… is from page 223 of the late Bernard Siegan‘s excellent 1997 volume, Property and Freedom:
Human experience reveals the fallibility of [Paul] Ehrlich’s position. Even if there will, in time, be less tonnage of each of these resources, human ingenuity will provide substitutes to satisfy needs and the market will efficiently allocate the scarce resources. Every day, in places all over the world, people are seeking to create substitute products that will be cheaper and more useful than each of these metals. Others are discovering less expensive ways to bring these resources to market. These processes have been ongoing since the beginning of civilization, and they have been much more successful since the Industrial Revolution that began in the eighteenth century. The major impediment to ingenuity is government regulation which clamps artificial impediments on the human mind.
