Cultural Survival Skills

America: The End of Economic Growth?

A dear friend of mine insisted that I read the book, “The end of Growth: Adaption to Our New Economic Reality”, by Richard Heinberg.

The main theme of this book is that our fossil fuel supply is finite and once we consume all of it, humans will be in for some very hard times. Furthermore, even though we may find more gas or oil, it will become increasingly more effortful to extract it and therefore the price of these energy resources will increase until we are forced to make great and traumatic changes in the way we live.

Indeed, one can imagine wars, famines, and many of the great human cataclysms of nightmares.

Of course we are not there quit yet. Fears of similar awful things have been rife since the beginnings of our species. Living life has ever been a dangerous and frightening venture.

My friend is busy constructing a self-sustaining life-style within a small farm community and therefore he and his neighbors should be fine at “The End of Growth”…until the barbarians come to loot and rape their enclaves. God Bless them and keep them safe in the bad times they predict, because nothing else but a strong military force will.

So if we live long enough, we will see what happens as our fossil fuel supplies dwindle and become more expensive to obtain and use. The future is hard to predict.

In the mean-time, we have more immediate problems and they are political in nature. My bet is that these political problems are likely destroy America before our energy problems do. Please consider the implications of the following quote from Richard Heinburg’s book.

Quote:

Beginning in the late 19th century, social liberalism emerged as a moderate response to both naked capitalism and Marxism. Pioneered by sociologist Lester F. Ward (1841-1913), psychologist William James (1842-1910), philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952, and physician-essayist Oliver Wendell Homes (1809-1894), social liberalism argued that government has a legitimate economic role in addressing social issues such as unemployment, healthcare, and education. Social liberals decried the unbridled concentration of wealth within society and the conditions suffered by workers, while expressing sympathy for labor unions. Their general goal was to retain the dynamism of private capital while curbing its excesses.

End of Quote:

Ok, folks. You can call it social liberalism, progressivism, socialism or communism. The name you choose does not matter because one political philosophy tends to morph into the others. Read F. A. Hayek’s , “The Road to Serfdom”, and look at the historical track record of these cultural designs around the world and now in America, the last bastion standing against these destructive “liberal” sociocultural designs.

In light of Detroit, Chicago and the entire state of California…How’s it going?

Carl Marx, Lester Ward, John Dewy, and Oliver Wendell Homes were a lot smarter that most of us. But, regarding their views on social liberalism, it proves again that very smart people can do very dumb things.

V. Thomas Mawhinney, Ph.D.