We Must End Our ‘Addiction to Economic Growth’

By Matt Holdridge

This video has become the latest laugh reel among “conservative” bloggers thanks to Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online and Andrew Breitbart. 

The video is a compilation of young adults at the Power Shift 2011 conference in DC. You can view the video here.

It goes without saying that we clearly have differences in opinion with these activists when it comes to issues like Cap and Trade, government subsidies for “green jobs,” and their overall embrace of government regulation of environmental issues.

Goldberg singles out one activists statement that, “We must end our addiction to economic growth” to prove how fringe and insane these people are.

However, despite what Goldberg and Breirbart would have you believe, real conservatives traditionally don’t wholly disagree with these activists premise. Traditional conservatives have been saying almost the same thing for 50 years although differing with the far left on the method to achieve this more sustainable society in a post industrialized world.

Russell Kirk, author of the Conservative Mind, famously wrote in is “Ten Conservative Principals” that:

The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old.

Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host.

Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry, who is revered in many conservative circles, has written about the same theme of the “cult of Progress” for years and most recently in a 2008 issue of Harper’s Magazine.  

Berry writes: 

The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait…

…In keeping with our unrestrained consumptiveness, the commonly accepted basis of our economy is the supposed possibility of limitless growth, limitless wants, limitless wealth, limitless natural resources, limitless energy, and limitless debt. The idea of a limitless economy implies and requires a doctrine of general human limitlessness: allare entitled to pursue without limit whatever they conceive as desirable—a license that classifies the most exalted Christian capitalist with the lowliest pornographer.

…However it came about, this credo of limitlessness clearly implies a principled wish not only for limitless possessions but also for limitless knowledge, limitless science, limitless technology, and limitless progress. And, necessarily, it must lead to limitless violence, waste, war, and destruction. That it should finally produce a crowning cult of political limitlessness is only a matter of mad logic.

Extravagance and hubris should always be criticized whether it’s the environment or spending. Like your mother says, too much of anything isn’t a good thing. 

In short, it isn’t always good policy to be for whatever your perceived opponent is against. We can debate the methods but the end goal is almost always the same. 

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