I have been hoping to have time to post this for a couple of weeks now. In [1] America Alone by Mark Steyn on pg 188 he has an essay entitled Cradle to Grave. In my opinion this essay gets to the heart of the matter. For the faithful I will reproduce a few lengthy excerpts but please buy the book.

When one contemplates the demographic catastrophe, it’s easy to say, well, maybe we should reduce the tax burden on young fertile adults, make it easier for them to afford to buy a home and start a family. But the economic argument is in the larger sense marginal. In traditional rural societies, children were a necessary insurance for one’s old age: by the time you were too stooped and worn to plough the field and hunt for dinner, Junior would do it for you. Today, when you’re stooped and worn (and, in fact, long before that point), the state steps in to take care of you. Reconnecting nanny-state populations with cross-generational solidarity requires much more than the marginal tax breaks the Portuguese government announced or the nine thousand bucks the Russian state is now offering for second children. The most important action in reaquainting individuals with a larger sense of life is the one that governments recoil from: shrink the state.”

“That gets closer to the nub of the matter. It’s not just a question of tax breaks and affordable housing. the chief characteristic of our age is “deferred adulthood.” All over North America and Europe there are millions of people going to college for no good reason. Certainly, there’s no reason why the sum of knowledge the average American has accumulated by the time he’s completed a bachelor’s degree should take twenty years to inculcate…”

“The state and its citizens would be better off if we gave students a terrific high school education and then let ‘em get on with earning money so they can afford to have two or three kids in their twenties instead of one fertility-treatment special delivery in late middle age. It won’t be easy to do that, particularly in America, where schools are a bastion of over-unionization dedicated to expanding thier privileges and protections at the expense of their pupils.”

“In the end, it’s not about cash: after all, materialism and self-gratification are why Eutopians gave up on the future in the first place.”