It has been a disastrous time for the woke left and corporate right doom-mongers! Their totalitarian politics, their abolition of “dangerous” nation states, their distortion of normal family relationships and their desire for corporatist socialist forms of Government are abhorrent to most and their opposites are succeeding across the world. For the fact is that, despite wars, recessions, political violence, attacks on democratic capitalism and waves of mass unemployment (all worst in those parts of the world where the woke left and the corporatist right have partially succeeded in implementing their programmes) there is a long term underlying advance of humanity and economic progress.
As people, democratic capitalism, entrepreneurship, nations and free trade begin to re-assert themselves this progress will accelerate. As power and responsibility descend from the arrogance of corporate multinational power and supranational political authoritarianism to free people in free democratic nations there will be a new resurgence of freedom, enterprise and cooperation. Those who wish to prevent this will continue to spread fear and threats of disaster for mankind to justify their continued authoritarianism. But Brexit is the first major crack in their controlling world.
Matt Ridley, whom I have known for some 30 years (after he showed interest in my two 1980s books Government against the People and The Failure of the State) has written an excellent summary of the massive progress in the last ten years. **
He lists the triumphs – including that extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time – down from 60% in the late 1950s. Africa and Asia have experienced faster economic growth than Europe and North America and the more advanced countries are showing how innovation and economic growth has led to the consumption of less metal, water and land not just proportionately to production but overall! This progress can now of course be transmitted to the poorer parts of the world. Indeed in the case of solar power, the internet and mobile phones it is precisely the poorest parts of the world which can benefit the most from these (ever cheaper – thanks to capitalist production) technologies.
It was of course the World Bank which in 1972 produced the famous report on The Limits to Growth and David Attenborough who today claims “infinite growth” is impossible “with finite resources”. But growth continues and there is no evident shortage of oil or minerals.
If one metal or energy source threatens to “run out” its price rises and it becomes profitable to find another resource or find a technology which uses a fraction of its previous use for the same effect. As Matt Ridley points out:
But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?’ For example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminium, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 12.5 tonnes to 8.5 tonnes. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall. LED light bulbs consume about a quarter as much electricity as incandescent bulbs for the same light.
I recall getting about 30 miles per gallon of petrol when I was young. Today my car (which is far bigger) is made of lighter material and does 50 miles per gallon on average! And Ridley points out that his modern mobile phone is
a camera, radio, torch, compass, map, calendar, watch, CD player, newspaper and pack of cards.
Now that is real productivity growth! And land productivity growth is equally impressive with 65% less land needed to produce the same quantity of food as 50 years ago (Ausubel, Rockefeller University)
In a devastating exposure of ecology fanatics Ridley recalls how the economist Julian Simon challenged the ecologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet that a basket of five metals (chosen by Ehrlich) would cost less in 1990 than in 1980. He won and even today none of those metals has significantly risen in price or fallen in volume of reserves, let alone run out.
And the problem with oil (now half the price it was a few years ago) is not that it will run out but that Middle East producers will have too much and no one will be buying it in the quantities which has given them such wealth in the past! Technology and risk taking investment has turned the USA into one of the greatest oil and gas producers on earth!
ENTERPRISING MAN
Man is eternally inventive and the elementary laws of economics mean that as a resource begins to decline or gets more difficult and expensive to extract, its price rises and either alternatives are found (nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, hydro) or we can (through higher productivity elsewhere) afford the new higher cost of the difficult extraction of old resources.
The free market competitive capitalist world based on personal ownership and responsibility is adaptable, creative and flexible. It is only the corporatist big business and socialist worlds which – by seeking to control – prevent innovation, progress and democratic accountability. For instance recent Harvard research has shown that wind turbine blades generate more heat than the alternatives they replace but will the State controlled world permit those truths to be turned into new innovation?
The Statist world and the corporatist media are full of those who censor progress if it does not fit their ideological stance. When a British journalist Iain Dale approached the BBC to do a programme on how capitalism had lifted poor people out of poverty he was told:
“Sorry Mr Dale we don’t think that particular documentary idea is right for our audience”
I recall getting exactly the same response when a company I jointly owned was producing programmes for the BBC and we proposed a Nigerian friend who wanted to show how his country had benefited from colonial rule. No way! That was also not suitable for “their audience” – and that from a State funded “public service broadcaster”!
It is that corporatist elitist world which people are beginning to revolt against. Brexit is the first major challenge to the world which has increasingly collectivised capital and humans – and threatens, shortly after the last deep recession, a new collapse. But even in that old world there was sufficient real capitalism to produce change and improvement.
THE STATE SECTOR VERSUS THE PUBLIC SECTOR
The State and the superstate (UN, EU) do not serve humanity well. The public serve the public – which is why the only “Public expenditure” is the people’s spending in the private sector where private capital and entrepreneurs are forced by the market to democratically react to necessary change. It is only in what the politician calls the “public sector” (ie the State) where we are all powerless and State subsidy of polluting industries (in return for votes) and wasteful loss-making pursuits destroy the wealth of all.
And when individual countries threaten to disturb the “consensus” their answer is to consume them in authoritarian, controlling, supranational power structures – like the EU!
**
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2019/12/weve-just-had-the-best-decade-in-human-history-seriously/
