Amerika

Voicing a sentiment often felt but rarely expressed among the Right, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen blamed globalization for the environmental crisis in which humanity now finds itself:

The plant, with a workforce of some 400 as well as around 300 sub-contractors, is controversial for dumping toxic waste known as “red mud” into a Mediterranean nature reserve for decades.

…The plant “is a symbol because they want us to believe that the choice is between jobs and health and the environment,” Le Pen told a handful of reporters outside the plant during her previously unannounced stop.

“I’m here to say that… there would not be such a choice to make” under a Le Pen presidency, said the candidate, who blames environmental degradation — and many other woes — on “unbridled globalisation”.

She touches a toe into the wider issue, which is that Leftism is an environmental disaster. Egalitarianism — or “everyone do whatever they want” — is perpetually popular, but it creates the conditions for runaway growth.

With egalitarianism, unity of purpose such as having a healthy civilization is erased and replaced with individual self-interest. In addition, because egalitarianism removes responsibility, it encourages transfer of socialized cost to the group through a process known as “externalization.”

This produces a runaway economy where each person, in a desire to acquire individual wealth, creates a unique business or concern that they own and then extracts wealth from it. This produces incentive to cut corners in order to widen margins, encouraging the habits of bad businesses like dumping “red mud” into the sea.

At the same time, because this creates massive social instability, it puts workers on the defensive because they can no longer rely on jobs to endure through the decades. Terrified of going bankrupt, they become dependent on society for jobs, which ensures that politicians can always win votes by claiming to “create jobs.”

This system can only keep going through constant growth, which branches eventually into immigration and social welfare programs as a means of producing more and more buyers. It will never stop until it consumes all resources because the need of individuals, taken as a group, demands more wealth without limits.

During the past two centuries and change during which Leftism has been steadily gaining dominance as the political system of the industrialized world, old businesses have been “disrupted” so that new people can seek wealth, resulting in a turbulent economy which produces mountains of landfills as it opens and closes temporary businesses.

Since any product which sells is considered a positive thing, the economy simultaneously barfs out any number of worthless junk objects for consumption and discarding by the herd, generating more waste. Governments encourage this through entitlement payments, which give citizens more money to spend on personal items.

Globalization accelerates this process by exporting the runaway Leftist economy to the world, necessitating constant new markets and new sources of cheap labor to keep feeding the growth spiral.

A society with a healthy view of environmentalism would have less individual freedom because that way, people would have roles they could count on for a lifetime, be economically secure and not be caught in this constant whirlwind of growth as a means of sustaining individuals. As always, the enemy is us.

Tags: environmentalism, growth, marine le pen, red mud