It should be obvious to everyone above the upper‑middle‑income poverty line that we must make a drastic and immediate change. There isn’t time for debate or argument; your petty ideological protectionism couched as philosophical protestation this moment won’t abide. We need action based on real data and hard science, and there is no time to wait.
No manufacturer is allowed to make another car that isn’t a hybrid. A car is transportation, not a status symbol, and the fact that you want it to be is shameful. Texas, California, and Florida – you don’t get another single all-wheel-drive passenger vehicle. Despite your imaginings, the return on investment doesn’t warrant it, and the perceived sense of increased safety is not merely unfounded, it is antithetical.
This is but an example of the sweeping changes required. But the first one is money.
Money is out. Sure, we’re going to use it as the medium of exchange, but it is no longer going to drive decision making. Outcomes and material constraints are.
There is about to be a huge, tragic, and entirely avoidable financial crisis. It will be largely manufactured by elites attempting to maintain their privilege (average Americans, this includes you), and it will have an outsized affect on the middle class (you again, average Americans). It won’t have legitimate root causes, but it will have real effects. Like almost every financial crisis, it will be induced by people seeking to preserve the disparity between rich and poor.
There is nothing in economics that demands this occur. The only thing that demands it is the desire to have more than your share, or at least more than the next person. Continued pursuit of that is ideological, and will result in your having less, I assure you.
I understand if you are dubious of these claims. My closest relations don’t believe me. When I say we have to cease almost all economic activity, they tell me that will lead to chaos and ruin. You probably agree, but you are mistaken.
The people who taught you to believe that are the very same people leading you to crisis. They claim that the economy must keep growing, but they are purposely vague about precisely why. It is because if it doesn’t they won’t be able to pay back the loans they made to one another, the returns on which they use to enrich themselves. This is why Elon Musk has very few personal possessions and is perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy; he deploys his wealth almost entirely in doing things. The vast majority of his peers (and the bulk of you, average Americans) don’t want to work; they want to walk around talking about working while others do the work. They certainly don’t want to labor. Egad! I might be too exhausted to CrossFit.
The economy doesn’t have to keep growing; in fact, it very much should not. But the financial system insists it must, and this is leading us into crisis.
Not that there isn’t a material crisis; there very much is. And it owes itself to two facts.
A single human produces approximately 6 tons CO₂e per year, while an elephant produces significantly less than one. And humans outnumber any other mammal on the planet by an order of magnitude. Except for rats.
This is not to say that the solution is to reduce the human population. It is to say that 6 tons CO₂e per person per year isn’t gonna fly (pun intended).
As E.F. Schumacher noted some time ago, it is critical that we adopt appropriate technology, not only in the so-called developing world, but indeed rolling back the use of excessive technology in already advanced economies. The story I like to tell to exemplify the inanity of capitalism is that when I was a kid all you needed to watch television was the hardware, electricity, and a tolerance for ads. Then came cable, which required the laying of cable, a set top box, and a subscription, on top of the aforementioned hardware and electricity, and you still got ads. Now we watch TV over the internet, which required the laying of another cable in the same location as the first, a router in addition to the set top box, paying a raft of streaming services on top of an internet service provider, and, somehow, after a brief hiatus, we’re still watching ads. Crazy, and yet the liberal economist describes this as rational.
Rational is also how they describe another of their delusionary hustles, comparative advantage, which is merely elite-speak for taking advantage of poor people. As theory would have it, comparative advantage is the mechanism by which China, by making stuff for Americans at a lower cost than Americans can make it themselves, becomes wealthy enough that they can turn to the Vietnamese to make stuff. This works for a while, but who does the last group of poor people turn to? Such is the infinite regression at which we have now arrived.
Our current economic system is driven by two things, both of which are anti-social. One is capital accumulation and the other is individual preference. Neither is beneficial.
I find it astounding that the average person accepts the premise that some people should have capital while others do not. Where did they get the capital, one might reasonably ask, and why don’t I have any? To quote Dave Mustaine, “I go to work every day, why do you think I’m broke?”
Similarly, why should someone get to choose to drive a giant Suburban rather than a small hybrid, when that choice is literally determining the fate of millions of people? Just because you want to and comparative advantage allows it? The tax levied on that horribly inefficient vehicle should make it financially unworkable to even buy it, if we priced in the pollution that the current system allows the individual to externalize to society at large.
All this to say – we must cease all superfluous economic activity. All the loans and stocks and bonds are null and void. They must be, so that when we stop making iPhones and flinging Starlink satellites into low earth orbit, the financial shock doesn’t cause people to starve in Africa.
We must redistribute the housing stock so that everyone has an adequate place to live. Adequate is the operative word here. Two people in a 13000 square foot mansion isn’t adequate; it’s ridiculous. And to head off the inevitable complaint, hard work didn’t get you that, taking advantage of people poorer than you did.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. No one is going to listen anyway. They are too busy being terrified of the very thing they themselves are causing, and the last thing they can imagine doing is getting off the amusement ride. Rather, they will march indignantly into a crisis of their own making, shaking their fists angrily at the impoverished scapegoats whose fate they both ensure and share.