Most Americans today don't like big government. The November to remember revealed just how much they don't like it.

After spending part of my fall internship in Washington, D.C., listeniting to irate citizens, I also know that there's another big government, at least geographically speaking, that a number of Americans love to hate: the United Nations.

Gripes about the United Nations usually take a nationalist form: The United Nations doesn't look out for U.S. interests -- just like the federal government doesn't look out for state and local interests.

But where the fed misses by a foot, to many times it seems like the United Nations misses by a mile. Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts is one thing; sending "my kid" to Bosnia is another issue entirely.

But if they'd been paying attention, Americans might have one more reason to doubt the leadership of the United Nations. Most Americans ignored the U.N. Conference on Population and Development, but in September delegates from around the world settled on a "program of action" which, they hoped, would cap the predicted world population explosion.

There were two basic problems with the goings-on in Cairo, Egypt:

First, the conferees assumed that, in order to preclude human suffering, as a "world community" we must take action to limit population growth. Perhaps very limited action. But before we do that, let's think this through. Even among experts, these issues are not resolved.

Population studies are relatively new. Who knows if the trends we're seeing should be alarming?

The historical context is missing. Birth rates are about as reliable as the Dow Jones. Growth experts tell us that the population could grow as large as 12.5 billion by 2050; it could also be as low as 7.8 billion. That's a globe's worth of difference.

Further, the South (a fancy name for the Third World) is also industrializing. Here in the post-industrial United States, growth rates are crawling. If the South goes the same way, the population explosion may be limited in time frame.

Population alarmists often do not account for technological innovations either. That was Thomas Malthus' infamous mistake in the 19th century:

Calling for catastrophe to level off the coming population explosion, Malthus did not foresee the Industrial Revolution which enabled fewer to feed more.

We might do well to learn from his error.

The second major problem with the Conference was the vague language used to discuss inherently serious subjects. At a preparatory meeting before the Conference, for example, Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, Timothy E. Wirth, said that the United States wanted to ensure that people "have the right to determine freely and responsibly the size of their families." What does that mean? A smarter person than I asked a terribly important question: Who sets the responsible family size?

The problem is, in some places, ambiguous language can mean government coercion.

In China, says John S. Aird, former U.S. Bureau of the Census research specialist on China, "the meaning of documents ... is frequently obscured by the use of euphemisms and apparently innocuous abstractions that presumably convey specific messages to family planning officials..."

The moral? Watch the doublespeak.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof report that in China the regime forces young women to undergo sterilization and abortion.

Undersecretary Wirth almost certainly didn't have this in mind; he's outspoken against coercion. But such ambiguous language could spell trouble later on if it's used out of context.

Other wording was more clear but just as troublesome. This bothered the Vatican and some Islamic countries which raised cain when conferees proposed that the final "program of action" assert a universal women's right to abortion. Vice President Al Gore promptly denied United States' support at any time for the universal right concept.

The Conference did produce some positive results. Probably the most important was its emphasis on providing women in Southern countries with schooling.

Hopefully with education' women will learn that their singular importance is more than to bear children. Crucial to improving conditions in the South, the Conference also rightly stressed the necessity of economic development.

But the question remains, why did it take persistent Islamic and Vatican nagging to rein in what one well-known columnist called "the gender-agenda coercionaries overpopulating global conferences" who brought up the nonsense about the universal women's right to an abortion?

Or non-coercionary Undersecretary Wirth, who carelessly spoke of our right to determine our family size responsibly?

Fortunately, it looks like none of this made it into the final "program of action." But the United Nations would do both Americans (we are its largest contributors) and the world community a favor by foregoing this language in the first place.