Before the Thought Police lock me up...has women's suffrage benefitted America?

The Exceptions to the Generalization: sexy tea party leader & conservative St. Louis radio host, Dana Loesch

Abstract: Before the thought police jail me: would American democracy be worse off if hysterical broads passing out at Obama rallys couldn't vote? whatever your moral beliefs are about women's suffrage, has American democracy benefited from womens suffrage? take it as a thought exsperience. look at a line up of presidential potraits and see what happens after around WW1 (1919). they all get more handsome and alot dumber.why?


I have not been happy to find out as i grow into adulthood that women are really not how feminists have potrayed them. It has gotten to such a point where i can now say, without doubt, that women simply do not have, nearly, the inclination that men do, nor the temperment, for poltics. Sure, some women care about poltics-but they are such a tiny minority and usually there poltics is that of Naomi Klein liberalism. But the average women your likely to meet or know 99.8% of the time is not at all intrested in poltics in anything but the most cursory manner. It simply bores them to death. "Why would you care about such things, so far outside your day to day life?" they think. Espousing poltical ideas that cut against the grain, wheather it be at a dinner party or in a office place, to women, is, nearly, insane. Why risk fitting in just to make a point about poltics? It doesn't make sence to females who are more consumed by fitting in and getting along to go along. Women insticivly avoid the confrontation and debate that is (or atleast, should or once was) at the center of our democracy. They are bored to death by actual policy talk and simply don't talk poltics beyond the level of saying things like "Ya, i really like Obama, he seems like a really good guy.". Women are very good at, or so they have claimed to me, at reading men's faces and gaining intuitive feelings or "vibes" about men as good or bad or providers or lazy bums or moochers or losers, so on, so fourth. This may be a important evoultionary skill for women when it comes to finding mates or knowing who to not let there daughters date but a problematic tendency of evaluatation when it comes to women voting in the age of television. I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, how women assesed Obama and why they voted for him. Often, in fact probably most of the time, women's votes can be mostly accounted for as part of a paticularily female herd mentatality that can effect there voting patterns either way in elections, but also there "vibe" about a candiaite passed on mere superficialitys is certainly also a factor. Thus i kept hearing from women, the words, "he seems like a good man" when they spoke about Obama and way they supported him. Sure, there votes aren't totally devoid of substance. They usually have some views about some issues. Women, many studies have soldified, are more naturally, and quite predictably, socialistic than men. Women, i think have a harder time making desisions that good statesmen have to make: whether to waterboard a terrorist in custody, whether to secure the border, whether to grant 20 million poor, uneducated, unskilled illegal immigrants amnesty and so on, there bleeding feminine hearts pull them towards descisions that are bad for America but sastify their motherly, noturing urges that pull on there heartstrings with such issues.Speaking of women, they also it seems to me tend to be less nationalistic and more susciptible to naively idealistic one-world outlooks that consume the idea of national intrest utterly and lead women to, misplace there womenly empathy, into giving 20 million illegals unlimited free non-emergency health care on the tab of the American tax payers. This isn't to say ofcourse that women aren't conservatives and are always wrong. Though female conservatives do tend to be more into bitching about homophobia and racism than male conservatives-which is a problem with them, especially Sara Palin. And women are worse arguing, for the lack the confronational, compeitive spirit that is so essential to masculinity and when combined with IQ's upwards of 130 produce William F. Buckley jr.'s and Theodore Roosevelts. I usually hesitate to speak of women like this way cause I always end up thinking about a Michelle Bauchman or Dana Loesch. I believe and i know to be true the fact that there are alot of women who have the right views about things like gender roles (they like being womanly and don't feel oppressed), poltical correctness, and all the rest but they never seem to, sadly, be the females in the poltical arena and hardly voice there opinions accept on a blue moon when prodded to do so. It just doesn't seem women's natural inclination to talk poltics.
It seems to me that women are more naturally inclined to be much more invested and intrested on there immediate lives-meaning there husband, there kids, there friends, there mailman, there dishwasher, there garden, etc. While men, naturally, have a wider scope of intrests that extends beyond there personal everyday lives into the outside, external worlds of sports and poltics. Notice how few women participate in fantasy football. And really all commentating about poltics is is the same male If-I-ruled-the-world provided in fantasy football but for, usually, higher IQ males. (And you could make a case for investing in the stock market being another such thing.) This disparity in intrests seems to go along with evoultion and everything we know about human history and what roles women and men have played in its course. Outside the last, more or less, 100 years women have simply stayed inside and men's sphere has been outside, atleast symbocally. Men have been the bread-winners and the ones who conducted goverment while women ran internal family life. Men thus, it would seem likely, devolped the agressive, compeitive, forthright traits needed to particpate in goverment/democracy that are displayed in debates. And by the way, how many women are on the average college debating team? The fact is is that males dominantate poltics and goverment and will continue to, barring the instuition of gender quotas, continue to not because bands of female would-be candiates for office are being turned away because they have breasts but because men, simply want to run for and hold office more than women.

Another Exception to the Generlzation: sexy conservative writer, S.E. Cupp

A distinction perhaps should be made in the case of wuite localized goverment. Women, as i say, tend to be more locally orienented than men. They care mostly just about there direct sorroundings-there towns and/or countys and the issues therein. So women often run for local office more than national or state elected office and often do good jobs at both. But women have more trouble at the larger national stage. Ofcourse, there have been good female heads of states, paticularily, at times of war. Indira Ghandi, Golda Meheir, Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth the Great (of Russia) where all great leaders and especially tough (and in my own ideal democracy they would all have a place to vote and run for office i should note). Sara Palin though seems more typical of the average women who goes into politics. She began taking up a spot on her local PTA in Wasilla, Alaska then ascended to mayor of the small town and then eventually to governor of a small (in population) state which is, lets admit, a poltical backwater which resembles what is county in a promient contiental American state more than an actual state like California or Illinois. Then Palin is nominated for Vice President by John McCain and she is completly underprepared for the national poltical stage.
Palin seemed to have never thought beyond Alaska and Alskaian issues and poltics her entire adult life by early 2008. It was little remarked upon by quite palable that the only issues she had any sort of command upon where Alskaskian issues. How many times did she fall back upon speaking about drilling in ANWR in interview during the campaign, often mentioning drilling in the artic more than once in answering questions with nothing even remotely to do with drilling for oil. How many times did Palin talk, almost incessantly, about being Alaskian and how she felt people viewed her and her fellow Alaskian to be nomads in the lower 48? I can hardly recall a interview with Palin inwhich she didn't go on a tagent about how people from the contiental United States think "us in Alaskia are all idolated and don't know whats going on, when where just like them and read all the same new and everything!". Then besides the Alaska issues, the only other issues she talked about with any proficiency at all or genuine intrest or flair where Sara Palin issues, things related directly to her and her family such as autism (because of her autistic infant son, Trigg). But all those "issue" related topics like drilling for oil and funding for autism research, where brought up by Sara when the McCain camp was forcing her to talk policy with the press in the 08' campaign. After the election everything changes and Palin dropped all that boring issue stuff for girl talk drama and gossiping fueding. She let her libido out and started giving interview after interview talking not a word about issues just getting back at Katie Couric and the evil media conspiring against her to depict her as stupid. She has appeared on TV since Obama's victory only to berate David Letterman for making a racy joke about her daughter, to go after ex-McCain staffers calling her dumb, and going after the media in general. Palin's book, "Going Rogue" has no policy-content or ideas in it, it's just a bunch of a school girl gone poltical's vendettas.
On a seperate note, if you watch Sara Palin's infamous interview with Katie Couric you'll see there's a kind of ackwardness between the two women as they walk and talk. You get the sence that there both sort of acting and that there working as if on the job and that they so want (atleast in Palin's case) to just cut this poltical crap and have some girl-talk. Especially when Couric asks Palin "Where do you get your information?" and Palin balks, as if caught of gaurd and says "Ya know, like everywhere" and Couric rebuts, "Ya, well like where?" and Palin, looking iratated, repeats, patheticly, looking oh so desperate, "Ya know like everywhere. I read em' all" and Palin looks as if she is in a nightmare and just wants to wake up. You feel at that moement that there is something grotesquely unnaturely about what your watching and that Sara Palin does not belong there and that she belongs in a kitchen in Wasilla and that asking her poltical questions is almost cruel and that feminism and demographic oppurtinism by the McCain camp has put her in a position she manifestly doesn't belong. You also feel that, if, there wasn't a camera around Couric and Palin as they walked around together or if they couldact as they wanted to that the two women wouldn't mention poltics at all, but Palin would ask Couric where to get good pant-suits and both women would complain about how tuff there scedeules where and how they didn't get enought "me" time and chat over other womanly topics i know little to nothing of and don't want to know more about. Katie Couric like Palin seems so manifestly unnatural, almost like a robot programmed and run by her, certainly, male producers and writers. She like Palin is a women who comes home to her kids and wants to take a nice long shower, watch Desperate Housewives, get a pedicure and go to bed rather than spend an hour reading National Review Online like the politico guys that hold up both Couric and Palin.
Finally, the obvious reason why the relationship women and poltics is so tenous and problematic is biologically obvious at the end of the day. Women give birth to children, and usually, with the exception of Palin it seems, are the leaders of there familys and devote a great deal of energy and focus into there children and derive, as feminists are inclined to forget, a great deal of joy and fuliment from doing so. They are thus often too pre-occupied to pay much attention to politics. Hence men do poltics and war. I mean could no one stand up in the 2008 election and say that the nomination of Sara Palin was ludcrious on the grounds that (along with being woefully uninformed) she was the mother of 5 children including newborn with autism requiring many hours of care? Was she going to breast feed in the oval office? What if a dirty bomb goes off in a Seattle Port during a Palin adminstration but she happens to be breast feeding Trigg, are the generals to wait in the hall until Miss. Presidents gets her blouse back on? And don't even mention how irrational and moody she may be on certain days every month and how that may effect her behavoir in office (a subject which would be of great importance to know if she ever once again became contender for national office as i pray she never again is).

Michelle Bachmann, attractive Republican Senator from Minnesota

In the end, we can say for certain that womens suffrage has given rise to the election of a new breed of airhead, pretty boy poltics that is within a inch of destroying this nation. When men vote alone, the appearance of politicians is a factor but not so great. However when you bring women into the democratic equatation, among many other ripple effects, the attractiveness of polticians becomes essential. Another factor, is that men don't speak as openly when poltics no longer is a backroom game for the boys (and there wives are now in the room peering over them). Women's suffrage gave rise to the sloganism and the candiate as preacher/saviour/celebrity thing epitomized by Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. Suddenly, you had to make "women feel comfortable" to be electable meaning you had to look like Mitt Romney not John Adams and also you couldn't come off as "anger" or "too agresive" you had only speak in fluffy neblous cliches and platitude about "hope", "change" and "yes we can". Also you couldn't get into details or really debate issues poltician to poltician the way Douglas and Lincoln did because that would bore women. Yes, women's suffrage has almost certainly produced a slew of terrible polticians and Presidents and has turned American politics essentially into a casting call for charcters in a TV Soap Opera or into American Idol, where former tenny boppers vote for the more attractive candiate with the more preferable facial features. The young women once crying and swooning and fainting at the Usher concert, in feminine hysterical adulation, become the women crying, swooning and fainting at the Obama rally or the John Edwards rally, passing out as the superstar enters stage left, weeping as he says "Thank you, Thank you" and begins his speech. They have turned our poltics into a rockstar event, gutted it of debate and substance entirely, all style and cliche. Now a poltician can't win if they come of as "mean" or "uncomapasionate" or "agressive", so they all must engage in inane, vapid happy talk. Women can't stand negative speeches so everything must sunny and platitude (aka Obama-rhetotic). They vote for poltician who tell them what they and we want to hear rather than what we need to hear.
Male voters do not get caught up in poltician's "charisma" or their "charm". They don't say they voted for Jimmy Carter or Barak Obama, cause they think they have "really really good hearts" or because "they seem like really good men who really care about the people". Thats too gay for men. Men vote on issues which isn't to say that men aren't sometimes uninformed but atleast they don't vote on looks. Ofcourse if a short, bald politician runs against a tall,handsome guy it will effect mae voters but not nearly to the extent it will effect women voters. And men don't react against candiates who are aggresive in there speakings style. Men don't demand happy talk from there polticians in fact they hate the "yes we can" bullshit. That's why no, women's suffrage has not benefitted American demcracy at all. Ofcourse, once again, this isn't to say all women are dumb or uninformed, they're are many very intelligent women. In my ideal democracy, there would be a mechanism for brillant women like Maggy Thatcher to become enfranchised and to run for office and the vote wouldn't be given out as a right to all men either. You would have to earn the right to vote in my democratic utopia by displaying your commitment to democracy and your taking citizenship seriously by knowing the issues. So if we could, by whatever means, find out which citizens of the United States don't and do know where Iraq is on a map or who Ronald Reagan or the FED is, i would have no problem barring those who didn't know either from voting. I think the Supreme Court should make sure that these questions for the right to vote where fair and non-bias.

HERE IS THE COMPLETLY UN-POLTICALLY CORRECT WAY TO IMPROVE THE LOT OF THE HAITIANS (IN THE LONG RUN)

A painting of the first succeful slave rebellion inwhich French slaves succefully revolted against France, creating the first free black republic, Haiti. The cost to Napelonian's empirial pocketbock would create the impetus for the selling of French Louisanna to America.

Let France or Canada (aka white Europeans) run the nation again. Much of the little infastcure in Hiati was built was by American occupation (1915-35) and French occupation. Let's face it, folks.
I personally might choose to make it a protectorate of an independent Republic of Quebec.
But, truthfully, all these suggestions are fanciful. There’s no chance that the international community will declare the first-ever black republic an official failure.

President Woodrow Wilson, this pious fan of the KKK sent the US Marines to occupy the wretched nation of Haiti in 1915.

The ugly truth about colonalism is that white rule was the best thing that ever happened to Africa and pan-African Republics such as Hiati. Its suprsing that few an anti-American commentators such as Howard Zinn haven't mentioned America's occupation of Hiati. Woodrow Wilson brought the marines to run the nation and in a way we again today. No, it's not the presence of whites in Haiti that exsplains why its so poor today but the absence of whites that does. But ofcourse the absence of white influence can never be a reason for black poverty in the land of poltical correctness.

"Papa Doc" Duvalier, the black power post-colonial era dictator of Haiti, who ruled the nation from the 50's to the 1970's-one of a slew of such post-colonial 3rd world tryants such as Robert Mugabe & Fidel Castro.

Here is Steve Sailer illumanting article which fluidly points out why Haiti is so poor (that question which everyone asks but everyone doesn't want to answer truthfully):

Why Haiti Is So Hopeless; And A Very Modest Proposal

By Steve Sailer

Does President Barack Obama have any more idea what to do with Haiti after the horrific earthquake than did President Woodrow Wilson when he sent the Marines in back in 1915? Obama has put his byline on the January 15 Newsweek cover story Why Haiti Matters, but he can’t seem to come up with an answer to his headline question beyond typical Obamaesque self-absorption: “We look into the eyes of another and see ourselves”.

(He has seized the opportunity to amnesty a lot of Haitian illegals in the U.S... But increasing Haitian immigration has been a little-noted Obama preoccupation for some time.)

If we’re looking for something to do for Haiti that will help it in the long term, it’s just not at all clear how. (I do make a very modest proposal at the end of this article). The 1915-1934 U.S. occupation built some infrastructure, but isn’t exactly remembered as ranking up there with Iwo Jima as the Corps’ finest moment. The long run effect of U.S. rule through mulatto surrogates seems mostly to have paved the way for Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s disastrous 1957-1971 black power government.

Other suggestions I’ve heard over the last week: handing Haiti back to France; handing it over to the Dominican Republic, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola (but little else besides deep mutual antipathy); and to Canada. I personally might choose to make it a protectorate of an independent Republic of Quebec.

But, truthfully, all these suggestions are fanciful. There’s no chance that the international community will declare the first-ever black republic an official failure.

So, Haiti will nominally keep on keeping on—under the purview of the U.N. and the U.S. taxpayer.

Haiti’s Malthusian poverty is the default state of mankind. Its rapidly growing population is kept fed by the more than 10,000 foreign charitable organizations active in the country.

Commentators have been competing to come up with ever more complex explanations for “Why Haiti Is So Poor”. The single most important cause is probably that Haiti attained its independence as early as 1805, culminating in a massacre of the remaining whites, before the end of the slave trade. Despite theoretically being a French-speaking, Roman Catholic, Western Hemisphere country, Haiti remains culturally rooted in Africa. Wikipedia’s article on the History of Haiti notes [January 17, 2010]:

“At all times, a majority of slaves in the colony were African-born, as the brutal conditions of slavery prevented the population from experiencing growth through natural increase. African culture thus remained strong among slaves to the end of French rule, in particular the folk-religion of Vodou, which commingled Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of Guinea, Congo, and Dahomey.”

Indeed, Haiti isn’t even particularly poor for a country with an African culture: 22 sub-Saharan African countries have lower per capita GDPs than Haiti’s $1,300, with Zimbabwe last at $200.

Most Haitians speak Haitian creole rather than French. Although the creole features many French words, the grammar is more African, so most Haitians are cut off from French literary culture.

Similarly, voodoo, with its black magic curses, makes up much of the substance of Haitian religion, with West African deities, such as the stylish and ominous loa “Baron Samedi”, demanding placation.

Thus Duvalier, a brilliant black doctor and sociologist turned maniacal dictator, used his study of voodoo and his resemblance to the popular depiction of Baron Samedi to convince the black masses that he was a powerful sorcerer and take power from Haiti’s mulatto elite.

Unfortunately, Duvalier began to believe his own propaganda about the power of voodoo. For instance, as Time Magazine reported in 1963, when Duvalier had a falling out with Clement Barbot, the head of his notorious goon squad, the Tonton Macoutes:

“But in voodoo-entranced Haiti the whisper went around that no one could kill Barbot. He had the strange power, they said, to change himself into a black dog and escape at will. In Port-au-Prince, Duvalier's policemen went around shooting black dogs on sight.” [Haiti: The Living Dead, July 26, 1963]

Much of the educated classes emigrated, leaving Haiti brain-drained.

Papa Doc died in 1971, making his somewhat less sinister son, Baby Doc, the 19-year-old President-for-Life. This playboy squandered his popularity with the black peasants in 1980 by marrying a daughter of the mulatto elite, a stylish Lena Horne-lookalike with expensive tastes. By 1986, Baby Doc was in exile in France.

Since then, American Presidents have spasmodically hired and fired Haitian dictators. At the request of the Congressional Black Caucus, Bill Clinton invaded Haiti in 1994 to restore the black radical defrocked priest Jean-Baptiste Aristide, who had been overthrown in 1991 by mulatto military leaders. The Bush Administration apparently more or less kidnapped Aristide in 2004 and sent him into exile in South Africa. Bush turned nominal power over to a shadowy band of “rebels”. UN peacekeepers were brought in to occupy the country and keep the gangs from running quite so amok. Now the Obama Administration appears to be the main de facto power in Haiti.

A new book edited by Jared Diamond, Natural Experiments of History, focuses heavily on the comparison of Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic that Diamond began in his last bestseller, Collapse. Diamond, the author of the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, is both smart and about 90 percent honest. That makes him the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind that is contemporary intellectual discourse.

Diamond’s January 15th article in the leftwing U.K. Guardian, A Divided Island: The forces working against Haiti, summarizes his thinking on how Haiti’s quantity and quality of population have hurt Haiti compared to the D.R., which has a moderate per capita GDP of $8,200. It’s dry, but more frank than most of what you’ve heard:

“But Haiti's area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic so that Haiti, with a larger population and smaller area, has double its neighbour's population density.”

(Economist Tyler Cowen blogged yesterday that until a decade ago, when kidnappings became routine, he hadn’t been afraid of crime when he visited Haiti because the population density was so extraordinary: “There's just not enough room for anyone to mug you, at least if you exercise due caution. Nor, for that matter, were there very many beggars, since usually there was no one to beg from.”)

Diamond goes on:

“The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side.”

In Collapse, Diamond praised the D.R.’s old megalomaniacal dictator Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961) for stealing much of the forestland and exploiting it cautiously in a rational manner. Dominican kleptocracy helped avoid the tragedy of the commons that contributed to the ecological ruin of Haiti, where the common folk chop down all trees for cooking fuel.

Diamond goes on to point out,—cautiously!—another advantage the D.R. has over Haiti: it’s whiter.

“A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic – with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry – was both more receptive and more ­attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves.”

The relative whiteness of Dominicans isn’t widely understood in the U.S. because we are mostly familiar with the largely black Dominican baseball players, such as Sammy Sosa. But Dominicans generally tend to look more like the American-born Dominican mulatto slugger Alex Rodriguez than the black slugger Manny Ramirez. The current president of the D.R. looks likefat guy in the Laurel and Hardy movies crossed with Muhammad Ali, and he’s the only one of the last five presidents with any clear black ancestry. the

Trujillo had an explicit policy of whitening the Dominican Republic’s population through immigration from Europe—and expelling Haitian illegal immigrants. He was the only national leader actively to recruit Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

Diamond continues:

“Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contributed to the country's development.”

To summarize Diamond, Haiti has more people per fertile acre of farmland and less human capital per capita.

That human capital can be purely cultural. Thus another former sugar-growing black Caribbean country, Barbados, independent since 1966 although Queen Elizabeth II remains the official head of state, has a per capita GDP of $18,900, an average life expectancy of 74 years.

As Lawrence Harrison, head of the Cultural Change Institute at Tufts University, told me in 1999:

“The culture of slavery, as well as zero-sum traditional African culture, powerfully sustained by a religion (Voodoo) without an ethical code, are palpable to any foreigner who has lived [in Haiti], as I did for two years. Barbados, which I have visited several times, remained a British colony until 1966, by which time it had substantially absorbed British values, attitudes, and institutions. The Barbadians are sometimes referred to as Black Englishmen or Afro-Saxons.”

(Still, that raises the question of why Barbados has a lower crime rate and a higher literacy rate than some other ex-British colonies like Jamaica. The late Robert MacNeil’s PBS series The Story Of English suggested that selection played a role: “[Barbados] was the first main port of call for the slave ships. It is said that unruly slaves from the least domesticated tribes were progressively shipped up the ‘claw’ of the West Indies until they reached Jamaica.” [p. 220])

Barbadian blacks were cut off from fresh infusions of African culture when the British Parliament voted the end of the slave trade in 1807. Sugar plantation owners could no longer afford to work their slaves to death and replace them with new slaves from Africa. The British government carried out an orderly emancipation, with compensation for slaveowners, in the 1830s.

Although 90 percent of Barbados’ population is said to be “Afro-Bajan”, Barbados has a fairly large mixed race middle class who typically call themselves “white” (for example, the Barbadian pop singer Rihanna, who is considered black in America, recently complained “I Was Bullied At School For Being White”.) and espouse traditional white standards.

Ironically, more than few of these West Indians who call themselves white in the Islands have gone into the civil rights business as black leaders in the U.S. For example, President Obama’s “African-American” Attorney General Eric Holder called America “a nation of cowards” last year for not talking enough about race, is a light-skinned Bajan-American.

Economist Thomas Malthus’s insights are severely out of fashion in the Industrial Age. But what else is Haiti going to do besides subsistence farming?

There has been some growth in manufacturing jobs in Haiti. But the Chinese industrial juggernaut makes that unpromising.

Call centers for France? Perhaps, but Parisian French isn’t all that widely spoken. (In contrast, Barbados has begun to compete with India in the offshore call center business.)

Tourism? Back in the day, Bill and Hillary Clinton honeymooned there. But almost nobody goes to Haiti anymore. The poverty is just too depressing for tourists. As Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. famously pointed out in President Obama’s favorite sermon, The Audacity to Hope:

"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks' greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere ...”

Sadly, therefore, much of the logic of Malthus applies to Haiti. Only outside charity and emigration keep it from starvation.

One obvious step that could help Haiti in the long run has, unfortunately, dropped almost into the realm of the unmentionable these days: increased funding of population control efforts. (Full disclosure: I’m a Catholic).

Third World birth control used to be a fashionable progressive cause. When I was a kid, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, made about 20 guest appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The Rockefellers and George H.W. Bush were strong advocates of the need for Third Worlders to reduce their fertility.

But today, it’s hard to find much on Google about Haiti and contraceptives. According to a 2001 World Health Organization report: “Among sexually active women, 13% used a modern method of contraception and 4% relied on traditional methods”.

And the other 83 percent?

It appears that Haitian women now wisely want to reduce the number of children they have—Haiti’s total fertility rate is said to be down to 3.8 babies per lifetime, the same as Saudi Arabia’s. But Haitians need to bring their fertility down to European below-replacement rates for a couple of generations to allow the land to recover—and the people, hopefully, improve their “human capital”.

Let’s make long lasting Depo Provera contraceptive injections free to Haitian women.

Anyone got any better ideas?