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October 10, 2007
George Monbiot Calls for an End to Economic Growth
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.
Posted by Van Helsing at October 10, 2007 11:16 AM
Comments
Why is it that whenever Leftists talk about the redistribution of wealth, people assume they're talking about Bill Gates?
THEY MEAN YOU! THEY MEAN EVERYBODY!
If you aren't in debt, or Gaia forbid, have actual savings, to them you are as bad a Imelda Marcos. They want you in debt or poor, so they can control you.
"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower becomes servant to the lender." Proverbs
They want YOU to become the servant of the government.
Posted by: phil at October 10, 2007 12:09 PM
No, he means everyone except him and his ilk. From his profile...
"He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics) and East London (environmental science). He is currently visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement." (whoa, Mandela....!)
He thinks insulated from the results of his theories ie; poverty for everyone, because he's an academic and probably has tenure somewhere. No doubt he is certain, as any communist is, in his intellectual superiority and the privleges that it will confer on him in his communist utopia. Some pigs are more equal.......
Posted by: bobf at October 10, 2007 1:05 PM
Why do all these people look alike...right down to the smirk?
Posted by: Bill Cruchon at October 10, 2007 1:29 PM
What's most offensive about Monbiot's writings is he always has to pause to pat himself on the back with this kind of "woah, dare I think the unthinkable? Am I really that radical? Why yes, yes I am!" thing.
"Maybe it's time to think, should we... should we ban shoes? The received wisdom is that shoes are necessary. But are they? I don't wear shoes in the bath. Babies don't wear shoes. The Japanese make you take your shoes *off*. Is it time to ask whether shoes are really a good thing?"
It draws the reader in to believing they, too, are a radical intellectual as they, too, think the unthinkable with George and, remarkably, find themself agreeing at the end. It's a cover for the transparent ignorance and lunacy of his arguments that sort of slips them by, by defusing them before they're stated. Irritates the tits off me, so it does.
Posted by: Ian from the EUSSR at October 10, 2007 3:00 PM
It's guys like this who say, "Illegal immigration doesn't hurt anyone...they add to the economy!" They feel secure in the knowledge that uneducated, low-skilled border jumpers aren't likely to be taking away jobs at snooty universities and newspapers (unless it's at the distribution level and then, who cares?).
Ian's description of the "radical intellectual" is spot on. Only I hope Monbiot doesn't dislocate his shoulder from all that self-congratulatory back patting...I hear the lines for medical care in Britain are pretty long.
Posted by: Pam at October 10, 2007 4:21 PM
Liberalism In A Nutshell:
In the time I can make two cookies, you can make two pies. That's unequal, and therefore, unjust. So you must give me one pie and I'll give you one cookie. This is "good" and "just" because:
We made a compromise.
We each gave up one item.
And most importantly, we now have equal posession.
The problem of course is that YOU had to give up MORE than I. And since the Liberals will force you to give me half of what you make, I don't have to work as hard as I used to. And because you will loose some of your property, you don't see any reason to work as hard, either.
That's why capitalist economies thrive while solcialist ecconomies fail.
Posted by: KHarn at October 10, 2007 5:38 PM
"Some ideas are so absurd, only an intellectual could believe them."
George Orwell
Posted by: phil at October 11, 2007 5:45 AM
