative brain that works hard to make life better himself and the rest of us.

So, I see people as producers, I see babies as blessings and not burdens and I see many countries around the world now, which are having too few children to maintain their current population, many countries in Europe are dying, Japan is dying, South Korea is dying, China of course because of the one child policy is dying.

Jason:
Russia is paying people to have children. Putin is paying couples.

Steven:
I have been Moscow at conferences to encourage the Russian government to raise the birth rate, because Russia is losing hundreds of thousands of people each year. Now, I’m not a fan, a big fan, of Vladimir Putin, who is these days? But, the fact is that the Russian government is now paying a one-time bonus of $12,000 to every couple who brings a child into the world in Russia. They’re so desperate for people they’re offering the largest baby bonus in the world right now.

Jason:
It’s just amazing how this stuff seems to go full circle and all of these unintended consequences or maybe they aren’t, who knows. What else do you want people to know about population control? I almost want to ask you to comment on some of the maybe more conspiratorial concepts. I’m especially interested and I don’t know if you saw it, but that Bill Gates TED speech where he seemed to have a slip of a tongue. Did you happen to catch that or have any thoughts about it?

Steven:
Well, I’ve been following Bill Gates for many, many years. I had exchanges with Bill Gates urging him to stop funding population control programs because they were compromising our long term economic future and his reply was, “Well, I’m only funding population control programs in countries where the population is growing extremely rapidly, more than 3% a year.” I went back at him and I said, “You know, there are only a few small island in the pacific where the population is still growing at 3% a year. The rest of the world is seeing birth rates fall into the cellar, into the basement, and the rest of the world is going to suffer a problem of not too many people, but too few people in the future. So, enough is enough already.”

I’m not sure that I managed to change his mind on that issue. You know, his father was a big support of population control. Dr. Gates, Bill Gate’s father and a long time board member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and I’m afraid that Bill Gates learned at his father’s knee that babies were a burden and not a blessing and people were a pestilence on the planet, something had to be done to prevent the population bomb from going off.

Jason:
Well, why did Bill and Melinda Gates have children then?

Steven:
You know, we would all want the radical left to actually act on their positions they hold. I mean, we want them to be consistent and if they think they’re too many people on the planet, well they should lead the way and eliminating themselves. There is a voluntary human extinction movement by the way, but I understand they have trouble recruiting new members.

Jason:
It’s so crude and it sounds so terrible to say, but why don’t I see bummer stickers that say or t-shirts that say a real environmentalist would commit suicide, you know? If this is the belief, which it appears to be because at the end of any of these arguments from the radical environmental movement, that’s what it comes to, human beings are the problem, they’re not a resource, they are the problem.

I remember I interviewed a Berkeley professor on my show. He had written at least one book on the topic and he kept droning on and on about how we have seven billion people and that’s just not sustainable and I said, well, tell me what number is sustainable, you know, give me a number. I mean, if seven billion is too many, what is the right number and then I let him answer and he didn’t have an answer, of course, and then I said, well, okay, whatever the number is, who gets to decide who stays and who goes?

And of course, oh well, we can’t, they just have no answer for that. It’s really a scary ideology. I mean, a quote cropped up, I think it was out of the dying Soviet Union that said, green trees have red roots. The new way to control the population was through environmentalism. Are we just being too paranoid about this or I’ll say me, you know, if you don’t want to be included in that or is this a real thing?

Steven:
No, it is real, it is a matter of tiny perhaps over educated at least thinking that they know better than the rest of us how we should live our lives and what choices we should make in child baring, but look, there’s seven billion of us, we are living longer than ever before, the average life span on the planet is over 70 years, almost 71 years, that’s a pretty good average. We are eating better than ever before, healthier diets, we have more education opportunities, we have more opportunities for employment now at seven billion than we did before, per capita incomes have never been higher at seven billion people our per capital income, average per capita income world wide is now over $10,000.

Who would want to go back to 1927 when there were two billion of us and the per capita income was only $500 a year. Who would want to go back to 1960 when there were three billion of us per capita income was $1500 a year and we lived on average 60 years instead of 71 years. Human beings have never been better off, never lived longer, never been more highly educated, never been better able to communicate and travel across continents, what’s wrong with this picture?

Jason:
I have another show I publish called the Longevity and Biohacking show and, you know, we are in so many areas of technology, we are on this exponential, exponential curve that is just, it is truly an amazing time to be alive. It is an incredible time and could we have gotten there with two billion minds and two billion laborers working us up to that point? I don’t know. I mean, the cover of Time Magazine in the early 60s, I found a copy of it somewhere, talked about how three billion people was the end of the world. The population crisis at three billion people and now we’ve got more than double that.

Steven:
Yeah, you asked the Berkeley professor how many people could the planet carry.

Jason:
I asked him that. I said, how do you know seven billion is too many? I mean, he is a professor. He’s an analytical guy, you know, I said, how do you know it can’t contain ten billion people or 12 billion or 20 or 40 billion? There’s no answer. It’s just an anecdotal opinion. It’s bad and it’s getting worse.

Steven:
There can not be an answer, because it depends on the level of technology that we have. Look, I’m an anthropologist. Back in the days when man kind survived by hunting and gather in the tempered zones a square mile could only support about two human beings who were out grubbing for roots and hunting small game. We moved to civic agriculture, you could put a few hundred people on that small square mile. Add irrigation, canals, you could put a couple thousands on the best plots of lands.

Now, of course, we have cities with densities of 50,000 people a square mile. There is no way to tell how many people the planet could hold unless you specify a level of technology and since we keep having technological advances that number keeps increase. So, there is no answer to that question, but it is a deceit used by the other side to scare people into thinking that we are already coming close to a limit on the number of human beings and we must radically restructure the economy, radically our life styles in order to avoid everything breaking down in some sort of catastrophic collapse and I believe that is never going to happen.

I believe the threats that are made that the sky is falling is a control mechanism that is used to get us to alter our behavior and to give large sums to money who are interested primarily in accumulating wealth in that way and accumulating power that way over our lives. I believe that we can solve without an intelligence any problems that are numbers caused and I also believe that the real environmental problem is not caused by too many people, it’s called by poverty and poverty is what causes people to pollute the very waters they need to drink. Poverty is what causes people to cut down the last tree because they need to build shelter, they need it to heat their homes. Poverty is what causes the last square foot of land to be planted because people are desperate for food.

We know how to cure poverty, let’s cure poverty in Africa and elsewhere by protecting private poverty and ending government corruption and allow economies to grow and as we do that, we’ll be able to set aside money and to clean up the environment, to create nature perseveres and to bring the rest of the world into the kind of, you know, clean environment that we now enjoy in the United States. We know how to solve these problems and you do not solve these problem by eliminating people. If you set about eliminating people, you only make the problems worse.

Jason:
You know, it’s really truly amazing. Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus lived from 1766 to 1834. That’s when the Malthusian was born in that time. Look it, we are hundreds of years after this and we’re still thinking this is a problem and look at all the problems that have been solved through creativity and human effort and human beings being viewed as asset, not a burden. It’s a scary ideology. It really, truly is. Hey, got to ask you, one of the questions I have here in these materials and I don’t know where this came from, but what is China’s secret strategy to replace America as a global super power? I can’t imagine China would be in a position, especially after what we just talked about, but is that something you address in any of your materials?

Steven:
Well, China is a country that historical dominated its known world. It was surrounded by tributary states. It controlled the land mass up north to Siberia where human beings couldn’t live because it was too cold. It controlled all the land out into the Gobi Desert where human beings couldn’t live because it was too dry. It controlled all the lands south Himalayans, which were hard to get over and it controlled all the land east to the Pacific ocean including most of the islands and peninsulas, so China has always dominated its known world. Its economy is growing stronger, it’s building up a first rate military, and it does have larger ambitious.

It is now claimed the entire south China sea, which is sort of like the United States suddenly declaring that the entire Caribbean belonged to the United States including all the resources and islands they’re in. That’s what China has done in the south China sea. So, again, this is a country that is run by a party state controlled by a tiny elitist party that is interested in expanding China’s influence. So, it is, yeah, I do speak and write and have worked with the US government in the past on China related issues. I helped to setup 20 years ago, our radio free-China broadcast into China and have done some other things to deal with the glooming China threat.

Jason:
Is that something they could actually execute on though? I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like they’d be in a position to do it. If you look around the world as with all its problems, it really seems even though, you know, we may have felt differently at various times or even now the people who think the dollar is going to collapse and all of this kind of stuff and the gold bugs out there. The US is in a pretty enviable position and I’m not saying its managed well at all. I hate the debt, I hate the government spending, I think it’s massively irresponsible, but by comparison, by comparison, because it’s all relative isn’t it, Steven, for large countries, I mean, it seems like the US is in pretty darn shape.

Steven:
Well, we are fortunate in this country that we have term limits on at least the office of the Presidency.

Jason:
Too bad we don’t have it in congress.

Steven:
Too bad we don’t have it in congress as well, because the main power we have in a democracy is the power to throw the bums out and I think we should throw them out at regular intervals before they get too comfortable in Washington, DC and learn too well to play the power game, but yeah, I mean, look, I wrote a few speeches for President Reagan after he left office and I believe with him that the United State is a unique country. I believe in American exceptionalism, I believe that we will set apart as a special place in the world.

We have, after all, in the last century we’ve saved the world war from tyranny three times in World War 1 and World War 2 and then by winning the Cold War. I do believe that there’s still tyrannies out there, including China that we must be active and opposing as well, but there’s a great resilience in the American economy and a great resilience in the American spirit that I think will take us through these times and I do believe that America’s best days are ahead of her.

Jason:
Good stuff. Give out your website if you would.

Steven:
We can be found at the world wide web at pop.org.

Jason:
Real easily, pop.org. That is a great website. You get some great resources there. Anything else you want to say, Steven, just in closing or if you want to give out a Twitter address or anything like that too, you’re welcome to.

Steven:
Well, I just want people to remember as they hear their fellow humans beings being described inhuman terms as parasites or pestilence or just as consumers that people are really in their numbers are a blessing to the rest of us, especially in a free society where they’re free to start businesses and improve their lives and the lives of others. Every baby born in the United States will contribute more over his or her life time to the economy then they will consume. Every baby born in the United States will produce about $600,000 more than they will consume. So, every baby born is a small fortune and a benefit to the rest of us.

Jason:
Good stuff. Steven Mosher, thank you so much for joining us.

Steven:
Thank you.

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