G-20: Governments are ‘Growth’ Magicians The G-20 met in Brisbane again this weekend for a shrimp-fest at reportedly considerable cost to tax payers (it cost more than $400 million and shut down an entire city for the best part of a week). What did the meeting achieve? According to the communique, it will achieve miracles. Not only is there going to be an intensification of the fight against the non-problem of ‘climate change’ (as if the climate cared what we do or don’t do), but governments will ‘create economic growth’ – allegedly $2 trillion worth of it over the next five years.
Since this figure refers to global GDP it can of course be achieved, mainly because GDP is a very poor measure of growth. All sorts of activities that really make us poorer are counted as ‘growth’ – all that counts for the purposes of GDP calculation is ‘spending’, no matter what the spending entails or who actually does the spending. The Soviet Union had ‘growth’ too – in fact it reported plenty of it. It even grew while millions died in famines during the collectivization drive. Western intellectuals were duly impressed by Stalin, who seemingly demonstrated the superiority of communism over capitalism in the 1930s. People in the Soviet Union were even paid in something that was called money, but there was very little they could actually buy with it.
Since governments want to fight ‘climate change’ (there is no point in fighting ‘global warming’ anymore, since it has stopped dead in its tracks more than 18 years ago), they are bound to create some of that magical growth by wasting scarce resources on alternative energy subsidies. It should be obvious that such investment is wasteful – if that were not the case, it would not need to be subsidized (Germany’s citizens have seen their electricity bills soar in the course of the rigorous implementation of the ‘green energy’ boondoggle in that country). However, it will register as growth in the GDP accounts, just as numerous housing bubbles around the world looked like growth until they blew up in 2008.
All this government intervention-induced growth should perhaps be called ‘growth at a price’ – it is a bit like buying $1 bills with $5 bills. According to the AP, the G-20 want to create more jobs specifically for women as well (by means of quotas? They didn’t say), but it is actually not necessary to plan specifically for that, at least not in the industrialized nations.
This post was published at Acting-Man on November 17, 2014.
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