Nothing speaks to the madness of the modern elites better than their war on farming. Consider France. One day President Macron is telling the world to get serious about ‘food security’. Post-Covid and with war raging in Ukraine, we must make sure food keeps being made and transported around the world, the French government says. Yet, at the same time, that same government, without missing a beat, is bringing in pesticide bans that could devastate sections of France’s own agriculture industry. Which could even lead to the closure of farms. Behold the schizophrenia of the 21st-century establishment.
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Samizdata quote of the day – state mandated schizophreniaFebruary 11th, 2023 |
 8 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – state mandated schizophrenia |
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The irony is that decades of western prosperity have lulled many into a distant understanding of how food gets to the table. That, coupled with the Green ideology, has caused the current mess.
On the substantive issue, it’s worth noting that while there are legit worries about chemicals used on the land, a potential way to overcome that is genetically modified crops. But guess what – the Greenies often oppose that too.
The international establishment observed what happened in Sir Lanka (what used to be Ceylon) – indeed we all know that the consequence of “Green” policy was economic collapse and mass hunger.
If people do not know the consequences of a policy they may be innocent of those consequences – but if they do know the consequences, and continue to push the policy, they they are guilty of deliberately intending those consequences. The international establishment do know the consequences of these policies – Sir Lanka was only one of several examples. So, Johnathan Pearce, this is not a mistake – to use modern jargon, economic collapse and mass poverty is “not a bug – it is a feature” of modern international policy.
Back in the 1960s the Club of Rome (the intellectual ancestor of the modern international establishment) dreamed of resource shortages that would get the ordinary people, that they hated and despised, and put us in our place (under their stamping boot) – but no such resource shortages emerged – so they have “had to” artificially create such resource shortages in order to put us common people in-our-proper-place (under their stamping boot).
As for those who, foolishly, look to Mr Putin as an alternative to the international establishment elite – he is not. Most land in Russia is government owned, and manufacturing output in Russia is even lower than it is in the United Kingdom (in spite of the much larger population of Russia).
One can not just wish the history of the last century (indeed more than a century now) away. As much as we would all like to wish it away.
Liberty has declined in Britain and other Western lands over the last century, indeed over the last century and a half (the rise of the state, even as a proportion of society, started back in the 1870s), but liberty utterly collapsed in Russia – into a nightmare that is hard for people in the West to fully understand, a nightmare that lasted the best part of a century. The terrible scars of that nightmare of tyranny continue to this day.
Bizarrely some people who called themselves “liberals”, as far back as the 1920s, supported the nightmare of tyranny that was the Soviet Union – the worst regime in the world at that time.
The “planed society” supported by the old Club of Rome and now by the World Economic Forum (and the United Nations – and almost every other organisation, public and private) may owe more to Mussolini’s Fascist Italy (“Stakeholder Capitalism” the Corporate State) than it does to the old Soviet Union – but it is certainly not a good thing.
The problem with the “planned economy” is that it substitutes fantasy and folly for actual data feedback. A traditional market economy provides feedback through profit and loss; if you don’t pay attention, the mechanism of that will put you out of business in fairly short order.
In a planned economy, nothing provides actual feedback of any real consequence. Fyodor the planner, sitting in Moscow, does not feel the slightest degree of pain for failing to prognosticate the amount of fertilizer needed in Kramatorsk during the growing season of 19-whatever. If the farms there fail because of that, oh well… Better luck next year; they’ll allocate more. Which won’t be needed, but would be needed somewhere else.
The whole thing about a planned anything, economy or whatever, is that it’s basically a messiah complex; the people believing in it and their own ability to do the planning are as delusional as the average guy in the sanitorium who thinks that he’s Napoleon. There are simply too many variables, too many pitfalls in the whole thing; you are far, far better off with a market-based economy doing all the decision-making organically. The more distortions that you throw into that, the more the whole thing will start to wobble on its axis and spin out of control.
It’s the same with everything; I could point out parallels in small arms and tactical development. You can propose all you want, but when exposed to reality, you’re going to find out the hard way that what actually works rather better is an open-eyed ability to observe reality and adapt to it, as opposed to insisting on the validity of your own preconceived notions about it all.
Quite so Kirk.
And it does not matter if it is one planner in Moscow – or a group of Corporate State planners in Davos or New York.
So, Johnathan Pearce, this is not a mistake – to use modern jargon, economic collapse and mass poverty is “not a bug – it is a feature” of modern international policy., writes Paul Marks.
Not always. You must know, being a well-read person, Paul, that people can blinded/warped by ideology into doing stupid shit even if they are not, you know consciously villainous? Sure, some neo-Malthusians such as Paul Erhlich, and figures from the past such as HG Wells and others, gave the impression they wanted mass human extinction, but most of them are failing to connect between actions and consequences. As such, when it comes to public policy, they are not much different to dreamers, ideologues and others throughout history. And I reiterate my point that a big issue is that for a lot of the chattering class, they are insulated from ever knowing what shortages of food must be like. Sure, they can read the horrible reports on the TV, internet, etc, but this is not real, it is not tangible, to them.
Johnathan Pearce – I hope you are correct, that the left really do not know where they are taking society.
But I think they do know. At least the important ones do.
As Mr. Marks has pointed out, the Dutch and French governments can’t be making a mistake. They obviously want to drive the kulaks off the land, but claim they’re doing it to save the planet so they won’t look quite so Stalinesque. Once the poors have been disposed of, the corporate operators who take over the land will be free to use all the fertilizer and pesticides they want. Beef production will be limited, though, since everybody but the ruling class will be getting their protein from bugs.
mikesixes – as you point out, it makes no sense.
For example, the government of the Netherlands claims the farmers are producing too much “green house gasses”, but the vast urban developments they want to put where the farms now are will produce more (more – not less) “green house gasses”.
Is Prime Minister Rutte of the Netherlands a stupid man? No he is highly intelligent – he knows the above.
That leads us to the other alternative – to put it in “crude” language, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands is not a good man, he is not standing up to the international establishment, he is part of the international establishment.
People in the Parliament of the Netherlands (yes the opposition – at least the Parliament of the Netherlands has a real opposition party in it, the Parliament of the United Kingdom does NOT) have pointed out that there is a lot of evidence of this – many years of active cooperation with the WEF and other such organisations, in their highest level meetings. Not so much just nodding at the lying reports of others (which all politicians do – saying “this report is a pack of lies” does not go down well at a meeting or conference) – but actively producing the lying reports himself.
Prime Minister Rutte is not deceived – he is one of the deceivers.
Did he start out as he is now? I do not believe so, I suspect it was a gradual process of moral corruption.
None of us should be smug about that – we are all open to the same corruptions.