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October 10, 2007
George Monbiot Calls for an End to Economic Growth
Posted by Dave Blount at October 10, 2007 11:16 AM
The Guardian's George Monbiot, from whose name the word "moonbat" may have been derived, is now demanding an end to economic growth:
I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises. I recognise that recession causes hardship. Like everyone I am aware that it would cause some people to lose their jobs and homes. I do not dismiss these impacts or the harm they inflict, though I would argue that they are the avoidable results of an economy designed to maximise growth rather than welfare. What I would like you to recognise is something much less discussed: that, beyond a certain point, hardship is also caused by economic growth.
How so? Economic growth causes there to be too many people who can afford jet skis, and Monbiot doesn't like jet skis because they make too much noise. Also, economic growth results in carbon emissions, but here the logic gets a little circular, because moonbats wouldn't pretend carbon emissions are a problem if they didn't result from economically productive activity.
Even Monbiot has brief episodes of sanity:
The massive improvements in human welfare — better housing, better nutrition, better sanitation and better medicine — over the past 200 years are the result of economic growth and the learning, spending, innovation and political empowerment it has permitted.
But Moonbat believes economic growth has gone far enough in the developed world. You see, it excuses governments from dealing with inequality. If the poor have more wealth than the middle class did a generation ago, that still doesn't fix the real problem, which according to Monbiot is the fact that some people have more wealth still. Better we should all be poor than someone inflict "inequality" by working hard and earning more than someone who can't seem to drag himself off the couch.
Monbiot quotes Henry Wallich, formerly of the U.S. Federal Reserve:
Growth is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.
Ideally there would be no hope, and moonbats would slake their festering envy by dragging the most productive down to the level of the useless parasites who benefit from their depraved and nihilistic ideology.
