PAUL DRIESSEN & DUGGAN FLANAKIN
Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that his Administration would “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” One clue to what he meant was his comment to now-congressional candidate Joe “The Plumber” Wurzelbacher: “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”
Not necessarily – especially when activists, regulators, politicians and ruling elites do all they can to ensure there is less and less wealth to spread around.
Just this week, the Civil Society Reflection Group on Global Development Perspectives released a new report to the United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit on Sustainable Development. The executive summary of No Future Without Justice begins with the heading, “The World in Need of Fundamental Change.” Major components of its “solution” include a “universal fiscal equalization scheme” and a “massive and absolute decoupling of well-being from resource extraction and consumption.”
The 18-member Group includes no Americans – but condemns the US and other governments for their dedication to economic growth, rather than spreading wealth, and demands that governments play a key role in promoting “sustainability” and welfare. They insist that all governments provide universal access to public health care, guaranteed state allowances for every child, a basic universal pension, guaranteed state support for the unemployed and underemployed, and of course universal social security.
It is, in short, the total nanny state – but with little or no resource extraction or economic growth to support it.
The Group admits that human civilization “will still need some form of growth in large parts of the world, to expand the frontiers of maximum available resources for poor countries.” However, the massive investments needed to shift to a totally renewable energy and resource-based economy will require “massive de-growth (shrinkage) of products, sectors and activities that do not pass the sustainability test” – as devised by them, affiliated organizations and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
