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Quote of the Day: Is Europe Finished?
Let’s cut through the diplo-speak: If Mr. Biden and the Europeans don’t get Ukraine right, Europe’s future is finished.
Putin is Hitler. He is attempting the extermination of a people and the obliteration of their cities. World War II wasn’t fought in Europe to prevent a future nuclear exchange between Russia and the U.S. It was fought because Europe was experiencing the indiscriminate murder of civilians under Nazi military doctrine, now revived by Mr. Putin and the Russian general staff.— Daniel Henninger
In an ambitious flurry of activity, Europe is speaking out and taking action against Vladimir Putin, canceling some of their commitments to him and stepping in to help Ukraine. Most of the Ukrainian refugees are landing in Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia. The EU has established an emergency protection system, offering jobs, shelter, and medical treatment. They have also worked at streamlining their entry procedures. The invasion of Putin has been criticized harshly, and Europe has stepped up.
But how long will they enthusiastically deal with this new reality?
At this writing, 4 million people have fled Ukraine; another 6.5 million people are displaced. It’s impossible to know how long the conflict will drag on, or whether the EU countries will be able to support millions of refugees, or how many of the Ukrainians will stay. Will they be able to find work? Will they be able to adjust if they choose to stay? Will they be welcomed by the various countries?
And will the U.S. make a sincere and reasonable effort to supply arms and compassionate support, and for how long?
And yet . . . and yet . . .
Does Europe really have a choice? Over time will they try to ignore the threats that Putin poses to the European continent?
Will they realize that helping Ukraine and Ukrainians and standing up to Putin could determine the very future of Europe?
Published in Foreign Policy
Well that’s good, but it is an average. Which means even if you two had 4 or more, it means other couples had maybe none. You’re doing it FOR them, and still falling behind.
It matters now. If Putin is not stopped now, there isn’t much point in having more children.
One reason why Putin might not be stopped is because people haven’t been having enough children, for decades.
Lack of children isn’t what’s keeping anyone from stopping him.
It’s one reason for lack of resolve in other countries – they have less to protect – and may also be partly why Putin does things like this: Russia’s population is shrinking, and this may be his/their last chance.
As societies and social groups become wealthier, they have fewer children. You’re not likely to change that. So if you want the west to have more children, we need to become poorer. Or at least we need to stop becoming wealthier. It’s not clear that a wealthy people has more children once it starts to become poorer, but I suppose we could try. A good way to do that is to decentralize and erect trade barriers between and within nations. I am in favor, but am not in favor of going to extremes, as that would make us vulnerable to all sorts of problems, too.
Maybe we should quit looking for deeper and deeper root causes and go to work to stop Putin.
That may be correlative but it’s not completely causative. Arguably, the US is at least as wealthy as Europe, and yet the US birth rate hasn’t collapsed like Europe’s has.
The best argument is likely that Europe is far more secular, non- and even anti-religious, etc. Mark Steyn explains it well in his books, especially America Alone, and in interviews. In effect, they don’t have children because they don’t believe in the/a future, as much as Americans do, especially conservative Americans.
The US birthrate is below replacement and falling quickly. It’s 1.7 at the moment. The 2020 census had the smallest population growth ever recorded and was entirely because of immigration.
You mean they lack skin in the game? Huh. Who woulda thunk that was important?
In addition, and surely related to the religious aspect, the tradition of voluntary collectivism driven by individualism and the established importance of liberty and freedom of choice is still strong.
Theodore Roosevelt Malloch agrees with me. Europe is finished and the US isn’t far behind:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/08/the-united-states-and-europe-redefined/
If I’ve got my memory cap on, the average European is only 2/3rds as wealthy as the Average American. There are only a couple of tiny countries in Europe that have higher per capita income than the United States.
So by taking in more people through immigration your population growth shrinks? How does that work?
I think the idea is that despite taking in more people through immigration, population growth shrank (is shrank a word??).
I think the word is “shranked.”
Perhaps. I’ve said this before. There’s an ebb and flow but the general trend since the year 2000 has been a trend leftward. Just look at the overall popular vote for President since then. Even when we’ve won with the electoral college, we’ve lost the popular vote, except for one where we inched one out. Thank God for the Electoral College.
But things can change. Maybe Hispanics do come to the right. That’s really the hope to change the dynamics of the last twenty years.
Thank you Charles. Well said. The European response to Putin has been superb.
Shrank is a word…lol
Don’t be fooled with raw numbers. The distribution of wealth is different. I’m not complaining, but wealth in the US is concentrated to fewer. That throws average off. The average American is about the same as the average European.
I don’t think that is right. Don’t forget that we have people on the bottom that skew the statistics just as much as those at the top. I’ve looked over various economic factors in the past and Europeans always fall short of their American counterparts. They have lower wages, fewer appliances, fewer cars, less living space, lower buying power with the money they do have, and so on. Some pundits used to argue that when certain European countries criticized our treatment of Blacks, it turns out that our Blacks have higher living standards than those country’s average citizens do.
Huh? The only reason the population grew was because of immigration. Clear enough?
You didn’t say that before. Now I understand.
I don’t think that’s quite right either. The rate of growth was the lowest it’s been, but that doesn’t mean growth was solely attributable to immigration. It’s like when the government says it’s “cutting” spending, but what it really means is they’ve reduced the rate of increase in spending. . .
Trump shifted the black vote too, more than any other previous Republican.
Another point Steyn made was that in Europe it’s far more common for people to be “jammed into small apartments” as Steyn put it, but “nobody wants to raise 3 kids in a small apartment.”
I guess that’s one reason, among many others, why the Obama Administration was pushing for greater urban development.
Plus Europe and the UK’s self-destructive energy policies, starving their populations and economies of affordable and reliable energy.
As Red Green would say at the end of every show, “We’re rootin’ for ya.
We’re all in this together.”[EDITED to eliminate CoC violation]
Plus the impact on production of fertilizer for food growing, etc.
As are we, under Brandon.