The problem? Too many people

‘Crystal Ball Gazer’ writes:-

THANK YOU for last week’s En Passant, about the shrinking of the size of a hake fillet when you order it at takeaways and restaurants. I too had noticed that they were getting smaller, and in one case I was getting two small fillets instead of one big one. I think it reflects and is just one of the symptoms of something that will be the end of us if we don’t soon take action.

We are using up all the resources of the world far too quickly with no thought for the future. It might be our coal and oil, and it might be our hake or rhinos, but they will be gone relatively soon if we don’t manage them in a sustainable way. You might think that there is a huge difference between hake and rhinos, but the fact is that the consideration is always their value.

To the international fish buyer, the hake might represent a nice profit for shareholders, to the rhino poacher the horn represents survival for another few months.

But basically, coal or hake, the reason the demand is outstripping the supply or reserves, is that there are simply too many people, too many cars, too many demands for electricity, too many demands for protein – just too many people. And the problem will get worse and worse as the time goes on, because every year there are more and more people and there seems to be no effort to curb the growth.

In this country and in Africa as a whole, and probably in most of the developing world, there is already not enough housing, classrooms, teachers, and medical facilities are always under pressure. And there are not enough jobs, and there never will be enough jobs, not in this country. The politicians are trying to get your vote by talking about six million jobs, but that’s a pipe dream.

And even if by some miracle they did create six million jobs, there would be another six million still without jobs, and that figure would rise every year as matriculants and drop-outs joined their ranks. And a job is not genuine wealth-producing employment if the person is paid by the taxpayers.

Governments that create more jobs in the civil service are actually not achieving anything. I mean this in a relatively kind way, but civil servants are parasites – they produce nothing, don’t make a profit and rely fully on the taxed wealth of others for their salaries. We have to get our population under control, it must be stabilised at what it is now to allow development to catch up, or at least catch up some of the way. If we don’t, there will be no hake, in fact no fish at all in the sea, and a lot of other resources will also be depleted.