Three cheers for Adam Smith, inventor of the world’s most effective contraceptive.

World Average GDP per Capita

You may remember Adam Smith as the 18th Century inventor of capitalism. You’d be right. But he also solved the problem of over-population. Capitalism is the greatest creator of wealth in history and wealthy families and nations have lower fertility rates. 

Let’s take the wealth side first. Think of Singapore versus Venezuela. Singapore has zero natural resources and Venezuela sits on one of the greatest oil reserves in the world. Or consider North versus South Korea. Or the People's Republic of China versus Taiwan. Or, in its day, East versus West Germany. 

 Capitalism beats a state run economy every single time. No contest.

Now, about those fertility rates. Look at the chart of U.S. birth rates in relation to income. Pretty obvious. The richer the family, the fewer the kids. It doesn’t matter why, the indisputable fact is that higher income, lowers the birth rate.

Does this relationship hold internationally? It does. Our indisputable fact went global: the higher the gross national product, the lower the birth rate.

Put these two observable phenomena together and you solve the Left’s most emotive fixation: global population control. Yet they reliably turn their back on capitalism because they distrust a system that makes some people richer than themselves. If the sustainability of Earth is an existential threat, then why discard obvious solutions? Many Leftists don’t think, others naively follow the catechism, but some purposely craft rationalizations for irrationality. 

Take population control: instead a real answer to their obsession, they promote every form of non-propagational sex, rabid feminism that separates men and women, people bunched up in tiny living quarters unfit for a family, ridicule of female homemakers, family dissolution, government dictates of family size, and when all else fails, they demand contraceptives and abortion for perverts who insist on an archaic relationship.

I sometimes wonder if anthropophobia is why Leftists frequently defend Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and other tyrants who impose ruthless forms of population control. (Hitler seems to be the only socialist they refuse to give a pass for murdering his own populous.)

Try Googling “birth rates versus GDP.” You’ll get hits on studies, papers, and programs to reduce population in order to increase wealth. Backward. They’re convoluting cause and effect. Why? Because they loathe capitalism. It’s not allowed in their toolbox. So, without thinking, they flip cause and effect. In the Leftist’s world, there are many cures worse than the disease. For example, they hate carbon dioxide, but lose their stuff if carbon-free nuclear energy is mentioned. If the means are blasphemous, the end remains delusive. 

Leftists cannot accept that the surest path to population control is to promote capitalism in every corner of the world. In fact, capitalism cures pollution, hunger, housing, illness, and even throws a monkey-wrench into totalitarianism. Just ask the Pilgrims. They got all that stuff for the first Thanksgiving after they tossed socialism in the ash heap.

But the Left won’t alter course. They remain bound to an ideology that promises a dreamland … but never delivers. 

Don’t blame them. They can’t help themselves. It’s in their nature.