[Skybird]

I often implied, expressed, said that the Green's wanted economic policy is an intentional turn towards economical desaster. Its not just a consequence they are just not aware of - they WANT it. That is one of the reasons why they are so extremely dangerous. The following essay describes it specificially for the German Greens, but I am certain you have parrallel thinking amongst the green party in other nations, too.

Deindustrialization and the Shrinking Economy. Consequences of green economic policy

Antony P. Mueller

From 22 thousand members in 1982, the membership of the party grouping Bündnis 90/Grüne has now risen to over 125 thousand. Even though this number is only 0.15% of Germany's population, this party is in the process of shaping German economic policy and directing the country toward a presumably more ecological economy through coercive regulation. The question arises as to what specific economic policy ideas are being pursued here. Who exerts formative influence on the ideas of this grouping when it comes to the "ecological transformation" of the economy?

In the current federal government, the Alliance 90/Green party provides the vice chancellor and holds the ministerial posts of Foreign Affairs, Economy and Climate Protection, Food and Agriculture, Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, and Environment. In Germany's population of 83.24 million, 6.47 million voted Green in the last federal election. That is 7.8%. Although this party grouping is thus not voted for by over 92% of the population, it lays claim to a determining influence on Germany's fortunes.

At the same time, little is known about what concrete ideas prevail about what the ecological turnaround should look like in concrete terms.

What form of economy is envisaged to cope with the supposed global warming? The first thing to note is that, for the Greens, it is a foregone conclusion that the global economy is on the verge of collapse because of climate change. Starting from this premise, the question is how to respond to this challenge. Which authors can be named who provide an answer to this question from a green perspective?

If you look around to see who is decisively shaping the economic policy ideas of ecological circles, you very quickly come across Ulrike Herrmann. Like hardly anyone else, Ms. Herrmann - since 2000 editor at the daily newspaper taz and its economics correspondent - shapes the economic worldview of the Green clientele. As an active lecture traveler and present in many debates, the activist knows how to communicate the vision of the ecological turnaround to her many supporters. Her influence on the ecological movement can hardly be underestimated. She is an avid writer, was awarded the Keynes Society Prize for Economic Journalism in 2015 for her contributions to the taz newspaper, and received the Otto Brenner Prize in 2019 "for her critical and trenchant economic journalism with a good sense of the welfare state."

Ms. Hermann is taken very seriously by her following. She is, as it were, the "chief economist" of the Green movement, although she holds no official party office. With her nice way of speaking, she knows how to convince her followers in a catchy way and in simple language that the end of capitalism has come. Ms. Herrmann avoids in-depth analyses and complex argumentation. But this is precisely how she has monopolized the Greens' economic worldview in her favor. Ulrike Herrmann is a master of the echo chamber.

Ulrike Herrmann's basic thesis is that capitalist economic growth is not possible in a finite world because production reaches absolute limits. There is the environmental limit and the raw material limit. The environment is overloaded and soon the raw materials will be used up to the last. But before that, there is already a climate catastrophe that will make life on the planet impossible. It must be acted fast.

Before the middle of the century, Germany should become climate neutral. The way to achieve this is the introduction of an "ecological war economy". Private property can be formally retained, but the state will give strict guidelines for consumption and production. The market will be suspended, prices will be controlled, and a system of quantity rationing must be installed.

For Ms. Hermann, capitalism is an economic system that both produces growth but also cannot exist without growth. However, since, according to Ulrike Herrmann, there are "absolute" limits to growth, capitalism is also finite and must necessarily give way to another system, which she calls a "circular economy."

It is not just a matter of rising temperatures, but a whole series of other disasters are linked to the climate catastrophe: the greatest species extinction of all time, the massive loss of fertile soils, an increasing shortage of fresh water. The world has little time left to stop global warming of several degrees. Failure to do so will result in the collapse of the Amazon forest and the thawing of areas of Siberian permafrost. If temperatures continue to rise, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is just as inevitable as that of parts of Antarctica, resulting in a rise in sea level of twelve to fifteen meters.

A trained journalist and historian by training, she knows how to convince her congregation of the need for the German economy to shrink. In order to move from today's growth economy to a circular economy, an intermediate stage is necessary, which must now be installed: a "war economy shrinking economy." In concrete terms, this means, among other things: Stopping air travel, abolishing individual transportation and cutting back on food, especially meat consumption. The model for their ideas is the English wartime economy. Just as England did at the beginning of World War II when it was a question of converting the economy as quickly as possible from a peacetime to a wartime economy, so now the current consumption- and growth-oriented capitalist economy is to be converted to an "ecological circular economy". Investment and consumption must be aligned with government requirements. Prices will be controlled, the market suspended. The aim is to direct all economic activity towards the goal of reducing "CO2 emissions".

Mrs. Ulrike Herrmann obviously wants the systematic deindustrialization of Germany. But that's not all: services associated with capitalist growth, such as banking and insurance, the advertising industry and trade fair logistics, would also have to disappear. This dismantling does not go along with mass unemployment according to their conceptions, however, since the ecological agriculture could offer sufficient jobs. However, she admits that this is not compatible with today's income levels. Wages and salaries will fall drastically, and that is a good thing, because there will be less consumption.

According to the ecosocialists, capitalism is not viable. Its basic constellation is the interaction of technology, industrialization and greenhouse gases. For the eco-Marxists, the basic problem of capitalism is not class struggle, but the "exploitation" of nature.

In summary, Ulrike Herrmann's thesis, and thus probably also widely accepted by the Greens as a party and its supporters, is that capitalism means growth, but because constant growth is not possible in a finite world, the capitalist growth economy must be replaced by an ecological circular economy. The way to get there is through a forced shrinking economy, which requires the use of war economy methods. The goal is to drastically reduce production and consumption in order to bring consumption in line with the ecological standards of one's worldview.

For ecosocialists, the coming man-made climate catastrophe, caused quasi by "capitalism," is a certainty. Epistemologically, this thesis cannot be proven a priori, either in advance or in retrospect, i.e. not even if warming were to occur.[1] Rather, it is a kind of dogma that is no longer considered questionable in the German leading media, and even critics of the dogma who remain objective are meanwhile ostracized from public discourse as "climate deniers" - regardless of their arguments. For this reason, it makes little sense to address this thesis. The present critique aims rather at proving that even if such a climate catastrophe would occur, the argumentation of Mrs. Herrmann and the green anti-capitalists following her is based on wrong theses and thus leads to wrong conclusions.

Mrs. Ulrike Herrmann has obviously studied Marx and perhaps also Adam Smith and a little Keynes, but beyond that she has hardly dealt with other economic theories and has certainly not thought about the Austrian School or even neoclassicism. Following the limited horizon of her intellectual foster fathers, Herrmann concludes that the life span of capitalism is limited. Here she follows Marx's thesis of the tendential fall of the rate of profit. According to this, competition drives capitalists to overaccumulate capital. This leads to ever diminishing returns. The rate of profit falls all the more as the concentration of capital increases. Capitalism is creating its own grave.

The law of diminishing marginal returns is part of the standard repertoire of economic theory and has long been well known from agriculture. Ecologists are now transferring this principle to the entire economy and using it to justify the limits to growth. In doing so, however, they fail to recognize a number of points: First, it is these diminishing marginal returns that prevent over-expansion. As soon as loss threatens, the entrepreneur will stop expanding. This is why there are so many small and medium-sized enterprises in the market economy, in addition to the few large enterprises. Second, a diminishing marginal return on the productive assets employed drives enterprises to seek new uses of capital that yield higher returns. This is what is known as technical progress. This is not just technology in the conventional sense of the word, but all operational measures that increase total factor productivity. Innovation is the hallmark of modern capitalism, not more and more production of the same goods with the same means of production.

Eco-socialists talk about scarcity of raw materials, ignoring the fact that scarcity is universal and is the essence of economic activity. If there were no scarcity, there would be no need for economies. In a market economy, prices are indicators of scarcity and also serve as an incentive to deal with scarcity economically. Therefore, because the theses of the ecosocialists are based on the threat of an increased scarcity of raw materials, a rational assessment would have to support market-based pricing all the more.

Another error of the ecological anti-capitalists follows the previous one: The belief that people are only ever concerned with more production and more consumption. Rather, it is the case that productivity growth also serves to demand more leisure time instead of more goods. What characterizes modern capitalism is ongoing productivity progress and not, as the ecosocialists try to make you believe, ever more production. Technological progress reduces the consumption of resources, and higher productivity allows for more muse.

The fact that Ulrike Herrmann certainly knows how to write and is an excellent speaker should not obscure the fact that her main thesis about the limits to growth, is deceptively false. Instead of repeating the same errors over and over again and parading through the country with the same theses, the "chief economist of the Greens" would do well to look into economic theory beyond Smith, Marx and Keynes. Then she would have to realize that not less capitalism, but more capitalism is the solution - and that regardless of whether a climate catastrophe is really imminent or not. The best way to guard against an environmental crisis is through high economic performance. High productivity is the basis for mastering this and the other challenges. But this is precisely the specific achievement of "capitalism", i.e. the unconstrained exchange of goods and services using production capital, as opposed to all other economic systems. Whether the announced climate catastrophe becomes reality or not, the more market-oriented the economic system is in the aforementioned sense, the better one will be able to cope with it. Conversely, ecosocialism leads in any case to an economic and human catastrophe - even if the climatic crisis should fail to materialize.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

https://www.misesde.org/2022/06/dein...chaftspolitik/

One must be afraid for this country, and for one's own life, one's own prosperity, one's own freedom. Personally I am deeply worried, extremely concerned, and utmost alarmed - since many years. Germany and Germans need a devastating collective shock experience in a bid to push some reason and mental sanity back into their heads. So far Germans take the echoes from events somewhere else, start their imagination machinery and then react to the drama of their fantasies, mistaking this with "adressing the reality". This country needs a shocking, desastrous experience (that it does not hear of happenngn somewhere else, but here), that people do not fantasize about how it feels for the effected people far away, but that lets them feel the pain themselves - real and undeniable.

When they need to fight for their very survival and fear and pain and agony is shaking them, maybe this then leaves them no more too much free time to wallow in stupid nutcase fantasies like these.

I always said so: the Greens are not just about ecology, they are about socialist-communist ideology and a destruction of the civil and burgeoise order there is.