Julian Simon Was a Model Person
You have heard it said that the environment is in trouble. We are running out of resources. Things are bad, and they will only get worse–unless, of course, we hand practically unlimited power to direct our affairs to those who very clearly know better than we do what is best for us. The world, you hear day in and day out, is coming to an end. The inevitability of resource scarcity and hence the long-run tendency toward desperate poverty for everyone was the plot in one of the most successful film franchises of all time. In Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, our heroes do battle with the mad titan Thanos, who is collecting Infinity Stones so that he can snap his fingers and literally wipe out half the life in the universe–all because, he reasons, in a closed system with finite resources, mass poverty is all we have to look forward to. It was the grim economic and social vision of the Reverend Thomas R. Malthus, who had the bad fortune of offering what had been a pretty good description of the world up until the point at which he published his An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798.
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