Life is sacred and precious. All life must be nurtured and protected. The spark or breath that imprints itself on inanimate material is miraculous and God-given.
Above all, the creation of human life by God in his own image places man at the apex of all creation with responsibility for all that is created in his world.
The GNP or GDP are basic measures of the economic productivity of a nation. These are, by no means, the only ones. These are not even exact or complete measures of economic wellbeing.
The production of goods and services in value terms may try to indicate our prosperity or material abundance.
These still have to be related to the kinds of goods and services produced and for whom are these produced and allocated. The basic variable of human population must enter the indicator.
Consequently, we use per capita measures or the gross indicator, GNP or GDP or whatever, divided by the population. This measures how much each member, man, woman and child, gets as his share in the variable of value of goods and services produced, or of the national debt, or of the national savings, if any.
Assuming the gross variable is divided equally. More often, there is no such equality, which makes the analysis and evaluation more difficult.
However, one thing remains constant. All of these economic activities and output is meant for the benefit of the human population. Food, clothing, shelter, education, entertainment, health benefits, travel, information, communications, technology and everything else are all for the use and enjoyment of man.
Manpower is one of the production resources or the factors of production along with land, labor, capital and technology or another set of machines, money and methods.
Together, these all interact to produce the output and there is a return to each factor.
In economics, rent is the return to land, interest or profit to capital and technology and wages to manpower. These are standard conceptual models and definitions in economics.
It is really more complicated and intertwined in the real world. Still, it is only to manpower or to the human population that is the ultimate reason for economic activity of produced output.
Human beings are resources which are both a factor of production and the end or consumer of the production.
It is dismaying when some economists and political leaders strategize to achieve increased production or economic development by focusing on decreasing the denominator of the per capita measure instead of increasing the numerator.
GNP/ population or per capita GNP will increase if GNP increases at a faster rate than population. It seems they find it easier to target a lower population growth than to increase productivity.
They seem to forget that manpower is also a productive resource and the logical policy would be to make that particular factor more efficient and effective along with the other factors of production.
If we focus on population control, we may end up like East Germany before and become a nation of a majority of old people with low productivity but maintaining even higher consumption.
Population control or management or by whatever one may choose to call it, women’s rights over their bodies, should not be a direct govermental intervention area, wherein goverment mandates specific acts or behavior or spends public funds to support such. This is a private concern and a private responsibility.
This is between the person and his God, his beliefs and values, which should not be the province of goverment resources which have many other areas to be concerned about. Let the free market prevail. Deal or no deal- a private decision by private resources.
