>And nobody is going to doubt
>that Malthus' Essay really is an argument for population control.
>
Malthus's _Essay_ is not an argument for what we would think of as population control--birth control, etc., etc. Malthus's _Essay_ is an argument for RELIGION and an argument against the Enlightenment: allow these philosophers to make fun of religion and allow the common people to read, and soon you have unmarried teenagers s****ing like rabbits and having large numbers of babies that grow up to expand the labor force and so diminish the average standard of living.
Hence--according to Malthus--Voltaire, Condorcet, Hume, Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and so forth were actually making humanity more miserable by spreading their doctrines of enlightenment and freedom...
Brad DeLong