Green economic blueprint is a recipe for tyranny

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Friday 4 July 2003

"If you think the old ideological divide between Left and Right has lost its punch, never fear. A new and far more disturbing ideological fault-line is emerging: the battle between the proponents and the opponents of economic growth." So wrote Ross Gittins of Sydney Morning Herald (It's silly, dangerous and coming to a head, 30/6)

Gittins was referring to Clive Hamilton's recently published +Growth Fetish. Now Hamilton is a socialist with a loathing of economic growth, even though he has no real understanding of the process, and a passion for slashing the living standards of the masses. But Hamilton is no socialist according to the urbane and widely read Gittins, neither is he an extremist. (See Growth, greens and living standards for a rebuttal of Hamilton's views).

Gittins did, however, ask "What's the alternative to growth? How would you manage the economy, and to what end? Would the population also have to stop growing? What if it didn't? Where would the extra jobs come from?" Quite.

Herman Daly, a leading environmental ideologue and former economist, has provided the answer — socialism! In his green paradise all goods are to be held to a minimum by the state which would also have complete control over all resources. In case Mr Gittins still doesn't get it, this is called socialism.

Furthermore, Daly admits that as a matter of policy prices would have to be kept high to reduce consumption, i.e., to enforce a low living standard. Anyone with any serious training in economics would know that at the very best — if you can call it that — Daly is really proposing a stationary economy.

In other words, the Hamiltons and Dalys propose to implement policies that would result in a poverty ridden stagnant economy. It should be obvious that for such a dismal economic situation to be sustainable for any length of time, the government would have to control savings and investment, entrepreneurship would have to be suppressed as would inventiveness and production would clearly have to be directed by the state. In short, we are back to central planning. But with the intention of suppressing growth, not directing and optimising it, and institutionalising mass poverty.

Daly and his fellow green fanatics have yet to answer three basic questions about their green dystopia: 1) What the minimum level of consumption will be? 2) Who will decide on what the level will be? 3) Who is going to decide on who gets what? 4) And how do they intend to enforce their diktats?

But these questions are largely superfluous because it takes little imagination to realise that the greens' economic system could only be enforced at the point of a bayonet and the threat of a Gulag. (Perhaps they are going to lift a few chapters out of Pol Pot's Manual for Economic Autarky)

Considering the green assault against economics and growth we need to ask why our so-called free marketeers have refused to come out of their bunkers and directly confront these green fanatics. If they think their media mates are going to do the job for them — forget it. They don't have what it takes. Come to think of it, neither do our self-appointed free marketeers.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes' Economics Editor