I'm continuing my reporting on the next installment from Conservative Estimate, the recently founded website that is devoted to demolishing Conservatism. Today, Alfred George continues to show why the fear of scarcity, a fundamental motivation of conservative thinking, is fundamentally—nonsense.
It's just a short hop over the orange double-dutch jumprope . . .
Last week, Mr. George began to show that the Myth of Scarcity—a basic belief of Conservatism—is simply mistaken. Insofar as this a pillar of the conservative world view, they are simply mistaken. On Friday, he showed that we do not need to fear shortages of food, water, or land. Today, he takes on scarcity of energy and money.
Why do people think that energy is scarce? Because the fossil fuel industry does everything it can to keep the populace focusing mostly on fossil fuels. The idea that we are running out of energy sources
is complete nonsense. It is predicated on the notion that energy must be extracted from fossil fuel. It does not. Much more energy exists than that which can be extracted from fossil fuels. We just don’t know how to use it all yet. . . . [M]ore energy hits the earth every day in the form of sunlight than the whole world uses in an entire year. And there are other promising technologies that can deliver energy in non-destructive ways.
We need to turn our attention away from the fossil fuel purveyors and toward much more plentiful sources. It will probably take "big government" to do this, since business doesn't give a damn about destroying the environment if they can turn a buck on it in the upcoming quarter.
And why is money not scarce? Because it is unlike any other commodity.
There is no limit to the amount of money that is possible, because money arises from all the possible exchanges that can occur among all the other commodities produced by all the work of man and the work of all his machines. The amount of money can grow continually as long as there are more people working, or more productivity, or more machines working. Even if world population levels off, there would still be the possibility of inventing new machines to do more and more work for us, while keeping the amount of human labor steady.
Running out of food, water, land, energy, and money are therefore illusory fears. We shouldn't waste our time dwelling excessively on these fears.
You can read today's whole post here.
Mr. George pointed out last week that the Myth of Scarcity also enjoins us to fear other people, who will without doubt come to harm us if scarcity should take hold. He says he will begin to tackle that part of the myth tomorrow.
I'll be reporting back each day as a new installment appears.