http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/34428
Liberalism's embrace of big government has made it into the party of
uncontrolled consumption
A Crisis of Unsustainable Consumption
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- Daniel Greenfield Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The budget stalemate between the right and the left comes down to a basic
difference in economic views, the left feels that we need to tax more in order
to consume more money, and the right believes that we need to consume less
money in order to tax less. Whichever side of the argument you come down on,
it’s not hard to see which of these positions is fundamentally unsustainable.
And it is amazing that the same people who can and do lecture for hours on
environmental sustainability, seem to have no grasp of economic sustainability.
If you tell them that the solution to high fish prices is to catch more fish,
they will tell you right away that you’ll fish out the lake. But tell them that
the deficit is too high and their immediate solution will be to tax more, never
considering the possibility that it’s possible to tax human resources, as much
as natural resources.
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Liberalism’s embrace of big government has made it into the party of
uncontrolled consumption
Liberalism’s embrace of big government has made it into the party of
uncontrolled consumption. While with one hand they force energy efficiency and
recycling on the public, with the other they display no conservationist
instincts at all when it comes to the public’s money. This paradoxical attitude
leads to tightfistedness when it comes to everything from light bulbs to
plastic bags to toilet paper, and spendthrift ways when it comes to money.
Forget to turn off a light bulb when you leave a room and you’re a monster, but
a few billion dollars here and there doesn’t amount to anything.
There’s a touch of Marie Antoinette to the spectacle of a government which is
fiscally irresponsible, yet obsessed with the fast food purchases and soda can
recycling habits of its subjects. A lifestyle of carbon neutral piety that they
preach, but never quite practice except in showy ways and on special occasions.
People may forgive irresponsibility in a government that expects little from
them or imposed austerity in a government that practices it from the top down.
But imposed austerity from an irresponsible government is quite another thing.
It’s more than hypocrisy, it’s the practice of tyranny. Taking from the many to
give to the few.
The media organs of liberalism act as if everything is a non-renewable
resource, except money. But where does money come from? Quite a few politicians
seem to be convinced that they create money by passing laws, which is just
wrong enough to be right, and just right enough to be very wrong. We may run
out of oil, gas, coal, wood and just about everything else—but the elite is
certain that we will never run out of money in this wonderful new paperless
global economy. And if we ever do, we’ll just print some more. The
virtualization of money means that it’s treated as an imaginary value defined
only in relation to economic and social policies, and those government policies
are treated as a means of creating wealth.
If you want more money, you must have more big government. That’s the economic
policy of every branch of government at every level. The more money an agency
spends, the more it can demand. Social services agencies hunt for more
‘clients’ to serve. Defense projects roll through that the military doesn’t
want. Politicians stuff in their pork, and even the ones who claim to believe
in fiscal discipline say that if they don’t grab their constituents’ share of
the money someone else will. It’s like a going out of business sale in which
everyone grabs what they can, but it’s taxpayer money and national debt that’s
on sale. ‘Use it or lose it’, is the mandate.
Manufacturing demand for spending becomes a means of preserving power
Manufacturing demand for spending becomes a means of preserving power. During a
recession governments spend more money to save the economy—even though they are
what the economy needs saving from. And then they spend money to cut costs,
which is a classic example of an addict’s rationalization. Government policy is
to do anything and everything short of not spending money. Because money is
power. Their power. Legislatures are numerous. There is only so much an
individual in a legislature can do. Passing laws is difficult. But spending
money is easy.
Michael Moore calls for treating wealth as a national resource. The government
has been treating individual wealth as a national resource all along. But
personal wealth is finite. So is national wealth. Debt on the other hand can be
virtually infinite, until people stop lending you money or the underlying
system collapses.
Appetite always outstrips available resources. Individuals and governments can
always consume more than they make. Debt turns appetite into consumption. It
allows for the practice of ‘Wimpy economics’, forever paying Tuesday for a
hamburger today. And we’ve got a bad case of ‘Wimpy economics’. Paul Krugman
won a Nobel prize in economics for his own brand of ‘Wimpy economics’, but even
debt has its limits. Your ability to borrow diminishes with your ability to
repay the original debt. Too big to fail, just means enough credibility to get
deep into debt, but it doesn’t mean a bottomless well of money.
Or to put it in a way that Moore can understand. His capacity for eating food
will always outpace his ability to pay for it. Moore is capable of eating a
dozen of Burger King’s ‘The Burger’ with ‘Wagyu beef, white truffles, Pata
Negra ham slices, Cristal onion straws, Modena balsamic vinegar, lambs lettuce,
pink Himalayan rock salt, organic white wine and shallot infused mayonnaise in
an Iranian saffron and white truffle dusted bun’, washing them down with
bottles of $160,000 a bottle Chateau Lafitte and a 25,000 dollar chocolate
sundae served in a goblet with edible gold. But even he would have trouble
paying for it.
Appetite outstrips resources. That’s where some form of sustainability has to
come into the picture. It is possible for the government to keep running up
deficits, until the system implodes. Harvesting more money from corporations
and the rich may delay that day temporarily, but it will not address the
underlying problem. And that problem is consumption based. And it is a problem
that cannot be solved by harvesting resources more efficiently. Either the
government’s appetite for uncontrolled spending is curbed, or the whole
economic ecosystem collapses.
Raising taxes during a depression is as smart as overhunting a territory during
a punishing winter
Raising taxes during a depression is as smart as overhunting a territory during
a punishing winter. You can only kill so many elk, before you put too much
stress on the population. Unfortunately the advocates of big government
spending are convinced that people with money are an infinitely renewable
resource who are part of a conspiracy to keep money away from them. Which
allows them to rationalize their bad fiscal policies using class warfare
conspiracy theories.
The left says that the problem is that the rich are greedy. The right says that
the problem is that government is greedy. And in the economic ecosystem, it is
the ultimate predator. The biggest, the fiercest and the hardest to resist.
That also makes it the most dangerous. A predator at the top of the economic
food chain with no limits on his territory or his appetite, means the
extinction of all the species that he preys upon, and then of the species who
are parasitically or symbiotically dependent on him.
Are we to be more concerned with the predator at the top of the food chain, or
the predators who are next in line, particularly when the predator at the top
of the food chain continues to expand his territory and become more aggressive,
while the predators below him fall into a decline. The appetite of government
has grown along with its ability to requisition whatever funds it wants. What
we have then is a crisis of consumption.
Taxing the rich is only a more efficient way of stripping the ecosystem’s
resources, and when that happens what then? Escalating government spending
means an unlimited appetite. Personal wealth is limited. National wealth is
limited. All resources are finite, even debt. The crisis of consumption remains
inescapable. It cannot be outspent or outtaxed or outrhetoriced. It remains a
crisis, so long as unsustainable consumption remains a tool of power in
Washington D.C. and at all levels of government.
If the crisis was one of insufficient taxation, as the left insists, then
taxing every wealthy American would still not even begin to cover the current
deficit. Blame the rich as much as you want, deficit spending backed by higher
taxes is still completely unsustainable. And therefore irresponsible. Even
taxing the wealthy of the entire planet could not fill a constantly escalating
deficit.
‘Wimpy economics’ says that if we get the deficit high enough, our economy will
becomes so vital that we will be able to reduce the deficit. This isn’t
economics, it’s a shell game, in which deficit spending today is justified
using a potential recovery. If the recovery comes, then clearly getting deeper
into debt worked. And if it doesn’t, then as Paul Krugman has said of the
stimulus plan, we clearly didn’t spend enough.
We have gone from a nation where economic policy was determined by businessmen,
to a nation where it is determined by professional politicians
We have gone from a nation where economic policy was determined by businessmen,
to a nation where it is determined by professional politicians. And the latter
don’t know very much about any business other than their own, which is to spend
money. Money to them is imaginary, a long set of zeroes on a piece of paper,
detached from anything real. And there are always self-serving justifications
for going down the same bad road, for viewing taxpayers and their money as an
infinite resource that can never be exhausted so long as the sun burns in the
sky.
Treating energy as a finite resource and money as an infinite resource confuses
one with the other. There is an infinite amount of available energy, but wealth
is finite. The sun beams out more energy than we could possibly use, and
governments spends more money than could possibly exist. But while the left
worries about sustainable energy, it spares no thought for sustainable
spending. While energy can neither be created nor destroyed, wealth can be and
is.
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