October 12, 1999
Billions And Billions
Megabucks Spent On Microsoft Attack
Resolved To Reduce
Fixing A Hole?
Billions And Billions
According to United Nations demographics, the world's population reaches six billion today. The UN claims that the fact that one billion people are just entering reproductive maturity ensures continued population growth on an accelerated scale, AP reports. Most of the more than 1 billion persons aged 15 to 24 live in less developed nations, the UN says.
"There is no population problem. Population growth is the result of the plunging death rate and increasing life expectancy worldwide. That is progress," Sheldon Richman said in 1995 testimony. "The growth in human population has been more than met by increases in the production of food and other resources, including energy. Famine in the 20th century is a political rather than an ecological phenomenon. We are not running out of resources, and real prices of raw materials are lower than ever before. Only the price of labor consistently rises. Population growth and economic growth are compatible: Between 1776 and 1975, while the world's population increased sixfold, real gross world product rose about 80-fold. People are net resource producers. Countries are not poor because their populations are growing. The England, United States, Hong Kong, and others became rich during unprecedented growth in population. The most densely populated nations are among the richest. What the poor nations suffer from is not too much population but too much government. If the developing world evolves into a liberal market order, it will find that it can have both reproductive freedom and prosperity. People are not problems; they're problem solvers."
Optimistic outlooks on world "catastrophes" like population growth were the hallmark of Julian Simon, who wrote the recently released book Hoodwinking the Nation. "The most important and amazing demographic fact -- the greatest human achievement in history, in our view -- is the decrease in the world's death rate (deaths per thousand). It took thousands of years to increase life expectancy at birth from just over 20 years to the high 20s. Then in just the past two centuries, the length of life one could expect for a newborn in the advanced countries jumped from less than 30 to perhaps 75 years… The ultimate resource is people -- especially skilled, spirited and hopeful young people endowed with liberty -- who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit and inevitably benefit the rest of us as well," Simon and Richman wrote in the 1996 commentary "The State of Humanity: Good and Getting Better".
Megabucks Spent On Microsoft Attack
The Justice Department has spent over $13 million in its actions against Microsoft, AP reports. The current antitrust suit and earlier legal actions against the software industry leader have cost $13.3 million, the DOJ said in its first public accounting. The figure includes about $7 million investigating and suing Microsoft in the pending trial, in which the first phase of a two-part verdict could come this month.
And for what? "Antitrust law aside, the principle of the matter is simple: Microsoft created its operating system and has a right to sell the system as it sees fit. But antitrust law pays little attention to such niceties as property rights. Instead, the reigning shibboleths are economic efficiency and consumer welfare. The antitrust questions, therefore, are whether Microsoft has a monopoly, whether it's misusing its market power, and whether government can find a cure that isn't worse than the disease. The answers are no, no, and no. Microsoft is behaving not like a monopolist but like a company whose very survival is at stake. Its prices are down and its technology is struggling to keep pace with an explosion of software innovation. Facing competition from new operating systems, consumer electronics, and Web-based servers, Microsoft now operates in a world where anyone running a browser will soon have the same capabilities as today's Windows user. Meanwhile, antitrust officials are preoccupied with antiquated notions-tying arrangements, exclusionary contracts, predatory pricing, and a host of other purported infractions-all wholly irrelevant, unless the real purpose, of course, is to pacify rent-seeking executives trying to attain in the political arena what they have been unable to attain in the market. It's time for our government to acknowledge that bankrupt antitrust doctrine is destructive of a modern Internet economy," writes Robert A. Levy in "Microsoft Redux: Anatomy of a Baseless Lawsuit", a Cato Policy Analysis released late last month. Similar issues are addressed in the book Antitrust Policy: The Case for Repeal.
Resolved To Reduce
The Senate approved a nonbinding Republican resolution advocating across-the-board cuts in all 13 annual spending bills for FY 2000, AP reports. The 54-46 vote was intended to signal the GOP's desire to avoid tapping the Social Security surplus. By the same margin, the Senate voted to reject a Democratic alternative that would have stated the intention to close tax loopholes and find other unspecified savings to pay for spending rather than advocating across-the-board cuts.
"Saving Social Security requires a budget that protects all, not just part, of the Social Security surplus," former U.S. Rep. Timothy Penny wrote in a 1998 commentary, "First, Let's Save ALL of the Social Security Surplus". "Several years ago, Sen. Pat Moynihan (D-N.Y.) proposed to reduce the payroll tax by 2 percent. I sponsored similar legislation in the House of Representatives. Our premise was simple: Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system. More taxes are being collected than are presently needed to finance the system. Instead of saving the extra monies to pay future benefits, Congress is using payroll taxes to cover overspending in the rest of the budget."
"[I]f the goal is to keep politicians from plundering Social Security, the most secure lockbox Congress could create is a personal retirement account for each and every worker. So rather than play rhetorical games with the president, lawmakers should take an honest step toward reforming the system by rebating every dollar of the Social Security surplus into personal retirement accounts owned and managed by individuals, not politicians," Scott A. Hodge of the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation wrote in the article "Safest Retirement Lockbox". Presidential Candidates' Positions On Social Security Reform are also available from socialsecurity.org.
Fixing A Hole?
The Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan intended to reduce pollution from heavy-duty trucks and super-large sport utility vehicles, AP reports. Newly proposed EPA regulations would require stricter pollution controls on tractor-trailer rigs and other heavy-duty trucks and direct refiners to cut sulfur in diesel fuel by up to 90 percent. In requiring more stringent controls, which would take effect in 2007, the EPA is attempting to close a loophole in its recent regulatory crackdown on tailpipe emissions in all passenger vehicles. But meanwhile, NASA scientists reported Wednesday that the Antarctic ozone hole is smaller than last year. Satellite data show the depleted area stretched 9.8 million square miles as of September 15, significantly smaller than the 10.5 million square mile depletion measured in September 1998.
"[T]he EPA has promoted various emission control strategies, including enhanced vehicle emission inspections and carpooling programs, that are… ill conceived. The sort of 'control for control's sake' pollution control strategies pursued by the EPA and the OTC are largely inappropriate because they are neither cost-effective nor equitable means of achieving emissions reductions, even should such reductions be necessary. Moreover, most of those policies are based on faulty assumptions about the nature and severity of ozone air pollution in the United States today and the proper means of addressing it. Those findings clearly suggest the need for legislative action to alleviate unneeded and costly regulatory mandates under the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments… Despite continuing overheated claims by government officials and environmental groups about the threat posed by urban ozone, the undeniable reality is that the entire nation has experienced a dramatic and predictable improvement in urban ozone air quality," K. H. Jones and Jonathan Adler wrote in the Cato Policy Analysis "Time to Reopen the Clean Air Act: Clearing Away the Regulatory Smog".