Overpopulation: The Perennial Myth

There are those in the world that believe the earth is or shortly will be overpopulated. That the earth and all of it's resources won't be enough to support the growing size of the human population, and will lead to greater and greater strife and human conflict. Those who believe such are completely wrong and perpetuating an evil myth. (I say evil because the proposed solutions involve a decrease in freedom and an increase in the size and scope of government.) And here to make my point is an article from The Freeman, a publication by the Foundation for Economic Education. I recommend reading the entire article, and if you're still not convinced, feel free to browse through the links below. The Freeman article can be found here. An excerpt:

From the period before Christ, men have been worried about overpopulation. Those concerns have become ever more frenzied. On an almost daily basis we are fed a barrage of stories in the newspapers and on television—complete with such appropriately lurid headlines as “Earth Near the Breaking Point” and “Population Explosion Continues Unabated”—predicting the imminent starvation of millions because population is outstripping the food supply. We regularly hear that because of population growth we are rapidly depleting our resource base with catastrophic consequences looming in our immediate future. We are constantly told that we are running out of living space and that unless something is done, and done immediately, to curb population growth, the world will be covered by a mass of humanity, with people jammed elbow to elbow and condemned to fight for each inch of space.

Sheldon Richman, at-the-time Senior Editor of the Cato Institute, Testimony on the myth of Overpopulation.

Walter Williams, economics professor at George Mason Univ., op-ed on the myth of Overpopulation.

Thomas Sowell, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, op-ed on the passing of Julian Simon, author of several works exposing the myth of Overpopulation.