PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

More People, More Prosperity: The Simon Abundance Index: The Simon Abundance Index 2024 finds Earth’s resources 509% more plentiful than in 1980. (Marian L. Tupy, 22 Apr 2024, Quillette)

Between 1980 and 2023, the average time price of the 50 basic commodities fell by 70.4 percent. For the time required to earn the money to buy one unit of this commodity basket in 1980, you would get 3.38 units in 2023. In other words, your resource abundance increased by 238 percent. Moreover, during this 43-year period, the world’s population grew by 3.6 billion, from 4.4 billion to over 8 billion: an 80.2 percent increase. Given that personal resource abundance grew by 238 percent ((3.38 – 1) x 100) and the population grew by 80.2 percent, we can say that the population-level resource abundance rose by 509.4 percent ((3.38 x 1.802) x 100 – 100). Population-level resource abundance grew at a compound annual rate of 4.3 percent and every 1-percentage-point increase in population corresponded to a 6.35-percentage-point increase in population-level resource abundance (509.4 ÷ 80.2 = 6.35).

ONLY TAX CONSUMPTION:

8 things that we could change about Tax Day forever (John Linder, 4/19/24, Fox News)

Every family that is legally resident in the U.S. would receive a monthly cash advance — a prebate — that would totally cover the tax costs of spending up to the poverty line for that family. Poverty level spending is defined each year by the government to be that spending necessary to buy essentials. The prebate for a family of four would cover the tax costs on spending of $40,880.

We want to encourage wealth creation and investment, yet we tax them?

WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES:

The enigma of Englishness: The English have debated their national nature for centuries (Luca Johnson, 23 April, 2024, The Critic)

[I]t is curious just how in sync the “severest critics” of Kipling’s times are with those of our own. “We are a nation of immigrants” and “Diversity is our strength” are now ubiquitous slogans in the multicultural and multiracial landscape of modern England. Yet there exists evidence that such notions were prevalent even at a time when English society was far more homogeneous. The ideological ancestors of this theory existed many centuries before even Kipling, as he goes on to show, reciting a passage from Daniel Defoe’s poem The True-born Englishman:

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,

In speech an irony, in fact a fiction,

A metaphor intended to express,

A man a-kin to all the universe.

Defoe wrote the poem in the late 17th Century as a means of ridiculing what he perceived as the xenophobic reaction to King William III’s accession to the English throne, during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was Defoe’s observation that an Englishman has no true grounds to refuse having a Dutchman on our throne, as those who criticise it may well have had a Huguenot father or a Viking ancestor. It all sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The Judds are English, the name deriving from Danish invaders originating in Jutland and the family moving to America in 1632. Englishness is capacious.