Did you know that Latvia and Montenegro are better places to raise your kids than the United States? Also Bosnia and Saudi Arabia. It must be true. It’s what the experts say.
A new report by a joint commission of the World Health Organization, the medical journal The Lancet and UNICEF has ranked the United States the 39th best country on Earth for raising children, behind virtually every country in Europe and also lots of other places.
Scratch the surface and you’ll discover what is driving the report: climate-change alarmism. In every way they can think of, elites are trying to make ordinary Americans desperate about climate change, so they can wheel their Trojan horse full of policy proposals into the United States.
The Lancet study was rigged to deliver the desired outcome of a low finish for the United States. Our low ranking was mainly due to our coming in 151st out of 159 countries for “sustainability.”
The leading countries in this category are mostly African ones. Because what “sustainability” means is “lack of consumption,” and what “consumption” means is “wealth.” Rank countries in reverse order of wealth, and the United States is going to be near the bottom.
Inequality, by the way, in which category we are the 11th-worst country on Earth, is another way of saying wealth: Countries like Cuba, where everyone is equal, are countries where everyone is poor. Someday, the experts will explain why having a neighbor who works on Wall Street is bad for children; today is not that day.
An editorial accompanying the study in The Lancet gives the game away: “The climate emergency is rapidly undermining the future survival of all species. . . . A second existential threat that is more insidious has emerged: predatory commercial exploitation that is encouraging harmful and addictive activities.”
Addictive activities? By this they mean ads for fast food, soda, alcohol and tobacco. When you start with the conclusion that climate change and advertising are going to kill all of our children — are these people aware that tobacco use among American teens has plummeted in the past 30 years? — you massage the numbers to punish America, the Great Satan of advertising and SUVs.
The World Health Organization clearly wants us to be a lot more like Europe: heavily regulated, highly taxed and forced by lack of wealth to live in small houses and travel by bus, train or in tiny little crapmobiles powered by $6-a-gallon gasoline. Hey, Euro-snobs, I didn’t need you to do a survey to tell us you think you’re better than us.
The Lancet survey is just the latest in a conga line of Very Serious Organizations using Very Respectable Language and Very Colorful Bar Graphs to tell us, in, Very Many Ways, that they’re hysterical. Other offerings in the genre include Freedom House’s ridiculous report that knocked our liberty rating down to 86 from 89 (out of a perfect 100), because of President Trump’s supposed threat to freedom.
Ranking ahead of us are countries such as the UK and Germany. In Britain, people have been arrested for saying mean things on Twitter, while in Germany, a bill is being considered that would require social-media companies to report all “hate speech” to the police. US courts, meanwhile, have repeatedly affirmed that we’re allowed to say hateful things without being locked up.
The Reputation Institute, based on anti-Trump animus, dropped the United States to the 34th best country out of 55 ranked in terms of reputation. A Thomson Reuters survey of “experts” in 2018 ranked the United States the 10th worst country for women. According to the Legatum Prosperity Index, the United States is only the 18th best country on Earth.
Yet when you ask actual citizens of Earth where they would most like to live, apart from their own country, America always finishes first — and by a wide margin. Gallup polling confirmed this, most recently in December 2018, when 21 percent of global would-be migrants said they’d like to come to the United States. Canada and Germany tied for second place, way back at 6 percent.
So here’s my idea for a global-experts survey: How many global experts who create surveys for a living are moving to, say, Bosnia? Can I see an 86-page collection of bar graphs and pie charts illustrating the concept of zero?
Twitter: @RKyleSmith
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