Via Sadly, No, I see that the Vatican and their misogynist sycophants like the Anchoress are up to their usual tricks, namely blaming women---as they've done going back to Eve---for pretty much everything that goes wrong, even when the vast majority of people who fucked this up were male. You, being a generous, logical human being who doesn't hate women, might look at the financial crisis and blame it on banksters who have made it a habit to create bubble economies to continue to generate wealth on paper without having to do tedious things like actually build wealth, on the grounds that actual wealth-building takes too long and requires hard work---the sort of thing that belongs to the era of higher marginal tax rates and hefty labor movements. This is because you are insufficiently appalled by vaginas, and women who use them for fun instead of pumping out one mouth to feed after another. Time for the godbags to step in and set you straight.

Bankers are not the cause of the global economic crisis, according to the president of the Institute for the Works of Religion. Rather, the cause is ordinary people who do not "believe in the future" and have few or no children.

"The true cause of the crisis is the decline in the birth rate,” Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, said in an interview on Vatican Television's "Octava Dies."

Blah, blah, we've heard this song and dance before---the way to improve the economy is drastically expand the number of people using the limited resources of the planet. The reason this will work is because Jesus hates independent women so much that he will reward us for depriving women of the right to birth control with more resources, a la the loaves and fishes story. He'll also stop heating up the planet slowly if you women stop with the thinking of yourself as human beings who have more than one purpose (baby factory) in life. Oh, you thought global warming was the result of a dramatic increase in greenhouse gases that are released by human beings---which means the more of them to create those gases, the worse it gets---but you were wrong. Global warming is magic punishment for ladies thinking they should get to do things besides pump out babies and pray a lot. Look, god sent us out of Eden because some bitch thought she had a right to know things. And he'll send the entire planet into flaming global warming hell if women today don't learn their lesson already. That is, if global warming is real. There's some confusion on this issue.

The funny thing about all this is that one reason we're in this situation is that the economic bubbles that throw us into turmoil are functionally Ponzi schemes. Take the housing bubble. It's a complicated issue in a lot of ways, but one of the major problems is that housing prices kept going up and up because more and more people bought into the investment opportunity, and like a good Ponzi scheme, the whole thing fell apart when you ran out of people to buy in. Like Atrios was constantly saying, there just aren't enough people who can afford houses at those prices. And sure enough, the bottom fell out.

This is ironic, because the solution being offered---pump a bunch of extra people into the system---is another elaborate Ponzi scheme. The idea is that if we can't find more people to buy into the larger "making money without creating wealth" economy, we'll just make more, and boom! Problem solved. If only Ponzi had thought of just making up whole new populations to buy in! The problem is that the wall you hit is resources, which are limited. Now, in the West, where these thinly veiled racist appeals are aimed (since they only seem interested in coaxing white people to breed more), it's true that it's possible to cut back and share more with all these new people they're demanding. A lot of us have more living space than we really need, for instance. But in other ways, the resources to handle the new people we're already making are strained as it is. And if you don't think so, ask a new parent to tell you how easy it is to find day care. This boundless rage aimed at women for fucking and getting away with it distracts from the fact that it's not just that women are selfish, slutty bitches that is driving down the birth rate. It's also that the resource wall has been hit---a lot of families with one or two children might want more, but they can't afford the college tuition, nor can they afford to have children that don't go to college, since your earnings without a degree are so damn low on average.

I believe that these Vatican fuckwits and the Anchoress believe their own bullshit. Who isn't entranced by an easy one-stop shopping solution? Ruin the sex lives of people you suspect are having more fun than you, spread misogynist ideals, and fix the economy without admitting that we need major overhauls to the capitalistic system? What asshole wouldn't want to sign up? But unfortunately for them, the reason it sounds too good to be true is it is. Though I suppose that when a real resource crunch hits the fan---and I include the effects of global warming in that---they figure they'll be dead and the rest of us can just fuck the fuck off. Including those children they want you to start having.

The good news is that most people are going to look at 10% unemployment and laugh at the idea that the problem is not enough people competing for jobs.