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Current World Population https://www.census.gov/popclock/world Population Curve http://frontiersman.org.uk/Population/Curve.html

Letter to the Editor
Dear Sam,
Hello, I pray this letter finds you well.
In response to your response [page 2] to my letter to the editor to you in the Oct ’23 issue....
I agree that humans are all members of the same species.  I was just pointing out we are different breeds i.e., blacks, whites, yellows, reds, browns, etc.
And yes, I have read Born to Rave, Apr/2018.
I agree with the idea that we, as a species, more likely than not have a common origin.  I’m just not sure it’s Earth.
A black gentleman here informed me that everyone started as black people in Africa, and we whites became so because of our migration to the more temperate climates of north eastern to north western Europe and Asia.
I question if that’s so, what about the tribes of people, like the Inuit people, who hail above the Arctic line, and cover everything, even their faces with leather w/eye slits.  Why shouldn’t they be so white they would be translucent?  The sun plays no part on their skin?
I agree, we’re all related but our ancestry on this planet doesn’t seem to have a point of origin.  D.N.A. or oral/written history.
Anyway, interesting collection of articles.  Enjoyable as always.
Have a good one,

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tively breeding us.  Regarding that idea, I suggest  Survival Bottlenecks and Ockham's Razor, in the November 2010 issue.

Dear Sam:
I have been thinking about the terms “propertarian” and “libertarian”.  Very often, people are classified in the media, and sometimes in academic discourse, as “libertarian”, when I think that they are really “propertarian”.
Some of the people I am referring to are Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the Argentine presidential candidate, Javier Milei.
Before I go further with personalities, I should explain what I mean by “propertarian” and “libertarian”.  I think that this can best be done by repeating a thought experiment that was commonly known in libertarian circles thirty or forty years ago, but which I have not heard repeated in several years.  The thought experiment is known as “The Baby on the Railroad Tracks”.
Imagine that you are a multi-billionaire.  Imagine that you own a very, very large estate in the wilderness.  This estate is surrounded by a high electrical fence, and is marked by warning signs in many different languages.  Also, there are loudspeakers that announce “No Trespassing” at intervals all around the estate.  On the estate, you have a private railroad.  One day, you are operating your train from the locomotive, and you suddenly see, far ahead, a baby on the railroad tracks.  You have enough time to stop and save the baby, if you choose to do so.  The question is;  are you morally obligated to do so?
Libertarians who think that the “right to life” is fundamental — meaning, the right not to be deliberately murdered — generally say that the driver of the train must stop.  Because the engineer sees the baby, and has the ability to stop, to choose to ignore the baby is the same as deliberately choosing to kill the baby.
On the other hand, there are some libertarians, (so-called) who are really propertarians.  They believe that the right to use property is sacred, and that unintentional or indirect harm to others caused by property usage is unimportant.  In the above situation, because the engineer did not place the baby on the tracks, and because he or she did not directly plan to kill the infant, then there is no obligation to save the infant.
My personal belief is that the right to life is the correct foundation of a libertarian social philosophy.  My reason for this is that the propertarian alternative is too easily twisted to justify such things as slavery, debtor’s prison, and restrictions of freedom of speech, assembly, and religious belief;  imposed as conditions of employment, or of renting or leasing property, or of getting a loan.  In my opinion, a society that would tolerate such things would be relatively unfree, and hence, not deserving to be called libertarian.
The “propertarians” I listed at the start of this text do not have identical political philosophies.  However, they all tend to regard liberty as subordinate to property rights.  The late Murray Rothbard and the still living Walter Block are probably the two most explicit economists on the topic of self-ownership, and how that translates into almost unlimited rights of contract.  Javier Milei is pro-business;  he’s a professional economist, who extols the virtues of Milton Friedman and other pro-capitalist economists.  Ramaswamy, Musk, and Thiel have all publicly called themselves “libertarians”.  It’s not clear if they understand the term libertarian in a strict way, or if they are merely using the term loosely, as a way of signaling their desire for businesses to have less regulation.
As propertarian libertarians seem to be grabbing the media spotlight, and as their policy views seem to be gaining political traction, I may have to stop calling myself a libertarian.  There would be no point in calling myself by a name that does not indicate my true ideas.  I think that:  Property rights are not supreme.  I may have the right to own a gun, but I do not have a right to use that gun in an aggressive way.  I do not have a right to shoot my neighbor, because he has a noisy, barking dog.  I don’t even have the right to shoot the dog.
FINIS

In your closing statement about guns, you’re equating rights and privileges.  You don’t have a right to own a gun.  You might have a privilege of possession but not a right of ownership.  The difference between libertarians and propertarians might be of some importance, but the difference between rights and privileges is very important.  I suggest my article Rights Galore, in the May 2010 issue, and my essay The Ravings of a Mad Man, in Pharos.

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— editor