Bob Brown's green vision will be hell for workers

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Friday 27 June 2003

Much has already been drawn about Senator Bob Brown's hypocrisy regarding Hussein Saddam and the war to remove his sadistic regime. Particular attention was drawn to Brown's grossly misleading statements about the social costs of the war in terms of casualties and damage to the environment.

(Oddly enough, I don't recall Brown or any of his supporters condemning Saddam for his vicious destruction of the Marsh Arabs and their environment).

What has been overlooked is just how elitist and loony Brown's green economics really is. A letter he had published in The Australian (27/6/91) expressing his views on what he sneering calls "extraction industries" basically said it all.

According to this brilliant economist logging and mining are defined as "resource robbery", Tasmania is a "post-industrial" society, despite the fact that it has never been industrialised, because the economy "is not based on dinosaur industries like pulp mills, zinc mills and aluminium mills." (Italics added)

That without pulp mills there would be no paper, and certainly no newspapers to promote his lunacy, was obviously beyond his powers of observation. The man who uses numerous electrical appliances, drives a car, travels by train, ship and plane is the same man who argues that the manufacturing processes that make these things possible are "dinosaur industries"!

Brown's attitude toward these industries reminds me of Ralph Nader's insane idea that America's petrochemical industry "might need to be abolished."

Are these green fanatics stupid are just cunning? Don't they realise that these industries are at the very highest stages of production and that damaging them must inevitably damage economic growth because their products are vital inputs for the lower stages of production that produce consumer goods? But then, the likes of Brown and Nader think we mortals consume too much anyway.

Brown argues "that it is in the green-backed arena of … labour intensive … small businesses that Tasmania's future job creation lies." Judging by other green comments this must go for that economy as a whole.

Let's get a couple of economic facts straight. Finding work is not a problem so long as there is sufficient land and capital to employ people. The problem is generating economic growth, the process that creates evermore higher-paying jobs. And it is this process that the likes of Brown hate.

Now higher-paid jobs for everyone can only come through increasing the ratio of capital to labour. The Austrian school of economics describes the process as one in which an integrated capital structure with many stages of production that keeps lengthening by adding more capital intensive stages that embody superior technology and techniques.

It is this process of 'capital lengthening' that raise the marginal value of labour's product and hence its real standard of living. Abandoning this process in favour of small-scale labour intensive firms is a recipe for a massive collapse in living standards — making Brown's elite green paradise a hell for the labour force.

At least Jeremy Rifkin, another green fanatic, was open about the consequences of green economic policies for living standards, admitting that "production will center on goods required to maintain life." However, he did not say who would decide what these goods would be.

Ernest Callenbach's book Ecotopia was brutally honest about greens aims to savagely lower living standards. In his green paradise living standards will have been massively cut and energy prices kept deliberately high. In case anyone should think that Callenbach's views are out of keeping with what passes for mainstream thinking in green intellectual circles, Ralph Nader, the white knight of the green movement, gave it his stamp of approval.

Brown's statements about the war against Saddam's sadistic regime are as despicable as his green economics. But perhaps I should finish with a simple question: Why did the green movement try to sabotage the war against Saddam?

On the other hand, perhaps the question is superfluous considering that the same Greenpeace that opposed the war against Saddam also cooperated with the KGB (Pro-Saddam Greenpeace blockades P.M. Howard's residence: now lets look at Greenpeace' KGB links), and that the sainted Ralph Nader supports the terrorist Arafat.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes' Economics Editor