A reader with the royal yet Hibernian name of King McDee asked whether the unemployment caused by automation should be counteracted by welfare payments from the public till to the poor. I replied that a greater help to the poor would be to lower income tax.

He asked four questions:

“1. I don’t understand how removing income tax will benefit people with no sources of income.”

The prices of all goods and services in the economy will fall, including those bought by jobseekers living off savings or charity.

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This is a reprint of the first column ever published here in my journal. Oddly, it seems to be part of an ongoing conversation, of whose earlier segment, if any, I have no record.

sophistibation asks:

I’m curious what your suggestion, if any, is for a long-run solution to the problem of overpopulation, given your seeming distaste for contraception, one-child policy, etc. I’m not suggesting that there is a current global overpopulation crisis, but only that eventually the population must be limited either by “self-regulation” (abortion, contraception in the case of the West today) or by war, famine, etc. Interested to hear your thoughts.

I am a Cornucopian, which is the opposite of a Malthusian. The term was coined to define the position of economist Julian Simon whose famous wager with doomsayer Paul Ehrlich in a sane world would would have put paid to the Malthusian predictions of the latter. (You can see more about the Simon-Ehrlich wager here.) A Malthusian says that population growth (especially of Irish, Hindoos and Negroes) leads to disastrous scarcity of resources, resulting in mass famine, war, and apocalyptic megadeath. A Cornucopian says that population growth, while it creates dislocations and even disasters (such as the enclosure laws of England) does not necessarily lead to the scarcity of  any particular resource, nor all of them.

More people does not mean less stuff.

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