Not once did we equate growing your population to huge numbers with guaranteed financial success. In fact the opposite is true. However, without that population growth (and here's the really important part) during the time a country has not exceeded their capacity to handle that growth, the advancing population helps to ensure the economy grows. Countries (like ours) in that condition count on an increasing customer base for their companies to continue to expand. It's very much part of the business plan of nearly every entrepreneur these days. Very rarely do you find someone considered to be a highly successful merchant or industrialist that builds their company to a set size and is satisfied with no further growth.

If they do that, investors start flocking away from them. The motto "if you build it they will come" grew out of this mindset.

We've all watched this occur in our cities and towns. Just go out to the outskirts where the houses are cheap and the strip malls pop up like toast. Without a continual increase of people coming into the area, they can't be sustained. Within a decade though those developers have hauled in huge profits leaving the towns and cities with a giant mess trying to accommodate the extra infrastructure that's been created.

Where it blows up is when the resources of the area - food, water, real estate, roads, transportation, social services (oh yeah you love that one), police and fire services, etc. are overwhelmed by too dense a population. Look up India, China (before they instituted strict population control) and many African countries in that old set of encyclopedias I know you have on your bookshelves and see how unrestrained growth worked out for them. Under our business model everyone there should have gotten filthy rich along the way. A few did but only by exploiting the poorest among them.

Why don't you stop pussyfooting around and say what really set you off, that the thought of regulating how many rug rats a family can have either by changing the social mindset through education or, if that doesn't work, using incentives and penalties as China was forced to do to force the change. I'm certain your Libertarian mind can't wrap itself around growth restrictions of any shape or form. Who knows if your objections are religious in nature or just that Libertarian "don't screw with me" greed but it's horribly myopic.

Unregulated growth as a model for business has an unsustainable endpoint and it's a dreary and devastating future. Why not start planning for that now instead of watching it all collapse around us and our children? Oh yeah, Libertarian children can damn well take care of themselves.

Art