December

55 Index Lesson plans for I articles are available at www.fee.org.

Ideas Of! LilJellif Published by The Foundation for Economic Education Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533 Phone (914) 591-7230 FAX (914) 591-8910 E-mail: freeman@fee.org FEE Home Page: http://www.fee.org President: Donald J. Boudreaux Editor: Sheldon Richman Managing Editor: Beth A. Hoffman Editor Emeritus Paul L. Poirot Book Review Editor George C. Leef Editorial Assistant Mary Ann Murphy Columnists Charles W. Baird Doug Bandow Dwight R. Lee Lawrence W. Reed Russell Roberts Mark Skousen Thomas Szasz Walter Williams Contributing Editors Peter J. Boettke Clarence B. Carson Thomas J. DiLorenzo Burton W. Folsom, Jr. Joseph S. Fulda Bettina Bien Greaves Robert Higgs John Hospers Raymond J. Keating Daniel B. Klein Wendy McElroy Tibor R. Machan Andrew P. Morriss Ronald Nash Edmund A. Opitz James L. Payne William H. Peterson Jane S. Shaw Richard H. Timberlake Lawrence H. White The Freeman is the monthly publication of The Foundation for Eco nomic Education, Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533. FEE, established in 1946 by Leonard E. Read, is a nonpolitical, educational champion of private property, the free market, and limited government.

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5,999,999,999 and Counting Sometime this fall the world's population was estimated to have reached six billion. The U.N. Population Fund, which "knows" pre cisely how many people there should be in the world, also "knows" precisely what day the world hit six billion: October 12. In fact, no one knows precisely how many people there are on earth. One would have to have an exaggerated confidence in the record keeping of governments to make such a claim. How reliable are the records-birth and death-of, say, Rwanda? The Population Fund's perennial campaign to scare us about the number of people is another unfortunate use of taxpayers' money. On its face the number six billion says noth ing. In context it says nothing disturbing. The population's rate of increase is slowing markedly. Fertility rates have been falling for decades. According to MSNBC, "Since 1992, the United Nations has had to push back its 6 billion estimate by almost two years."

The Population Fund and its brooding boosters such as Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown have been predicting disaster from population growth for decades. No set of pre dictions has been more forcefully falsified. Even Alex Marshall of the Population Fund had to concede that "N0 one in history thought it would be possible to reach this number with an intact planet; they predicted ecological collapse, famine, and nuclear war, but we are doing rather well and that's an achievement." Marshall is apparently unfamil iar with the work of ~ T. Bauer, Julian Simon, and others. Marshall could not resist adding: "But the other side is that so many people are living in desperate poverty and the population is still growing, mostly in the poorest countries to the poorest families." In fact, people in most places are living longer, healthier lives than ever before. The population grows because the death rate falls.

One of the myths too many of us live by is that people cause poverty. This is worse than wrong. Poverty needs no cause or explanation. 2 It is wealth that must be explained. And by now we should know the cause of that: peo ple!-more precisely, free and enterprising people living in a regime of private property. Thus it is interference with private proper ty, not population growth, that should be the cause of concern. * * * The countdown to the triggering of the infamous "Y2K bug" nears the zero hour. Whatever happens at midnight on the 31st, there is no gainsaying that people have spent a lot of money to make sure that computers and embedded chips read "00" as "2000" and not "1900." Was it the work of dunderheads that necessitated all the expense, effort, and worry? Or is it only hindsight that permits condemnation of the programmers of decades ago? Bill O. Reitz puts himself in their place.

Ebenezer Scrooge is the Christmastime fig ure people love to despise. The oddly self centered man who spent no money on himself is often taken as a foil for anticapitalism. But is Dickens's A Christmas Carol really a brief against free markets and for the welfare state? Daniel Oliver goes to the text to exam ine this question. The term "states' rights" got a bad reputa tion because it was identified with slavery and later legally enforced segregation. Yet as Gene Healy argues, if one safeguard of liberty is the fragmentation of political power, then "states' rights," however unfortunate the name and some of its past applications, deserves anoth er look from classical liberals. Fans of activist government admire Ameri ca's quiet neighbor to the north for its "enlightened" public policy. In the interest of multiculturalism, Monte Solberg provides a tour of Canada's political milieu.

What happens when the free market dis places central economic planning? James Madison strolls through Prague and samples the fruits of international investment. 3 Government regulation of business is sometimes mocked for its waste and occa sional outright silliness. But the regulatory machine chugs on undaunted. Michael Catan zaro shows the myriad ways that regulation is bad for everyone's prosperity. By now it's an old saw: no one takes care of someone else's property the way he takes care of his own. George Leef found a super sized illustration of this principle: the North Carolina university system. Economics is everywhere, even in the choice to go to the movies rather than stay home and read a book. Ninos Malek explores some of the economics of everyday life. Economically, China was once among the most virulent of communist countries. Over the last 20 years some market reform has taken place. But Christopher Lingle shudders to think of that country's next economic phase: old-fashioned Keynesianism.

People sometimes let their language fool them, as when they attribute features of indi viduals to groups. Mischief can come from such imprecision, as Tibor Machan demon strates. In columns this month, Donald Boudreaux dismantles statist slogans; Lawrence Reed reflects on the difference between government and everything else; Doug Bandow scruti nizes the Korean peninsula; Dwight Lee explains protectionism; Mark Skousen probes Robert Heilbroner's biases; and Russell Roberts wonders if people get the politicians they want. Richard Timberlake reads a news paper article claiming that the Federal Reserve sets interest rates and protests, "It Just Ain't So!" Our book reviewers chew over works on the philosophy of individualism, the libertarian conservative divide, foreign interventionism, the diet gendarme, the New Deal, and the relationship between politics and culture. -SHELDON RICHMAN by Donald J. Boudreaux Unfettered Powerful Extremes O ver the years, intelligent and well-mean ing opponents of private property and free markets have offered thoughtful and articulate arguments in support of govern ment intervention. None of these arguments have withstood close scrutiny,but at least they were offered in the spirit of honest debate.