Why that’s insane! You say, but quite the contrary crippling the economy will do us all quite a favor. What is this man
rambling about! The truth of the matter is that
economic growth is a bad thing. While the entire field of economics may say something about how its supposed to be good, do not be fooled these folks have no idea what the hell they are talking about. This anonymous poster is a pure genius and will shortly completely
deconstruct economics and destroy everything you hold dear!
Let us begin!
I'll start off with a story. Once upon a time some hunter gatherers were sitting around the camp fire and one of them looked around at the others and then said: "A-HA!! I figured it all out. I know why we poor and smell bad and don't get any women. It is because our economy doesn't grow! Let us start farming that way we will produce more food than we need and then women will flock to us in order to have our babies."
The others sitting around the fire looked at him in astonishment. They sat in silence for a full ten minutes trying to figure out what the hell this guy was talking about. Finally one of them, a respected hunter stood up and said: "I'm afraid I don't understand. Who told you we were poor? We have enough to eat. I don't know about you, but I took a bath in the river two days ago and I don't smell at all. You talk about women, but didn't I see you cheating on your two wives last night? You have enough women, perhaps even too many! Ha ha! We also have plenty of babies, only as many as we need. You have lost your senses! You should go to sleep!"
But the other man couldn't let it go. He responded: "But how will we conquer our neighbors?! I need to build a big giant house on that hill so I can lord over the proletariat and eat their children for breakfast while I wear a giant stove pipe hat. We need television, faster cars and illegally imported Cuban cigars! My life will be empty if I don't read the morning paper tomorrow, we need to invent a morning paper. But first we need to farm so that we can build empires, then industrialize and then meet our destiny which is make war with the Moonites!"
The respect hunter told him that he ate too many mushrooms, he must be having a bad trip to say such horrible things.
The story ends when the guy on acid gets eaten by a lion!
Now let's get to some hard cold conjecture. In the capitalist system, as a result of competition the means of the production must constantly be revolutionized. This means that production become more efficient and consumer goods are produced cheaper but at declining profit to the capitalist. This means that new needs must be manufactured in order for the capitalist class to maintain its existence and relevancy. Otherwise all production would be automated and we would be living in Marxist communism.
So what we've established is that a growing economy exists to provide relevancy and income to the capitalist owner class. This is not the whole story as the middle and working classes get a trickle down effect in the form of inexpensive consumer goods. AND ever increasing amounts of fancy useless gadgets!
(Don't be disappointed, this is not a Marxist diatribe. I'm not done yet.)
The truth of the matter according to modern economists is that modern economics has developed a mechanism of pure logic which creates the raw material out of which the substance of reality is produced from. This means that the economy can grow forever. Even after all the oil, coal and mammals are used up and gone, we will still be able to produce cable television if we think about it hard enough.
I'm sorry to destroy your fairy godmother, but: the economy is of finite size. The size is defined by the amount of extractable resources on Earth as well as the amount of energy to extract those resources which comes from the sun. This means that resource consumption will increase at an exponential rate speeding up as resources become more scarce and more valuable until a quick and sudden CRASH, BAG, ITS ALL GONE. What we are seeing now is the scramble for the last bits of natural resources in places like the Amazon rain forest and Alaskan wild life refuges.
YOU ALARMIST YOU FULL OF SHIT!
That's right because we are about to cripple the economy! Here's how it works: throw away your television, radio, air conditioner and computer, cancel the cable and the internet, sell your car and any other fossil fueled vehicles you own, call up your job and tell them you will only work 20 hours a week from now on, start growing as much of your own food as possible and learn how to can vegetables and bake apple pie (MMMM! yum!), learn how to play a musical instrument like the banjo or guitar, sit on your front porch strumming songs and drinking lemonade with your children, make sure you have a straw hat and a corn cob pipe. It helps to know learn how to hunt with home made weapons, most importantly: home school your children or at least make all their clothes so that no one but hippies will talk to them.
If everyone started living like monks or hippies the economy would collapse. This is an important thing to keep in mind next time you buy organic vegetables instead of those awful conventional ones. If you are one of the few people to live like a monk its fine, but as more people start to follow your example its best to make sure your situation is stable and selfsufficent enough such that you could survive the economic collapse you are engineering. In other words, this is how to enact social change. Be sure to have a healthy stock pile of munitions and a well regulated militia!
We can do it! Good luck to ya!