Rarely has an article been more panoramically wrong than Ian Huyett’s contribution of 3 December. The problem is supposed that New Hampshire has too many old people and too few young people — a theme heard from GOP state reps in years past, who look in awe at the Democrats’ many gunpoint solutions to non-problems and conclude that the GOP needs a few of its own.
The rhetoric is extreme: New Hampshire is in a “crisis,” facing “doom” because a “balance” has been “poisoned” by policies supposedly reflecting hatred toward an entire social class. The evidence of the problem is mere statistics: comparisons of New Hampshire to other states to portray us as “ultra-elderly.” And drawing a straight line to show that we will eventually be “majority elderly.”
We should be skeptical of any such claim of a “crisis.” We have been through two years of massive government fixated on the statistics of COVID “caseload” and “deaths” — heedless that government above all seeks to perpetuate itself. “Caseload” is cited for every new Sununu emergency decree with no one ever asking how many cases involve actual sickness, and whether any given “case” was measured with the PCR machine set to Ct=30 (30 doublings multiplies DNA by about one billion) or the popular hair-trigger Ct=40 (one trillion), which “detects” COVID anywhere. The death toll is dishonest too, conflating deaths OF COVID and deaths WITH COVID (such as George Floyd!) to multiply the crisis by about 16, with hospitals receiving a cash premium under the CARES Act if they claim to treat a “COVID death.” The ridiculous goal has been to force these numbers to zero, and failing that, prolong the emergency and portray any opposition as deadly.
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An aging population is not a crisis in the first place. George W. Bush famously wrecked his support with his base on the notion that we must give amnesty to border jumpers because “they do the jobs Americans won’t.” The simple rebuttal was: At a suitable wage, Americans will do any job. (The call for amnesty continues today among GOP donors who simply want cheaper labor. Trump won in 2016 by combining a mostly pro-liberty platform with the popular anti-liberty plank of closing the open border.)
Suppose New Hampshire became so elderly that there were no youngsters to flip hamburgers. It’s obvious what would happen: Adults who can’t cook would learn how to, people would come out of retirement to fill the gap, people doing non-menial jobs would start doing menial jobs, and we’d speed up the push toward robotics. It might take a pay increase to make this happen; this would slightly increase the cost of a hamburger; we would live. Manchester seems to have no workers able to communicate in English and Chinese; at the Heng Won take-out, the staff drives up from Boston. This is an added cost but prices are still competitive. In short, the market would effortlessly adjust to Huyett’s demographic “crisis” long before we became “a state without a functioning workforce.” “The answer is simple: without purposeful changes, New Hampshire’s jobs will not be filled.” This simple answer is myopic. At the right wage, all jobs are always filled, even without Huyett’s “purposeful changes.”
On causation, Huyett says “this demographic collapse…is the bitter fruit of purposefully anti-family…policies like age-restricted housing and a lopsided tax system.” Housing developments with a consensual over-55 requirement on residents are a voluntary solution, not to demographic diversity but to the fact that kids are disorderly and noisy. Huyett celebrates Pelham, which uses the force of law to close off this option.
He omits the elephant in the room. Opposition to growth and new residents is a constant at municipal meetings, but mainly because immigrants with children are guaranteed free schooling at everyone else’s expense at our welfare schools. “Free” schools are sold to us as the basis of civil society, even as the schools do the exact opposite, teaching hate for the country and hate for achievement and giving townspeople a reason to hate newcomers. “Lopsided tax system”? Oldsters willing to document their income to Town Hall are already partially spared from paying for the schools.
Huyett cites the dysfunction in an elderly county in Florida. This is less likely to be caused by a surplus of oldsters than by the Biden malaise. Across the nation, a “compassionate” government still makes it easy to live comfortably without working. And Huyett even mentions New Hampshire’s housing problem, which isn’t caused by demographics either, but by municipal and state barriers against development, which aren’t going anywhere because — like all barriers to entry — they inflate the prices of our own homes.
Huyett’s ironic conclusion that this “crisis” will wind up harming oldsters is cute but useless. It doesn’t matter who is harmed nor which demographic the author favors. There is no crisis.
Most of your readers believe that Americans’ Rights pre-date government and are “endowed…by their Creator.” A consequence of this is that government should minister to the population that exists, not shape it by force to make its own job easier or more pleasant. And the supposed government goal of making statistics prettier is an open-ended blank check for eternal government fixes, which we should oppose every time it is offered.
Huyett’s group, Cornerstone Action, advocates cultural change. I concede his assumption that it would be better if New Hampshire were more attractive to young adults. I even concede the group’s signature point that we would be better off as individuals and as a society if everyone lived more Christian, drug-free lives and carried every unwanted pregnancy to term. These issues call for persuasion, which Cornerstone has never achieved. Huyett’s proposal is unspecified, beyond doing something deliberate, with the implied threat of State force. Such solutions never work and always make society less civil. The legislature should enable us to live in peace, not compel us to change our lives until the statistics get prettier.
