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Jewish World Review /Feb. 24, 1999 / 7 Adar, 5759
Walter Williams
Population control nonsense
(JWR) ----(http://www.jewishworldreview.com) MULTIBILLIONAIRE TED TURNER, Jane Fonda's husband, told last week's 27th
annual meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health
Association (NFPRHA): "We have to defeat those congressmen and senators who
are standing in the way of progress. We've got to win the next election."
Turner, founder of CNN and vice chairman of Time-Warner Inc., was sounding
the alarm that something must be done about overpopulation. This father of
five said we could achieve the "ideal" world population of 2 billion people,
as opposed to today's 6 billion, "if everybody adopted a one-child policy
for 100 years."
How did Turner arrive at the ideal population? He learned it from his
mentor, professor Paul Erlich, author of the 1968 best-seller, "The
Population Bomb."
Idiots like Erlich and organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the State
Department's Agency for International Development and NFPRHA constantly
sound nonsense warnings about how overpopulation produces disaster and
poverty. There is absolutely no relationship between high populations,
disaster and poverty.
Population control idiots might consider Zaire's meager population density
of 39 people per square mile to be ideal while Hong Kong's population
density of 247,501 people per square mile is problematic. Hong Kong is 6,000
times more crowded than Zaire. Yet Hong Kong's per capita income is $8,260
while Zaire, the world's poorest country, has a per capita income of less
than $200.
Planet Earth is loaded with room. We could put the world's entire
population into the United States. Doing so would make our population
density 1,531 people per square mile. That's a far lower population density
than what now exists in New York (11,440), Los Angeles (9,126) and Houston
(7,512). The entire U.S. population could move to Texas and each family of
four would enjoy 2.9 acres of land. If the entire world's population moved
to Texas, California, Colorado and Alaska, each family of four would enjoy
nine-tenths of an acre of land.
So-called overpopulation problems are really a result of socialistic
government practices that reduce the capacity of people to educate, clothe,
house and feed themselves. Poor countries are rife with agricultural
restrictions, export and import controls, restrictive licensing and price
controls, not to mention gross human rights abuses that encourage their most
productive people to emigrate. The most promising anti-poverty tool for poor
people and poor countries is personal liberty.
But let's get back to the population-control gang and ask: Suppose the rest
of us don't feel like adopting a one-child policy, then what? The elite's
answer will be to use brute government force, like China does, to impose a
one-child policy. You say: "Williams, what would make you say that? Just
ask, who are the heroes of America's liberals, including Ted Turner's wife,
Jane Fonda? They are some of history's most despicable blood thirsty
tyrants, like Mao Zedong, Lenin, Stalin and Castro.
Don't forget that it was the 1960s campus liberals who marched around
singing the praises of Mao, Lenin and Ho Chi Min. The difference between now
and then is that many of these liberals have moved up to become congressmen,
senators, presidents, college professors and government
In that book, Erlich predicted major food shortages in the United States,
and by "the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to
death." Erlich forecasted the starvation of 65 million Americans between
1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6
million. Erlich saw England in a more desperate situation, saying, "If I
were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the
year 2000."
Turner
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