Reflections  

Dispatch from the Death Star — According to an article in the Washington Post, the city of Washington, D.C., will soon be installing machines dispensing free condoms in public buildings in the nation's capital. "They're going to be as common as water fountains," said Ivan O. Torres, interim director of the city's HIV/AIDS Administration. Two thoughts come to mind:

1. Given how slowly the wheels of bureaucracy turn — is this a measure called for by Clinton?
2. Does Torres know how difficult it is to find a water fountain in D.C.?

— Wendy McElroy

Modern Malthusians — On Dec. 9, the United Nations released a projection of world population growth. The U.N. experts are not modest — they predicted numbers for the year 2300, a mere 300 years out. If this sounds absurd, it is. Imagine experts a century before Malthus, predicting what the world's population would be in 2003.

And it's not that they haven't been warned by their own past failures — in offering predictions for just 50 years from now. As USA Today noted, "The United Nations' latest forecast of the world's population in 2050 is half a billion people lower than the U.N. estimated just two years ago." Half a billion. Would you trust someone who was that wrong, that recently? But "expertise" is apparently immune to skeptical doubts. The USA Today story continued: "Though it's hard to be accurate in long-term forecasts [I'll say!], the U.N. reports are widely considered the 'gold standard' by demographers." "Paper standard" would be more accurate, whatever their demographic colleagues think.

Well, bad money drives out good. That's one cliche that comes to mind. The other is Jesus' remark about prophets not being without honor, save in their home country. But all the world is home to the U.N. experts, and it's obvious that they are honored throughout it. Does that mean that they're not really prophets? — Stephen Cox

The Egg and I — The Atkins diet is presently quite popular in America. Atkins is a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that encourages eating meat, cheese, and eggs, and severely limits grain intake. It is becoming so popular that it is starting to affect food prices. Grain prices are down, and egg prices are up. Market forces will now compel farmers to use the back forty to build a henhouse rather than plant corn in the spring. Were the Department of Agriculture in total control, it would take several years for them to adjust. By that time the fad will have passed, and low cholesterol will probably be back in fashion. Or perhaps the food bureaucrats, who have always opposed the Atkins diet on a nutritional basis, will work to keep the shortage of eggs in place, to encourage people to follow the food pyramid — those Department-of-Agriculture-funded guidelines we all have been ignoring for the past ten years.

Even with the cost increase, the price of eggs is extremely reasonable. Once considered a luxury, an egg contains 10 percent of a day's worth of protein for about 15 cents. Even the poorest laborer ($6.00/hr) can now fulfill his entire daily dietary requirement of protein (ten eggs) with only fifteen minutes of work. Compare this to the first pioneers who tilled the soil from sunup to sundown just to sustain themselves, sometimes unsuccessfully, and you will realize how wealthy modern Americans really are. — Tim Slagle

Turn on, tune in, tax out — The United Nations' first attempt at an Internet power grab came in 1999, when a U.N. agency concocted the brilliant idea of taxing email. A report from the United Nations Development Program predicted a tax of one cent on every 100 email messages would be a fabulous way to forcibly transfer about $70 billion a year from taxpayers in richer countries to less affluent ones.

That idea fizzled, but the taxocrats bode their time. In December, the U.N. convened a "World Summit on the Information Society" in Geneva to discuss a Digital Solidarity Agenda. The U.N.'s International Telecommunica-tions Union says 12,922 people registered, including 900 journalists. (Forbes reported that about 60 second-tier heads of state, including Fidel Castro, showed up too.)

Much of the Solidarity Agenda is vague, predictable, and apparently crafted to justify taxpayer-subsidized expense account junkets to Geneva. It calls for more taxes and spending on politically favored information technology programs, the protection of indigenous peoples' cultural heritage, out-lawing so-called hate speech, and so on. There's the obligatory crypto-censorial suggestion that governments must take "appropriate measures" to combat "illegal and harmful content in media content," whatever that means.

Some of the more incendiary stuff is buried in section D2, which says the U.S. government should take "concrete efforts" toward expropriating $97 billion a year from American taxpayers and funneling the cash to Third-World nations to be spent on some ill-defined technology programs. I'm not sure how much non-military foreign aid the U.S. hands out today, but in 1997 U.S. taxpayers coughed up around $7 billion. Because we have around 130 million U.S. taxpayers, without adjusting for income disparities, the extra $90 billion amounts to an average tax increase of $692 per taxpayer. What a bargain!

About the only other concrete proposal is an attempt to wrest control of Internet governance (think domain names and addresses) from a U.S. non-profit corporation created in 1998 as part of a privatization process. Since then, we've learned that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is quite flawed, but it's probably still a heck of a lot better than giving the U.N. the key to the shop.

For once, we can't blame the Democrats or Republicans for devising this bit of lunacy. In fact, the Bush administration seems entirely cool to the whole Solidarity Agenda. The responsible parties are entitlement-happy countries like Brazil, Senegal (which demands a "global digital solidarity fund"), and most of the rest of Africa. Perhaps Senegal and its African cohorts could better spend their diplomats' time by drafting an Email Recipient Solidarity Agenda to punish Nigerian spammers instead? — Declan McCullagh

Trial Lawyers Face Lawsuit EAGLE PASS, Tex. — In a shocking turn of events, a multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit has been filed against the Trial Lawyers Association by a group of lawyers representing a group of lawyers. Some of the lawyers involved claim that the devastating legal action, which could put the lobbying behemoth out of business, was just an accident. "Look, accidents happen," one attorney confided. "We were just going about our business, and the TLA stepped right in front of us. Tough luck if they get run over. It's a dangerous world out there. Just because something goes wrong, that doesn't mean someone has to be responsible for it." But other lawyers, speaking off the record, said that the incident, far from being an accident, was definitely an intentional, if desperate, measure. "Frankly, the TLA was the only deep-pockets defendant left that we hadn't sued yet," one plaintiff said. "They're loaded. So we had to go after them, even though they're us." The suit alleges gross negligence and knowing deception as well as product liability, arguing that the TLA's signature brand, Frivolous Litigation, has long been known to have serious side effects, including closed playgrounds and parks, curtailed medical research and services, inflated consumer-goods prices, and annoying, ludicrous warnings on everything, like "CAUTION: Contents May Be Extremely Hot" on takeout coffee containers, "WARNING: Do Not Place Hand or Head or Posterior in Blade Area While Starting Engine" on power lawn mowers, and "Remove Capsules from Bottle Before Swallowing" on over-the-counter medications. "The good news," said one of the lawyers, "is that if we win we'll collect not only our standard 30 percent contingency fee but the whole shebang. The bad news is that if we win we'll lose our shirts." — Eric Kenning

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