The
Malthusian Theory
of
Population Expansion
How an 18th century economists’ flawed theory is being used by governments and industry to justify forced culling of the world population today.
By: David Deschesne
Editor/Publisher,
Fort Fairfield Journal, December 30, 2020
In 1798, economist, Thomas Malthus published a book entitled, An Essay on the Principle of Population. His thesis centered around the observation that as a society’s food supply increased, the population also increased accordingly but that population growth ultimately ceased as the increased number of people tapped out the current food supply being produced. He postulated that population growth expanded geometrically every 25 years, as opposed to food production increasing arithmetically ultimately causing more people to be alive than their current food production could maintain.
To put it in simpler terms, geometrical expansion is a doubling of numbers such as:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256...
where arithmetical expansion is simply an adding to the numbers as in:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11...
Malthus believed the population was always prone to expand at a rate much faster than the food supply could sustain and ultimately lead to global overpopulation, starvation, and a subsequent decline in population to levels the food supply can maintain. He claimed in his essay, “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”
He also stated that there was a fight for survival amongst humans and that only the strong who could attain food and other needs would survive, unlike the impoverished population he saw during his time period. These ideas were received by Charles Darwin as he was formulating his theory of evolution. Adapting Malthus to Darwin, a new line of economic thinking called Social Darwinism was formed.
Malthus believed this theory of his to be enshrined in natural law, such as gravity, the laws of thermodynamics or the speed of light. However, it is important to note that none of the writings of the ancients, whether they be the Orientals, Hindu, Egyptian, Jew or Greeks noted this particular law in any of their philosophical, scientific or religious writings.
Malthus argued that two types of checks hold population within resource limits: positive checks, which raise the death rate; and preventive ones, which lower the birth rate. The positive checks include hunger, disease and war; the preventive checks: birth control, postponement of marriage and celibacy.
In later editions of his essay, Malthus clarified his view that if society relied on human misery to limit population growth, then sources of misery - such as hunger, disease, and war - would inevitably afflict society, as would volatile economic cycles. On the other hand, “preventive checks” to population that limited birthrates, such as later marriages, could ensure a higher standard of living for all, while also increasing economic stability.
Governments and political economists embraced Malthus’ new age thinking wholeheartedly and sought new and creative ways to artificially control population numbers via executive fiat.
A little more than eighty years after the publication of Malthus’ original thesis, American economist, Henry George published his monumental work, Progress and Poverty (1882, this writer has an original copy) where it was noted that, “the doctrine...is now generally accepted as an unquestionable truth, in the light of which social phenomena are to be explained...It is endorsed by economists and by statesmen, by historians and by natural investigators; by social science congresses and by trade unions; by churchmen and by materialists; by conservatives of the strictest sect and by the most radical of radicals. It is held and habitually reasoned from by many who never heard of Malthus and who have not the slightest idea of what his theory is.” (pp. 90-91).
Mr. George, who goes on in his book to rebut and disprove Malthus’ theory describes governments and their societies as accepting the Malthusian theory without any scientific support in the same way that today’s society has accepted the establishment, corporate media’s narrative on COVID-19 as a “deadly and dangerous” virus even though the scientific literature does not support that position. More on all of that, later.
In a recent article published in Scientific American, Michael Shermer wrote, “On the negative side of the ledger are the policies derived from the belief in the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse. ‘The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race,’ Malthus gloomily predicted. His scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations' family size, including forced sterilizations.”
Shermer goes on, “We think of eugenics and forced sterilization as a right-wing Nazi program implemented in 1930s Germany. Yet as Princeton University economist Thomas Leonard documents in his book Illiberal Reformers (Princeton University Press, 2016) and former New York Times editor Adam Cohen reminds us in his book Imbeciles (Penguin, 2016), eugenics fever swept America in the early 20th century, culminating in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, in which the justices legalized sterilization of “undesirable” citizens. The court included prominent progressives Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the latter of whom famously ruled, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The result: sterilization of some 70,000 Americans.”
In the aforementioned book, Progress and Poverty, Henry George tackled Malthus’ idea that populations double every 25 years in perpetuity and showed that there is no historical evidence to support that position in any country of the past. He also noted that vice and misery never seemed to come from an increase in population; “there is not a single case in which the vice and misery can be traced to an actual increase in the number of mouths over the power of the accompanying hands to feed them; but in every case the vice and misery are shown to spring either from unsocial ignorance and rapacity, or from bad government, unjust laws or destructive warfare. The globe may be surveyed and history may be reviewed in vain for any instance of a considerable country in which poverty and want can be fairly attributed to the pressure of an increasing population” (pp. 94-95).
As for an increasing population outpacing its ability to produce food, Mr. George notes that as populations increase, so does food production due to man’s ingenuity and inventiveness. “If bears instead of men had been shipped from Europe to the North American continent, there would now be no more bears than in the time of Columbus, and possibly fewer, for bear food would not have been increased nor the conditions of bear life extended, by the bear immigration, but probably the reverse. But within the limits of the United States alone, there are now forty-five millions of men where then there were only a few hundred thousand, and yet there is now within that territory much more food per capita for the forty-five millions than there was then for the few hundred thousand. It is not the increase of food that has caused the increase of men; but the increase of men that has brought about the increase of food. There is more food, simply because there are more men.” (p. 117)
Mr. George also reasoned that food and lifespan for man can increase over that of the animal and vegetable kingdoms because man is the only animal that seeks to increase his lot. “[man] is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied. The wants of every other living thing are uniform and fixed. The ox of today aspires to no more than did the ox when man first yoked him. The sea gull of the English Channel who poises himself above the swift steamer, wants no better food or lodging than the gulls who circled round as the keels of Caesar’s galleys first grated on a British beach. Of all that nature offers them, be it ever so abundant, all living things save man can only take, and only care for enough to supply wants which are definite and fixed. The only use they can make of additional supplies or additional opportunities is to multiply.
But not so with man. No sooner are his animal wants satisfied, than new wants arise. Food he wants first, as does the beast; shelter next, as does the beast; and these given, his reproductive instincts assert their sway, as do those of the beast. But here man and beast part company. The beast never goes further; the man has but set his feet on the first step of an infinite progression - a progression upon which the beast never enters; a progression away from and above the beast.” (pp. 119-120)
Put simply, the animals do not and cannot come up with new and creative ways to grow and produce their food, or build more luxurious shelters or even extend their life spans and quality of life. Only man can - and the more humans there are on the planet, the greater the creative ability to advance societies, food production and life spans.
Mr. George also cleverly points out how the number of people and thus human labor on earth is directly tied to the second law of thermodynamics and that as more men are created for a time, they eventually will die and return back to the earth the matter which the borrowed to sustain their bodies for the time they were alive. In effect, there is no more or less matter (soil, minerals etc.) on the earth regardless of how many or few humans populate it and man’s creative ability to problem solve and invent will always tend to outpace his pressure on food production.
The Current Adoption of Malthusian Theory
Even though his theory has been proven to be irreparably flawed, Malthus’ thinking and ideas are still embraced by government and other industry leaders today. What started with the Eugenics movement in Germany and the U.S. of the early 20th century has progressed to our modern day abortion mills where progressives were able to successfully argue for a “woman’s right to choose” to kill her unborn - and sometimes live-born - baby. This is the natural progression of the cheapening of life through the eugenics movement; the next step of which will be the legalization of physician-assisted suicide and human euthanasia.
But, abortion isn’t culling the population fast enough. Microsoft founder and self-appointed vaccine guru, Bill Gates recently undertook a massive vaccination program in India and the African continent which resulted in the sterilization of millions of females. While he says he doesn’t support sterilization, he does admit that if we just vaccinate everyone so children won’t get sick, parents won’t feel the need to have so many babies and thus population growth will be slowed. There are shades of eugenics all through that belief system.
Food additives and preservatives are another tactic to reduce world population. By allowing artificial chemical preservatives in the food supply, governments are engineering a slow and covert demise in their population base as cancers and other diseases slowly manifest from those “FDA Approved” additives.
There are also reports of toxins being sprayed in the ubiquitous chemical trails from obscure, high flying aircraft. Not to be confused with condensation trails - naturally occurring trails of water condensation in high flying commercial and military aircraft - Chem trails are deliberate spraying of various aluminum and barium salts to ostensibly block out the sun and prevent “global warming.” These salts ultimately settle to the ground where they are absorbed into the food supply, consumed by humans and ultimately cause irreparable harm to their health.
The most recent attempt at global population culling has been the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Developed in a Chinese bio-weapons lab in Wuhan, China, which has historically received financial grants to fund its research from Dr. Anthony Fauci in the U.S. National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, the COVID-19 coronavirus has all the hallmarks of a manmade, designer virus with snippets of the HIV virus engineered into it. Its purposeful design was to infect and kill the frail, elderly population in order to cull them from the population and thus reduce their financial impact on governments’ social security and welfare systems worldwide. The establishment, corporate media has done a remarkable job of covering up this information and creating a diversion narrative designed to invoke fear and panic in society so the next phase of population control could be introduced and voluntarily accepted on a mass scale by the younger populations - the vaccine for COVID-19.
The COVID-19 vaccine is quite likely the final phase in population control and reduction as it is designed purposefully to re-engineer the DNA of the human recipient to grow COVID-19 within them in order to stimulate immunity to the virus. However, the Malthusians who populate the vaccine industry and governments that fund them may have slipped in some special DNA tweaks that they’re not admitting - additions that are designed to more efficiently and effectively reduce the global population with either sterilization or new and advanced forms of cancer, blood diseases and respiratory illnesses that can take the blame for the deaths and provide the necessary cover for vaccine manufacturers to continue to ply their trade and implement the worst - and perhaps last - eugenics program the world will ever see.
