"How to Impoverish the Whole World"
One carbon conscious, dollar destroying, virtue signaling step at a time...
by Bill Bonner
Geneva, Switzerland - "Prices rising. Shelves empty. This is a ‘good thing,’ isn’t it? It will mean less consumption, less production, less CO2 in the atmosphere, lower standards of living, people will get less of what they want… and they will be poorer. But it will save the planet, right?
Right. Friday, we made some suggestions about how you personally can enjoy your indigence with a sniffy, superior air. Today, we focus on the bigger picture, the whole economy. How can we impoverish other people too? And here we connect some big, fat dots. Let’s look first at the basics.
Home to Hovel: You don’t have to do anything to be poor. In fact, for an individual, the less you do, ceteris paribus, the more poverty you get. Poverty is easy. It gives you plenty of time to read The New Yorker magazine, update your Facebook page or watch CNN.
Prosperity, on the other hand, takes work, self-discipline, investment, learning, savings, innovation – and a few rules. Respect for each others’ property is one of them. If you can’t hold onto your stuff, it won’t work. A rich man’s house, for example, is the product of many generations’ worth of trial and error… and a multitude of inputs by skilled artisans and engineers – with HVAC systems and stylish moldings… and carefully laid tile work… expert carpentry… and all the other things that go into a modern, expensive house. Nobody would bother to build such a house if he thought it might be taken away from him.
The poor man’s house, by contrast, is a hovel, little changed in the last 2,000 years. In our area of Argentina, for example, people still live in mud huts. Mud on the floor. Mud on the walls. Mud on the roof. Few inputs. And those few are rude, rustic and unskilled. Doors are made of wooden planks held together with rawhide strips. There is no plumbing (and until recently), no electricity.
Poverty is a natural condition. But it’s also natural for people not to want to be poor. The human species was barely better off than orangutans for the first 290,000 years of its existence. People lived in small family or tribal groups, with little change from one generation to the next. It’s only in the last 10,000 years or so that it has made much material progress.
And now, people can get ahead in life… and live in comfort, with the satisfaction of getting richer than their brothers-in-law. They innovate, work hard, go to college, etc. As if by an ‘invisible hand,’ are they guided to win-win deals, giving to others so that they get from them what they want too. One learns how to treat cataracts. Another builds tree-houses. Progress is made. Left alone, in other words, growth happens. Wealth increases. And ‘the people’ are better off.
From Riches to Rags: So, if we want to move the meter in the opposite direction – towards poverty – we are going to have to backtrack; we’ll need to get control of ‘the people.’ We can’t allow them to do what they want… live their lives the way they want, trying to get what they want by working, saving, building, learning, inventing and so forth.
Prosperity depends on letting ‘the people’ do their thing. But de-growth and poverty depend on stopping them. And that’s what the feds are for. If they’re going to make us poorer, they’ll have to step up to the plate… and whack us with the bat. And they have plenty of models and ‘five year plans’ to guide them. North Korea, for example. Cuba. The Soviet Union. Baltimore.
There’s a reason South Korea is a lot richer than North Korea. The difference is public policy. The latter is a society tightly controlled by a political elite, swinging a big stick. The former is a ‘light touch’ society, with much more individual freedom. So if poverty is the new prosperity, we will have to imitate North Korea, not South Korea. The North Korean deciders know how to stimulate poverty; and they’re good at it. And the North Korean people are model citizens for the Brave New World of planet-savers. No Hyundai for them. No Samsung. No Korean barbecue. No Squid Game. No passports; if they were let out of the country, they may not come back.
Few of them have cars. They eat little… and very little meat. Their clothes are drab. They travel rarely… almost never leaving the country. In short, they use little fossil fuel. The Davos elite applaud their tiny carbon footprints. And some are even virtuous enough to starve to death."
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