The world's population should be at most 50 million.

[onlinebiker]

" no clear reason"????

Holy shit.

There' s almost 9 billion reasons.

Every major problem on this planet can go back to one cause - human overpopulation.

If we had 1/10th of the population we do - global climate change would become a much lesser threat. Starvation would cease to exist. Alternative energy would be closer to reality.

Right, no clear reason..because the state doesn't have a compelling interest on account of the world having lots of people.  The state is, firstly, accountable for and to it's own.  There aren't too many americans.  There aren't even -enough- americans.  That's what it means when immigration is the only thing keeping us up over pop replacement (and when we require x amount of guest or illegal labor).

I strongly doubt that you'd be able to pin overpopulation as the cause of every major problem on this planet.  Why would having 1/10th of the pop, for example..make global warming less of a threat?  Less than 10% of the human population is driving the thing to begin with.  Why would starvation cease to exist?  There's already enough food, people still starve.  Why would alternative energy be closer to reality with a -smaller- market of potential consumers?

-and why, after we address those puzzlers...would we start with the poor..anyway?

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adden

To help you see how I'm approaching this, here's some trivia.  It's estimated that the worlds billion most impoverished people contribute a whopping 3% to our carbon footprint.  If those 1 billion people were disappeared...a significant portion of the total pop (through, in your case, a program of voluntary controlled breeding with a economic incentive)...that wouldn't make a dent in climate change.

Since we've been keeping stats on grain yields, the worlds population has increased roughly four or five times.  The average yield of an acre of corn...eight to ten times.  

The most limiting factor in the rollout of alterantive energy is the existence of a sufficient number of customers or consumers to make break even costs (and here we'd have to assume hefty tax subsidy, tax revenue...also determined in the aggregate of taxpayers).  

With that in mind, can you see how a person might not find the malthusian religion all that convincing? 

You're overlooking some rather hard facts.

1. The reason we got better at growing food - is because wee came up with better ways of turning oil into food. Take a look where all that high nitrogen fertilizer comes from - it' s petrochemically based. Consequently you are freeing up more CO2 to grow the food that' s feeding the masses. That means more CO2 into the astmosphere.

2. The limiting factor on alternative energy is demand. Have you any idea what kind of power the world consumes? Start small - look at one aluminum refining plant. It takes GIGAWATTS of electricity to operate one. You know how big an area of solar cells that would take? I had a rather sharp engineer tell me once that after doing the math - he found one aluminum refinery would take a solar array of roughly the size of Kansas. 

There is no downside to a smaller population.

There' s a multitude to a larger one.