Famous Australian philosopher Tim Blair has coined a trenchant saying which is now known round the world as Blair’s Law. It illuminates a depressing but seemingly inexorable tendency:

"… the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force"

Almost anything said by the Western world’s increasingly bedraggled and violent Occupiers falls into this category, a footling mish-mash of ignorant platitudes jumbling up anti-capitalist slogans with Green and feminist ‘demands’ of all shapes, genders and sizes.

But these dim light-bulbs are as nothing compared to Naomi Klein who operates on an intergalactic if not utterly cosmic scale of forceful idiocy. Something has gone badly wrong at the Browser who link to what they call her ‘outstanding essay’ on Capitalism and Climate.

Well, to be fair, it is outstanding. Outstandingly communist and odious.

It’s very long and gets increasingly hysterical as she tries to create a new way of looking at things which moves on from both the Greedy Neoliberal Right and Statist Left:

The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilisational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits, including the limits of human intelligence.

So in a way, Chris Horner was right when he told his fellow Heartlanders that climate change isn’t “the issue.” In fact, it isn’t an issue at all. Climate change is a message, one that is telling us that many of our culture’s most cherished ideas are no longer viable.

These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress, unaccustomed to having our ambitions confined by natural boundaries. And this is true for the statist left as well as the neoliberal right.

Anyway, Naomi wants a heck of a lot of collective action, which (it turns out to no-one’s surprise) necessarily involves incredible coercion by the Statist Left inflicted on the rest of us:

Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale.

That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible.

The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.

This is the very same public sector which is wasting trillions of dollars by messing up the Eurozone.

We are not talking about a return to authoritarian socialism, after all, but a turn toward real democracy. (But why do you think people will vote for this folly? What happens when they try it, find it’s crazy, then vote against it? Presumably you’ll stop this happening by refusing to turn back the wheel of history)

The thirty-odd-year experiment in deregulated, Wild West economics is failing the vast majority of people around the world (Drivel – the ‘vast majority’ of people on earth have been getting richer precisely because authoritarian socialism has been dumped)

These systemic failures are precisely why so many are in open revolt against their elites, demanding living wages and an end to corruption. (Yup – the Arab Spring sure is all about the Arab masses rising up against neoliberal economics.) Climate change doesn’t conflict with demands for a new kind of economy. Rather, it adds to them an existential imperative…

Anyway, on she drones at vast length. But amidst all the rambling, this one especially outlandish thought caught my eye as summing up just why she is so confused and perhaps dangerous (my emphasis):

The way out is to embrace a managed transition to another economic paradigm, using all the tools of planning discussed above. Growth would be reserved for parts of the world still pulling themselves out of poverty.

Meanwhile, in the industrialised world, those sectors that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impacts (such as the caregiving professions). A great many jobs could be created this way. But the role of the corporate sector, with its structural demand for increased sales and profits, would have to contract.

Just say we all decide that ‘corporations’ are too powerful and somehow need to be ‘reined in’, favouring state-driven ‘planning’ instead. Where do jobs and innovation then in fact come from?

What is missing in Klein’s wild rant is any sense at all of the role of personal creativity. Growth is nothing more than the cooperation of people inventing and doing new things, preferably within a solid legal framework to help mobilise others to invest their efforts and accumulated savings too.

It is theoretically meaningless to ‘reserve’ growth for parts of the world pulling themselves out of poverty. Every time anyone anywhere has a good new idea, the potential for growth asserts itself: how even in theory do you limit that? Poor people in principle of course can be as inventive as anyone else. But it is only capitalism and market processes which allow that creative energy to be reproducible on a significant scale for general benefit. Poor people are poor because they do not have capitalism but usually gangster statist socialism instead. 

To go the Klein route means that huge millions of people will be sacrificed and die for ‘the planet’. As market mechanisms are dumped in favour of ‘planned’ outcomes, we’ll no longer have any coherent basis for working out what anything costs and what is ‘affordable’. Every industry now existing will be run down. Medicines will not be developed. New, cheaper technologies for fixing things and saving energy won’t be invented.

And since there is no prospect of containing people and their creativity in this insane way except by brute force, democracy will have to give way to the Statist Left on Steroids, aka one-party communism. Which we have tried.

It was not such a good deal for the Planet, as the systemic information deficiency and suppression of innovation caused by mass oppression stopped even the most elementary environmental concerns from being registered. Ecological disaster on a scale greater than anything else ever seen on Earth took place:

This is what Nutty Naomi wants to re-inflict on us, as an ‘existential imperative’.

All the greatest idiocies rolling inexorably into one gigantic useless force.

No thanks. Please go away.

 

Update  I needn’t have bothered. JoNova does a far better and ruthless demolition job by looking at how Naomi ignores the numbers:

Klein thinks the answers to feeding the poor lies with “Big Government”, but rational thinkers know that more than anything, the fate of the poor depends on clear thinking, real evidence, and polite debate. None of which is on offer in this article.

Reading Klein is like visiting a parallel universe — her religious devotion to her ideology means nearly every sentence is the exact opposite of the truth.  More’s the pity that The Nation has no editors who recognise innumerate drivel and an ideological rant based on a logical black hole.

Bad mannered bluster, blind assumptions, and religious rationalization have always been the tool of witchdoctors and con artists.

Naomi Klein: Nice writing, shame she can’t think.

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