Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [10]
Grant was first and foremost an avid conservationist. He was head of the New York Zoological Society, a cofounder of the Bronx Zoo, and a pioneer of wildlife management who started and supported numerous environmental organizations throughout his lifetime. In a New Yorker magazine profile of the anthropologist Franz Boas, an opponent of eugenics and nemesis of Grant and Osborn, Grant is described as someone who’d “extended a passion for preserving bison and caribou into a mania for preserving the ’Nordic race.’ ”
John Tanton would understand.
PEOPLE ARE POLLUTION
Not all early proponents of eugenics were reactionary bigots. Many prominent progressive and socialist reformers also cottoned to the idea, reasoning that eugenics would help temper evil, unwieldy free-market capitalism and lead to more egalitarian socioeconomic outcomes. Europeans in this camp included Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. And U.S. advocates included not only Justice Holmes but also Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate who wanted “more children from the fit, less from the unfit.” The founder of Planned Parenthood, Sanger is celebrated today as a feminist icon, but she was also a strong supporter of the 1924 immigration law, calling Eastern Europeans a “menace” to civilization. “While I personally believe in the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the insane, and the syphiletic,” she wrote in 1919, “I have not been able to discover that these measures are more than superficial deterrents when applied to the constantly growing stream of the unfit. . . . Birth control, on the other hand, not only opens the way to the eugenist, but it preserves his work.”
Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute who’s written extensively about population control, says “the Hitler branch of eugenics was completely discredited, but the Sanger branch was not. And the Sanger branch gets us to today’s zero population growth movement.”
The “people are pollution” crowd often cites the eighteenth-century classical liberal economist Thomas Robert Malthus as their muse. But, just as John Maynard Keynes ultimately disowned what’s referred to today as “Keynesian economics,” Malthus, in the end, was no Malthusian. Which is to say that he was not immune to facts. And those invoking his name to buttress their antinatal arguments are distorting his population theory by ignoring the evolution of his arguments.
In 1798, at age thirty-two, Malthus published (anonymously) An Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he stated that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce sustenance for man.” He further explained: “Population, when unchecked, increases in geometric ratio. Subsistence increases only in arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with the numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison to the second.”
Malthus’s limits theories were wrong, as contemporary economic giants like David Ricardo did not hesitate to tell him, and as Malthus himself acknowledged in later editions of his initial essay. During his own lifetime, his prediction that more people would tend to produce a drop in the standard of living was proved false. Population and living standards rose simultaneously, and continue to do so today. Malthus would later say that he overstated his case. He conceded that all sorts of things can postpone or prevent the collision of human numbers and resources, including technological progress and what he called “moral restraint,” or the rational decision by people to have fewer children.
Malthus’s views adjusted over time as he looked at his “diminishing returns” model in more detail. In the second edition he wrote, “I have endeavored to soften some of the harshest conclusions of the first Essay.” And in his conclusion to the fifth edition, he said:
From a review of the state of society in former periods, compared with the present, I should certainly say that the evils resulting from the principle of population have rather