A specter is haunting the globe — the specter of overpopulation. Or maybe under-population. Or perhaps “demographic decline.” Whatever it is, all the powers of old Earth have entered into various holy alliances to exorcise it.

The panics started way back when with Thomas Malthus, but came to new prominence in 1968 with  Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” the Ehrlichs wrote. “At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” The only chance of saving humanity was for governments to embrace population control measures ranging from “free” contraceptive distribution to mandatory sterilization, which they enthusiastically did (see, for example, China’s “one child policy”).

World population has continued to grow anyway … but since the book’s publication, the world death rate has fallen from 13.5 people per thousand to 7.7 per thousand. We got better at feeding people and treating their illnesses instead of everyone just lying down and dying.

On nearly every re-reading more than half a century after its publication, The Population Bomb discredits itself further. Nobody gets everything completely wrong, but the Ehrlichs came close.

Now, all of a sudden, the concerns run in the other direction. Fertility rates are falling.

China’s government is begging people to have as many children as they can instead of forcibly limiting couples to one with measures up to and including forced abortion.

The US government continues to look for ways to put its “child tax credit” on steroids, not just because Democrats love handing out checks (although they do), or because Republicans realize lower birth rates mean smaller work forces demanding higher wages (although they do), but because plain old racism is back in vogue.

It seems that those with lighter skin are having fewer babies than those with darker skin. Horror of horrors! America’s complexion might change if something isn’t done to get those “white” people back on the baby-making treadmill!

Do population growth and shrinkage have consequences? Well, of course they do.

But population growth and shrinkage are also becoming more and more self-regulating in what basically amounts to a global marketplace.

With both contraception and fertility assistance widely available, increasingly large swathes of the population can decide, based on their own circumstances, whether or not it’s “profitable” to have children and, if so, how many and when.

The trend seems to be toward fewer and later, and that’s understandable. Increased human productivity ended the days when most of us were farmers, and every farmer needed ten helpers, and got them by siring rather than by hiring.

The real specter isn’t population growth or population (or “ethnic”) decline. The “market” has that in hand a la Darwin and Mill and naturally selects for how to make most people most happy.

The real specter is the threat to government’s control over individuals’ choice to reproduce or not. If the politicians can’t plan your future, they doubt their own. That’s a feature, not a bug, in freedom.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“[F]ormer MTV star” Connor Smith, NBC Chicago reports, “is wanted in the Chicago area after he was accused [of] trying to meet a child for a sexual encounter.” Smith is accused of “traveling to meet a minor, grooming a minor and disseminating harmful material.”

While I’ve never heard of this “star,” he sounds like a bad dude who’s up to some very bad things. But perhaps not quite as bad as one might think from the story’s lead paragraphs. As it turns out, Smith was “communicating with an undercover detective … posing as a girl under the age of 15.”

I see quite a few stories like this one, and each of them makes me wonder: What’s being done for the actual children who are actual victims of actual grooming and actual sexual abuse?

According to statistics from the National Center for Victims of Crime, one in five girls and one in 20 boys are victims of child sexual abuse nationwide.

Any way you slice the demographics, that’s millions of real victims.

And the vast majority of those victims are molested by people they know well (especially family members), not by randos who chat them up via phone or web apps.

How many of those real crimes go unsolved — in fact, are never even noticed — because law enforcement agencies spend their employees’ time and your money manufacturing sick fantasies and arresting those who fall for stings based on said fantasies, instead of doing their supposed jobs?

If Smith did what the cops say he did, chances are pretty good that he’s done it before, for real, to an actual victim or victims.

But in THIS case, all he’s actually accused of is talking dirty with, exchanging dirty pictures with, and attempting to meet with, an adult entertainer who pays union dues to the Fraternal Order of Police instead of to Actors’ Equity.

How much of that actor’s — and other cops’ — time was spent purveying free porn and setting up an ambush with an eye toward making a splash in the news, rather than on following up on actual tips, interviewing actual victims, and tracking down actual criminals who committed actual crimes?

Someone should ask that question next time the Lake County Sheriff’s Office comes to taxpayers demanding budget and manpower increases. Perhaps  a local community theater troupe can fill in and free up the county’s law enforcement budget for a focus on “serving and protecting.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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They’re over Alaska! They’re over Montana! They’re over Lake Huron! They’re over … oh, wait, they just got shot down. Whew! That was close!

Tesla’s engineers are gathering this week in Washington with an eye on dramatically improving their vehicles’ acceleration profiles by studying how fast the US government managed to get from “nothing there,” to “balloon of some kind,” to “spy balloon,” to “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon,” to seemingly flying squadrons of military aircraft over every child’s birthday party and using expensive missiles to take down stray helium containers.

From, you know, an abundance of caution. Wouldn’t want the Chinese to find out about those low, low prices at the Walmart in Billings, Montana on pretty much everything but the giant sub-$100 helium balloons which US Senator Josh Hawley finds “very disturbing” (as if we didn’t know he’s already very disturbed in general). To surreptitiously gather THAT information, they’d have to surveil an Amazon.com distribution center.

Perhaps we should all hide under our beds — except that they were probably made you-know-where — or before long we may end up carrying surveillance devices around in our pockets and purses 24/7, inadvertently feeding Beijing valuable information on cosmetics use and videos on the gustatory joy of laundry pods.

In the immortal words of Joe Biden: “C’mon, man!”

In anything like a sane world, “there’s a balloon over [insert latest location here]” wouldn’t make the news at all, crowding out important information like the local Pop Warner league’s box scores and someone’s great-aunt’s recipe for peanut butter no-bake cookies, let alone become the basis for Defcon Freakout.

Quick, no search engine cheating:

How many billions of your dollars has the US government given to Ukraine since last February?

For how long, and why, has the US government had in place the crippling sanctions on Syria which it lifted over the weekend to facilitate earthquake relief?

Heck, how many face piercings is your own teenager sporting these days?

If you can’t answer those questions, but can point at a spot on a map (to within 50 miles of) where a US F-22 finally shot down that first “Chinese spy balloon,” it’s not because you’re a bad person.

It’s because you’re being conned by politicians who’d rather distract you with made-up issues of no real importance whatsoever than risk the possibility that you might start paying attention and take notice of the crazy stuff they put over on you 24/7/365.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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