America Alone

America Alone Read Online Free PDF

Book: America Alone Read Online Free PDF
Author: Mark Steyn
at some soiree, I'd much rather Doris Day provided the evening's musical entertainment than the latest caterwauling gangsta rapper; I'd rather date Debbie Reynolds than Angelina Jolie. But even to put it in those terms is to become aware of how our assumptions about a society's health - about its innovative and creative energies - are based on its youthfulness. Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill's closed down and the young people have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have - managing growth or managing decline?
    So what happens when the whole nation - and in Europe the entire continent - has a profile closer to the decrepit mill town than to the Sun Belt suburb?
    And, if you're anti-capitalist, don't console yourself with the thought that you don't need all those businesses anyway. Big Government depends on bigger population: Americans have a relatively smallish government compared to Canada and Europe, but the U.S. Social Security system assumes a 30 percent population growth between now and 2075 or so and, even then, expects to be running a deficit after 2017. Now imagine you're Spain and you've America Alone

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    got even bigger public pensions liabilities and a population that's going to be halving every thirty-five years. The progressive Left can be in favor of Big Government or population control but not both. That mutual incompatibility is about to plunge Europe into societal collapse. There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital - and that's before anyone invented unsustainable welfare systems. True, birth rates are falling all over the world, and it may be that eventually every couple on the planet decides to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of thirty-nine. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage - and those societies with expensive social programs dependent on mass immigration will be in the worst predicament. It's no consolation for the European Union, with its deathbed birth statistics, if the Third World's demographics are also falling: they're your nursery, they're the babies you couldn't be bothered to have; if their fertility rate goes the same way yours has, that will be a problem for you long before it's a problem for them. Unless it corrects course within the next five to ten years, Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: the grand buildings will still be standing but the people who built them will be gone. By the next century, German will be spoken only at Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering's Monday night poker game in Hell. And long before the Maldive Islands are submerged by "rising sea levels" every Spaniard and Italian will be six feet under. But sure, go ahead and worry about
    "climate change."
    More immediately, Europe will be semi-Islamic in its politico-cultural character within a generation.
    In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent's population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear - in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.
    THE MATH OF THE MAP
    My interest in demography dates back to September 11, 2001, when a demographic group I hadn't given much thought to managed to get my attention. I don't mean the, ah, unfortunate business with the planes and buildings and so forth, but the open cheering of the
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