I'd like to see a variation of that "first baby of the new year" feature newspapers are always running to honor the 6,500,000,000th person born on Earth Saturday. How many people can the Earth support? Short answer: As many as there are. Every since Malthus, various "experts," such as Paul Ehrlich, have been predicting that overpopulation would eventually exhaust the world's resources. They've been wrong every single time, but people still keep paying attention to them.
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Yeah, I used to scoff at Malthus and Ehrlich, too, back when I was a wise, old 18 year old. Why, hadn't Ehrlich and his ilk been proven wrong when Ehrlich lost the commodities prices bet with Julian Simon?
Look, I'd rather be around a libertarian almost any day than anyone else, because libertarians are optimistic. Where libertarians go wrong is in believing that man's mind has an *infinite* capacity to peacefully solve the problems of overpopulation and shortage of resources. But libertarians cannot prove their belief in this *infinite* capacity. All libertarians can do is mock Malthus and Ehrlich and the like as doom-sayers, as Chicken Littles.
Well I've got news for you libertarians: Resources on this Earth *are* finite. Yes, man has the capacity to make the most of bad situations, man's mind can turn what would seem to be dross into materials as good as gold--but only up to a point. And because resources on Earth *are* finite, there are real limits to the population of this Earth. For an absurd example, imagine there are humans enough to occupy every square foot of space on the planet. What space will be allocated for the next generation?
Perhaps libertarians count on mining the moon for additional resources, and/or in terraforming Mars. But it's irresponsible to consume all of the Earth's resources with abandon, and to encourage human population growth based on pie-in-the-sky plans of terraforming other planets and excavating the moon.
Now, in one respect, you're right in saying that the Earth can support as many people as there are. But at what cost? The mass extinction of other species? At some point, the system will collapse, and an ecosystem that formerly sustained millions of humans will be lucky to sustain hundreds. Better we recognize our limits and reduce human population--our footprint on the Earth--before the Earth takes matters out of our hands and solves our overpopulation with disease and famine.
An excellent resource for recovering libertarians, that is, those who recognize that there *are* limits to growth, are the writings of Garrett Hardin, author of the famous paper, "The Tragedy of the Commons."
http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/
Hardin's book "Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos" is an excellent place to start.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195093852/sr=8-1/qid=1140706343/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-5104670-1983942?%5Fencoding=UTF8