300,000,000 Americans

Fantastic commentary on the United States reaching 300 million citizens by Stephen Moore:

"This demographic milestone is not cause for alarm -- as some prophets of doom would have it. Rather, it is cause for celebration. We 300 million Americans are on balance healthier and wealthier and freer than any population ever: We breathe cleaner air, drink cleaner water, earn higher incomes, have more leisure time, and live in less crowded housing."

"Our population is rising mainly because early childhood death rates in the U.S. have fallen by 90% in the last century, and continue to fall: A child born today in the U.S. is four times more likely to live to adulthood than one born in 1950, and 12 times more likely than one born in 1900. And these children will live longer, as the nearby chart shows. Life expectancy has increased by more than 30 years in the last century."

"This good news is an eloquent rejoinder to 40 years of seemingly endless jeremiads issued by neo-Malthusians from Paul Ehrlich to Al Gore. In the early 1970s, when the U.S. head count was one-third less than today, the then-president of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, famously proclaimed that overpopulation was a danger on par with nuclear war"

"Apocalyptics in the Club of Rome -- who complained that America has the "grossest national product" and whose famous screed, "The Limits to Growth," asserted that economic growth could not continue because of limited natural resources --

"[They] were wrong."

""Americans are the first best hope for the human race," as the historian Paul Johnson put it. That there are now 300 million of us -- and growing -- suggests that the future of freedom is in good hands."

Read the whole article here.