“[L]iberal economics fail for precisely the same reason that liberal environmentalism fails–they are both defined by the politics of limits.”
“Discarding the politics of limits means also discarding the remnants of Marxism. Demystifying the environment and casting down the objective Gaia will leave liberalism without a spiritual core.”
“Economic collapse, it seems, is the only proven way to guarantee emissions reduction.”
“Making energy more expensive affects the poor severely. Not only do they spend a higher portion of their income on energy than the middle and upper classes, but their other purchases are highly sensitive to the price of energy. The poor can’t buy iPhones even when the price goes down, but they do buy food whose price is raised by biofuel mandates.”
“So the liberal environmentalists are once more pump-priming a disaster: a massive, unnecessary, unprecedented recession that will cause poverty, hardship, and social unrest, none of which have ever proven to be good for the environment.”
Iain Murray, The Really Inconvenient Truths, Regnery 2008
“…The dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival. To follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.
“All of this raises an important point about which I wish to be explicit from the outset. Although I attack the presumption of reason on the part of socialists, my argument is in no way directed against reason properly used. By `reason properly used’ I mean reason that recognizes its own limitations and, itself taught by reason, faces the implications of the astonishing fact, revealed by economics and biology, that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive…”
F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism