Capitalism had won. It was not people's revolutions, but the slow industry of a rising middle class that toppled feudal monarchies. Productivity led to prosperity, and succeeding generations of new money made the class system nearly irrelevant. The process moved swiftest in the new American colonies, where a shortage of laws, problems that required ingenuity to overcome and a booming population of arrivals eager to carve out a share for themselves, laid the ground floor for it to become the economic superpower of the 20th century. The political, religious and social revolutions that accompanied this surge of history were all spinoffs of that vast unfolding flower of human productivity.
But history, unlike fairy tales, doesn't usually traffic in happy endings. Capitalism had toppled many of the old elites, but it was only a matter of time until a new elite would find a way to apply the reins to the galloping horse of the free market. The new elite went by many names, it wore the mask of social concern to its political costume balls, first for the poor at home, then the poor abroad and finally for the trees, bears and clouds of the whole planet. But its best and most whimsical mask of all was the mask of the anti-elitist. The comic opera sad mask that was always frowning, even as Janus-like, the mask behind it was laughing fit to burst. The game was over, but it had really just begun.
The problem was productivity. Because productivity led to material prosperity. And prosperity led to individualism and independence. Cutting off productivity was key to putting the genie of freedom back in the box. Keep people poor, take away their opportunities, make it impossible for them to leap class barriers, and they become easier to rule over. Prosperity made class virtually irrelevant, by making the good life available to everyone. It was becoming harder to find things to do, that the middle class couldn't save up enough money for. And so the middle class became the target of the elitists, dressing up in their funny little anti-elitist masks, condemning them for having the good life.
In London, there will be no new runways. Indeed there will be no new runways throughout all of England. Because the middle-class has been bad. They're being punished for engaging in the loathsome activity known as "binge flying". The middle class has been flying all over the place, taking holidays and lying on beaches. And it will have to stop. And who do they think they are anyway? Bono? Al Gore? A few thousand useless overeducated idiots flying to Cancun or Copenhagen to discuss ways to prevent people from flying? Off with their runways. Let's see how they like it when flying becomes more miserable for the cheeky binge flying beggars.
The "Off With Their Runways" strategy of curbing consumption highlights one environmentalist approach, the creation of artificial shortages. While governments usually lead with burdensome taxation, even taxing a product will not prevent its use. Taxing airline travel makes it more expensive, but it also drives airlines to find new price cutting measures. That leads to ridiculously budget airlines such as RyanAir or Southwest. Traveling becomes more miserable, but still affordable. Piling on fees generates revenues, and makes it harder for both consumers and companies to get by, thrusting them deeper into a cycle of mutual hatred and exploitation, as both sides try to put one over the other, but it doesn't eliminate usage. Because necessity is the mother of invention... sometimes it even expands it.
That's why the hard core environmentalists, wearing their best elitist anti-elitist masks, usually push for artificial shortages. Creating actual shortages can be tricky, because there's just too much of everything. Environmentalists have driven local manufacturing and industries out of business, or made them too expensive to be anything but taxpayer subsidized white elephants, but it's all too easy to import more from China. Cutting the legs off a global economy takes time. And until then, the shortages have to be manufactured at the government level.
Off with their Runways is one approach. It's cleaner than taxation, because there's seemingly no regressive bias at all. No one is discriminating against the poor or middle class by making products more expensive, (well they are, but we just don't talk about it) they're just curbing everyone's consumption. Of course they're not. Just the consumption of those who use commercial air travel. Most of the austerity measures don't change the lifestyle of that top 1 percent, who also happen to be heavily represented among the ranks of the anti-elitist elitists. Like their pretense that raising taxes on people who make over 250,000 a year, is the same as raising taxes on billionaires, the left finds it convenient to crowd the upper middle-class together with the upper class, and pretend that they're cracking down on the 1 percent, when they're actually cracking down on the 19 percent below them.
But artificial shortages are ultimately still regressive. Even in a Communist system, wealth still makes it possible to buy privileges. Shortages apply the squeeze from the bottom up. Talk of curbing public binges, whether it's food or travel, means that the anti-elitist elitists work their way up from the working class, which feels the sting first. The word "binge" implies greed and waste, but that's a term better applied to the six figure salaried activists who jet from all over the world, to discuss a treaty to tax airplane fuel for international travel, all at public expense. The middle class family going on holiday to Corfu, are not taking anything away from anyone. The anti-elitist elitists who would take away their holiday, are.
Artificial shortages hamstring prosperity by interfering with productivity. And those hit hardest are the middle class and the working class on their way up. It's not really about airline travel, so much as it's about the amount of time and energy that has to be put in to achieve even the simplest of goals. Regulations create obstacles and add expenses in both time and energy. While taxes take a visible amount off the top, the drain of added obstacles can be far more subtle. Like the extra time spent flying out of Heathrow, the expense is invisible and impossible to quantify in financial terms, but yet it's there. And it's meant to be there.
Until Communism gave way to Environmentalism as the dominant model of the left, productivity had not yet become the enemy. Even the Reds claimed that they didn't want to prevent people from being productive, they just wanted them to be able to work for themselves. It was a lie, but the left today isn't even bothering with the lies. They are open about productivity being the enemy. Their goal is to chain up human potential, to arrest Prometheus for emitting carbon from his stolen fire, and chain him up to have his liver devoured by the sharp beaks of career bureaucrats.
The Reds pointed to the man at the top at the enemy. The environmentalist just points to the man. Any man. Anywhere. Human beings are their enemies. When people accomplish something, it must be stopped.
The "Theory of Universal Pollution" best known as Global Warming by way of human carbon emissions, creates artificial shortages in the name of an artificial crisis, as manufactured, branded and packaged as anything you might pick up in a convenience store. Its stroke of genius is to treat all human activity and decision making as forms of pollution. Since everything we do is going to emit carbon, then all human behavior must be regulated, controlled and suppressed. It's a brand of totalitarian madness that would have made even Stalin giggle like a schoolgirl.
When everything we do is pollution-- then we are all polluters. To restrain that human pollution comes a multitude of laws, which make all of us into criminals. Since we can't all be imprisoned, except within the larger prison of the state, we must be rehabilitated instead. Lectured endlessly, hectored constantly and troubled everywhere we go. Artificial shortages will punish us for the good of the planet, whose representatives and self-appointed spokesmen heat their own homes with roasting dolphins turning on a spit over a fire of imported Malaysian coals.
A "Theory of Universal Pollution" is also a "Theory of Universal Criminality and Constant Culpability" and the justification for "Universal Tyranny". A tyranny built on an economic counterrevolution to topple the economic revolutions that brought cheap goods and social and economic freedoms to 90 percent of the Western world. Destroying political freedoms, by destroying prosperity by destroying productivity, follows the chain of development back far enough to cut it off, and push us back to the feudal era under the green banner of the Church of Mother Gaia and Bishop Bono.
But it isn't really about the environment or the myth of manmade global warming. If it was, then global warming conferences would be teleconferences, not giant binges of jet travel, hotel stays and open bars. It's about what all counter-revolutions are about, the recovery of lost power by an elite. As the Bolshevik takeover of Russia was a counterrevolution against the authentic revolution that had toppled the imported German monarchy of the Czars, the left has been conducting its own counterrevolution against the republican political and economic revolutions that put an end to the monarchies of the West. Their goal is to dismantle the republics and replace them with global entities under the control of the truly enlightened. The anti-elitist elite.
Environmentalism is a convenient tool of the economic counterrevolution, which undermines popular rule, national sovereignty, individualism, economic prosperity and cultural identity, in order to reassemble a bureaucratic empire that will oversee everyone's lives, with no say in it from them. Spreading poverty, cultural division, fragmenting families and national unity, are all key elements in the campaign. Creating chaos and misery, and then stepping in to fix it, is a time honored trick of tyrants. The trick is being played on us all over again. Almost all of their cards are on the table now. And they are dealing from the bottom of the deck.
But history, unlike fairy tales, doesn't usually traffic in happy endings. Capitalism had toppled many of the old elites, but it was only a matter of time until a new elite would find a way to apply the reins to the galloping horse of the free market. The new elite went by many names, it wore the mask of social concern to its political costume balls, first for the poor at home, then the poor abroad and finally for the trees, bears and clouds of the whole planet. But its best and most whimsical mask of all was the mask of the anti-elitist. The comic opera sad mask that was always frowning, even as Janus-like, the mask behind it was laughing fit to burst. The game was over, but it had really just begun.
The problem was productivity. Because productivity led to material prosperity. And prosperity led to individualism and independence. Cutting off productivity was key to putting the genie of freedom back in the box. Keep people poor, take away their opportunities, make it impossible for them to leap class barriers, and they become easier to rule over. Prosperity made class virtually irrelevant, by making the good life available to everyone. It was becoming harder to find things to do, that the middle class couldn't save up enough money for. And so the middle class became the target of the elitists, dressing up in their funny little anti-elitist masks, condemning them for having the good life.
In London, there will be no new runways. Indeed there will be no new runways throughout all of England. Because the middle-class has been bad. They're being punished for engaging in the loathsome activity known as "binge flying". The middle class has been flying all over the place, taking holidays and lying on beaches. And it will have to stop. And who do they think they are anyway? Bono? Al Gore? A few thousand useless overeducated idiots flying to Cancun or Copenhagen to discuss ways to prevent people from flying? Off with their runways. Let's see how they like it when flying becomes more miserable for the cheeky binge flying beggars.
The "Off With Their Runways" strategy of curbing consumption highlights one environmentalist approach, the creation of artificial shortages. While governments usually lead with burdensome taxation, even taxing a product will not prevent its use. Taxing airline travel makes it more expensive, but it also drives airlines to find new price cutting measures. That leads to ridiculously budget airlines such as RyanAir or Southwest. Traveling becomes more miserable, but still affordable. Piling on fees generates revenues, and makes it harder for both consumers and companies to get by, thrusting them deeper into a cycle of mutual hatred and exploitation, as both sides try to put one over the other, but it doesn't eliminate usage. Because necessity is the mother of invention... sometimes it even expands it.
That's why the hard core environmentalists, wearing their best elitist anti-elitist masks, usually push for artificial shortages. Creating actual shortages can be tricky, because there's just too much of everything. Environmentalists have driven local manufacturing and industries out of business, or made them too expensive to be anything but taxpayer subsidized white elephants, but it's all too easy to import more from China. Cutting the legs off a global economy takes time. And until then, the shortages have to be manufactured at the government level.
Off with their Runways is one approach. It's cleaner than taxation, because there's seemingly no regressive bias at all. No one is discriminating against the poor or middle class by making products more expensive, (well they are, but we just don't talk about it) they're just curbing everyone's consumption. Of course they're not. Just the consumption of those who use commercial air travel. Most of the austerity measures don't change the lifestyle of that top 1 percent, who also happen to be heavily represented among the ranks of the anti-elitist elitists. Like their pretense that raising taxes on people who make over 250,000 a year, is the same as raising taxes on billionaires, the left finds it convenient to crowd the upper middle-class together with the upper class, and pretend that they're cracking down on the 1 percent, when they're actually cracking down on the 19 percent below them.
But artificial shortages are ultimately still regressive. Even in a Communist system, wealth still makes it possible to buy privileges. Shortages apply the squeeze from the bottom up. Talk of curbing public binges, whether it's food or travel, means that the anti-elitist elitists work their way up from the working class, which feels the sting first. The word "binge" implies greed and waste, but that's a term better applied to the six figure salaried activists who jet from all over the world, to discuss a treaty to tax airplane fuel for international travel, all at public expense. The middle class family going on holiday to Corfu, are not taking anything away from anyone. The anti-elitist elitists who would take away their holiday, are.
Artificial shortages hamstring prosperity by interfering with productivity. And those hit hardest are the middle class and the working class on their way up. It's not really about airline travel, so much as it's about the amount of time and energy that has to be put in to achieve even the simplest of goals. Regulations create obstacles and add expenses in both time and energy. While taxes take a visible amount off the top, the drain of added obstacles can be far more subtle. Like the extra time spent flying out of Heathrow, the expense is invisible and impossible to quantify in financial terms, but yet it's there. And it's meant to be there.
Until Communism gave way to Environmentalism as the dominant model of the left, productivity had not yet become the enemy. Even the Reds claimed that they didn't want to prevent people from being productive, they just wanted them to be able to work for themselves. It was a lie, but the left today isn't even bothering with the lies. They are open about productivity being the enemy. Their goal is to chain up human potential, to arrest Prometheus for emitting carbon from his stolen fire, and chain him up to have his liver devoured by the sharp beaks of career bureaucrats.
The Reds pointed to the man at the top at the enemy. The environmentalist just points to the man. Any man. Anywhere. Human beings are their enemies. When people accomplish something, it must be stopped.
The "Theory of Universal Pollution" best known as Global Warming by way of human carbon emissions, creates artificial shortages in the name of an artificial crisis, as manufactured, branded and packaged as anything you might pick up in a convenience store. Its stroke of genius is to treat all human activity and decision making as forms of pollution. Since everything we do is going to emit carbon, then all human behavior must be regulated, controlled and suppressed. It's a brand of totalitarian madness that would have made even Stalin giggle like a schoolgirl.
When everything we do is pollution-- then we are all polluters. To restrain that human pollution comes a multitude of laws, which make all of us into criminals. Since we can't all be imprisoned, except within the larger prison of the state, we must be rehabilitated instead. Lectured endlessly, hectored constantly and troubled everywhere we go. Artificial shortages will punish us for the good of the planet, whose representatives and self-appointed spokesmen heat their own homes with roasting dolphins turning on a spit over a fire of imported Malaysian coals.
A "Theory of Universal Pollution" is also a "Theory of Universal Criminality and Constant Culpability" and the justification for "Universal Tyranny". A tyranny built on an economic counterrevolution to topple the economic revolutions that brought cheap goods and social and economic freedoms to 90 percent of the Western world. Destroying political freedoms, by destroying prosperity by destroying productivity, follows the chain of development back far enough to cut it off, and push us back to the feudal era under the green banner of the Church of Mother Gaia and Bishop Bono.
But it isn't really about the environment or the myth of manmade global warming. If it was, then global warming conferences would be teleconferences, not giant binges of jet travel, hotel stays and open bars. It's about what all counter-revolutions are about, the recovery of lost power by an elite. As the Bolshevik takeover of Russia was a counterrevolution against the authentic revolution that had toppled the imported German monarchy of the Czars, the left has been conducting its own counterrevolution against the republican political and economic revolutions that put an end to the monarchies of the West. Their goal is to dismantle the republics and replace them with global entities under the control of the truly enlightened. The anti-elitist elite.
Environmentalism is a convenient tool of the economic counterrevolution, which undermines popular rule, national sovereignty, individualism, economic prosperity and cultural identity, in order to reassemble a bureaucratic empire that will oversee everyone's lives, with no say in it from them. Spreading poverty, cultural division, fragmenting families and national unity, are all key elements in the campaign. Creating chaos and misery, and then stepping in to fix it, is a time honored trick of tyrants. The trick is being played on us all over again. Almost all of their cards are on the table now. And they are dealing from the bottom of the deck.
Comments
The louder the environmental groupies yell the more hypocritical they are with huge planes, huge homes with huge bills for utilities. They arrive at their conferences in gas guzzling limos.
ReplyDeleteAl's utility bills are more than many people's annual incomes.
he can afford it with his carbon credits
ReplyDeleteSo the question remains, who will trick who first: the western bureaucrats, the muslim mullahs, the Russian godfathers, or the Chinese despots?
ReplyDeleteEither way, we all lose!
Sultan, the "anti-elitist elites" can't be successfull without the participation of the modern day "useful idiots." I'm refering as an example to teachers in our primary schools who teach our kids to be afraid of the future because of so called man-made global warming. What can be done to reduce the cadres of useful idiots?
ReplyDeleteWho is fracking from the bottom of the geological deck
ReplyDelete!@#$##! AMAZING, groundbreaking article as usual.
ReplyDeleteI would like to read more about the topics you've raised.
Any suggestions from you, or any other readers?
it's the useful idiots who assume that they're right, because they're omnipresent
ReplyDelete"What can be done to reduce the cadres of useful idiots?"
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, there is only one way but it doesn't involve a ballot box and we don't have the stomach for it -- yet!
DRILL BABY DRILL!!!!
ReplyDeletethe BIG LIE.
by Steve McCann (Full article at americanthinker dot com)
Yet the United States is sitting on the world's largest untapped oil reserve. A natural resource that would not only mitigate the over $400 Billion sent overseas to other countries but could create untold millions of jobs and put the country on a sound financial footing.
The untapped reserves are estimated up to 2.3 Trillion barrels, nearly three times the reserves held by the OPEC countries and sufficient to meet 300 years of demand, at today's levels -- for auto, truck, aircraft, heating and industrial fuel, without importing a single barrel of oil.
The US could become the single largest exporter of oil and oil related products in the world, thus potentially eliminating its trade deficit, and increasing the national standard of living as well as making a massive dent in the national debt.
Here is a look at some of the largest untapped reserves:
The Bakken Fields in North and South Dakota. New drilling and oil recovery technology is making the capture of this oil feasible and some development is now underway. It is estimated that there is at least 200 Billion barrels of oil in this region. At a price of $100 per barrel the value of this find is $20 Trillion.
The Outer Continental shelf. It is estimated that around 90 billion barrels of oil sit beneath the ocean bed 50 to 100 miles off the shore of the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts. The value: $9 Trillion.
The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. About 10 billion barrels are locked up here with a current value of $1 Trillion.
Tar Sands: Around 75 Billion barrels of oil could come from these areas which are similar to the Canadian tar sand fields and which now produce about 2 million barrels per day. The value: $7.5 Trillion
Oil Shale. This is the most massive area of potential oil production in the world with an estimated 1.5 Trillion barrel potential. The technology necessary to extract this oil is now in place and being operated on a pilot project basis. The value of this resource: $150 Trillion
There also the very real potential that further finds will be discovered as technology continues to improve.
In total the value of the potential oil reserves of the United States listed above exceeds $187 Trillion. The current national debt is $14.2 Trillion or less than 8%.
Despite the protestation of President Obama and the environmentalists the world and particularly the United States is not running out of oil. Their foolish tilting at windmills and solar will never produce energy sufficient to operate a $14Trillion and hopefully growing economy. It will be decades if not the rest of the 21st Century before any meaningful substitute for fossil fuels will be developed and additional time and investment will then be necessary to distribute the product.
Very well put DG.
ReplyDeleteThe next question is, how to reverse and then defeat this ugly monster.
The monster is so huge now that it will have to be hoisted on its own petard.
The AGW Climate Change scam has now moved out from the so-called scientific phase, and is now well entrenched in the political arena.
ReplyDeleteAll the enabling tax policies that will allow even more taxation on the spurious carbon emissions racket, are already in place. To remove them will require a revolution, as taxes once imposed, are nigh impossible to reverse unless there is revolution, and all the old parties are dismembered.
So how to stop the process?
The AGW scam is essentially a Leftist/Marxist power grab to control the population via impoverishment and social control - DG has made this very clear. This elite is embedded in the media and academia, and has total control of both. Bloggers can make a difference, but I see little chance of us making any major headway (unless there a major war)
CHANGE FROM WITHIN
It can be correctly argued that de-industrialisation of the West, and shifting it to China, has increased pollution globally as the Chinese manufacture goods at a much higher environmental cost and pollution then would have been the case.
The economic and pollution cost of transport of these goods from China is another unintended consequence, which increases pollution globally.
A war is most likely – an internal civil war with Muslims, leading to a war with the ME. A separation from that world will follow quite naturally without us having to exercise coercion of any sort. In a civil and external war situation, AGW will simply be forgotten.
CHANGE FROM WITHOUT
Given the reality of the total occupation of the social, academic, political, and academic space by the enemy, the only hope we have is that we get help from outside.
One of the striking features of AGW is that it has no serious proponents in the manufacturing part of the globe. The manufacturing part of the globe is now - Japan, China, S Korea, and Taiwan. These are very large industrial countries, backed up with the necessary scientific and industrial infrastructure. If there was any truth in AGW, one would have thought that a large number of scientists from the above countries would say so. Nothing.
The reason why China is immune to Marxism is that it has had 50 years of the Marxist parasite forcibly injected intravenously into them. After 40+ millions deaths + untold misery, the survivors are well and truly immune to the parasite. Japan and China have seen it close up. South Korea can see it over the border.
Why should these countries help us now? In the short run, it is true that China profits from the de-industrialisation of the West. But they still would like to be wealthy. That means they have to increase their profit margins. If we OTH become poor, then we can hardly afford to buy the goods at a price to make China wealthy. I’m sure China does not want to be the sweatshop of the world forever. The Industrial East also realise the inventiveness of the West. A poor West that is not inventive is not a good thing for them.
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