The Freeman 1972 - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

1972 LIMITED GOVERNMENT OR LIMITED PEOPLE? 581trends. But it will be a problemthat can be more easily resolvedfrom a financial point of view bya growing population.Crowding and CrimeAnother favorite "problem" ofpopulationists is crime. A classicexample of this was a full-pageadvertisement in the New YorkTimes sponsored by a group calledthe Campaign to. Check the PopulationExplosion. Under the headline"Have you ever been mugged?Well, you may be" was a pictureof a man grappling with a mugger."Is there an answer [to crimein the cities] ?" the ad copy asked."Yes," it responded, "birth controlis one."Major central cities such asNew York do, in fact, have thehighest crime rates. But thesecities are losing, not gaining,population. Shall we therefore concludethat crime increases as populationdecreases?Of course, juvenile delinquencygoes up disproportionately duringa period of population growth becausethere are more young peoplearound in relation to the rest ofthe population. The ad also callsattention to this fact with thestatement: "City slums - jampackedwith juveniles, thousandsof them idle - breed discontent,drug addiction and chaos."Tongue-in-cheekwise, populationcontrol is sort of, yes, an "answer"to the so-called "youth problem."But an answer which involvessolving problems simply by eliminatingpeople who have or causethe problems hardly meritsseriousconsideration as a legitimate solution.Population DensityWhat about overcrowding? At55 persons per square mile, theUnited States is one of the leastdensely populated countries in theworld. Holland, for example, has975 persons per square mile; England,588; Switzerland, 382.Overcrowding in the U.S. is afunction of population distribution,not population size. And peoplecongregate, Le., overcrowd, inmetropolitan areas for their mutualadvantage. This is what metropolitanareas are all about.But even in these areas populationdensity is decreasing with thecontinuing exodus of people fromcentral cities to suburbs. This decentralizationwas initially madepossible by improvements in transportation.It is now being furtherhastened by revolutionary improvementsin electronic communicationswhich are rapidly minimizingthe need for centralizedpaper-shuffling and face-to-facecontacts.Nobody anticipates that theUnited States will run out of re-