Thanks for placing a link to the SOUL websiteon your site. I'm still praying for the success of our pro-life organisation. Could you also pray for those refugees on the MV Tampa off Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean: even though our neighbour, Australia, has serious valid concerns with illegal immigrants and human trafficking, nonetheless, they were still created, just like us, in the image of God, and deserve to be treated with the dignity of human beings.
Reading your stuff on overpopulation, have you ever read "Unlimited Wealth" or "God wants you to be rich" by Paul Zane Pilzer, a Jewish economist? (And Rabbi as well. although I will have to check that one). With his book Unlimited Wealth, written around the early 1990s, he is trying to convince people to reject the principle that is the focal point of economics: scarce resources. His theory is that the wealth of a society is governed by amongst other things: the level of technology that society has; the social structure of that society. To help illustrate his point, around the time he wrote the book, the wealthiest country in the world in terms of natural resources per capita was the Soviet Union: the richest country in GNP per capita was Japan. Now Japan has somewhat gone backwards from there, but what made the Japanese rich was their application of technology to their economy. That, and there were incentives for those who worked hard. Under communism, there were no such incentives for the workers, so why would they work smarter to get ahead?
However, he makes a lot of valid points in these books. He talks about the importance of proper education for people: it's importance in developing people as people as well as helping a nation to advance economically. I would recommend reading these, as it is about how people need to think economically: the availability of resources is constantly expanding as new technologies are developed; the pie is getting larger, so other people need not threaten your slice.
Anyhow, get the book and have a good read of it.
God bless you,
Sean
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Dear Sean,
Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds like a good book. It seems like a further question is how much of Japan's present economic woes have resulted from their declining birth rate - and severe restrictions on immigration. The U.S. had sustained economic growth from 1945 to 1968 when our birth rate was high. Also the nineties were strong - altho the birth rate was low (not as low as Japan and Europe) we did have population growth due to immigration.
I have been praying for the refugees. What has happened?
God bless,
Fr. Phil Bloom
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