Jerry Bowyer: No Room for “Bah, Humbug!” This Christmas

Home

“If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

With that quote, Ebenezer Scrooge makes perfectly clear the true political message of “A Christmas Carol.” Dickens was writing amidst a wave of hysteria about population growth, triggered by Thomas Malthus, who argued that reproduction would exceed growth in food.

Scrooge was both anti-procreation and anti-marriage.

Of course, Scrooge and Malthus—who inspired him—turned out to be wrong. His nephew Fred and Christmas Present turned out to be right. In 1800 there were roughly 1 billion people on planet earth, now there are well over 8 billion.

But the lessons from “A Christmas Carol” ought to give us strength today as we press back against our own anti-procreation forces, the opposition we see to basic biological reality and our contemporary opposition to capitalism

“God bless us, every one!”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.