Cutting on Medicare? Nope, only if you pay Walmart employees darn well. As long as wages are as unjust in the U.S. as they are — no way! Raising retirement age? Goody, but only if you pass a Constitutional Amendment like, “Bricklayers are required to only play with LEGO, in order to not ruin their health.”

In Europe “liberal” refers to one of the original Latin meanings and means *libertarian* (neo-liberal). The U.S. refers to the 1700s’ French meaning, which is “generous, kindhearted ect…” Indeed, I like the American meaning better than our European one.

Those who talk against degrowth have only one option to explain their attitude:

“Dammit, we rather die than change our life style!”

Only this: People like you are like the smoker who refuses to stop smoking after amputation of already one of his legs.

Or how about this: The old woman who already has hundreds of cats in her small chaotic apartment, and still feels like getting in more.

Scientists say, it now looks like their worst prognoses of global warning will come true and you call it “childish”.
By the way, my quarter is up the hill — maybe I will have the pleasure to watch ya get wet…..

Deeply impressed.

This is why bailing out criminal thieving banksters at the expense of ordinary people is such a bad idea.

Bankers should be hanged, not bailed out.

Nor is it even necessary. There private sector does a better job at distributing wealth, eliminating poverty, and the like. It’s when government tries to engage in it “to be relevant” that thing start to go wrong.

I, for one, lived in East Germany, and can objectively tell you that Socialism is not “nice” or even humane. In fact it is the least humane choice a society can make, despite the nice-sounding sales pitch and the demonization of freer societies by institutional entities.

It’s a perscription for the structural enlargement of poverty, the truncation of human life expectancy, population, and individual potential in every and any area. In fact if you get a sufficient number of chumps to buy into the idea, you have the perfect means of creating a means by which totalitarianism can emerge, all for the sake of “the good of man”, a term used for decades behind the iron curtain to justify the limitations forced on people.

It’s hardly even fit to argue over. It presumes the power of the state over that of the individual in a fashion no different than Nazi euthenasia and race theory which attempted to construct deliberate contraction in some populations.

It also childishly assumes a static state: than somehow, we’ll still have the good and human things available in the present age, and that nothing will change that.

It’s morally repugnant to promote a theory that, for all the smokescreen chatter about “how we’ll all live better”, will not result in anyone living better, and will enduce misery. It will require the curtailment of medical treatment, even palliative end of life pain aleviation.

Clarissa :
I’d also like to see a second public power supply system on about 20V basis. This would make it easier to use solar power and spare lots of energy. And safe: under 30V DC is harmless. For most devices in private households we don’t need high AC voltage.

Here I’m quoting my comment from March, on Thom Hartmann’s blog.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2012/03/estimates-gas-might-hit-5-gallon-summer-americans-are-screwed-pump#comment-121843
This was a degrowth-idea. So government could make the high-voltage system, as we know it, very expensive, by taxing it — and at the same time offer a cheap and tax-free second low-voltage system.
Democratic Green Socialism would NOT mean, ending the free market (by prohibiting private entrepreneurship, as Leninism did). No, it would be more regulations and government going into the market as well. For example, make laptops with small screens tax-free, taxing meat very high. A society struggling with lots of flood disasters might be ready for laws which prohibit any kind of illuminated advertising.

“The prices for solar panels hardly dropped over the last five years. Something is wrong with the market. I’m very much afraid this is a matter of lacking competition. The manufacturing techniques changed very much, but I don’t have the feeling you see that in corporate price policy. This is why I want government to go in this business too.”

Same page I just linked to on Thom’s blog, just another comment. Actually I’d like to see government manufacturing various kinds of technical devices and make them extremely cheap. Today’s technical standard makes it possible to design devices which hardly need electricity. We don’t need those rotating CDs anymore, for wave files can be played via flash memory. There are already speakers on the market which are extremely efficient. My one has a very good sound, lots of bass — it’s just not very loud. I tried to check how many watts it would use, but it was immeasurable, because too low.

I am convinced, we could run our civilizations on amazingly low wattage. The technical options are already on the market, but the free market is too selfish to concentrate on environmental protection. In this matter the free market is NOT efficient and government manufacturing could be better.

Just some examples how to degrow our present insanity.