It’s becoming just one of those statements:
That free-market capitalism is almost certainly not environmentally sustainable, as well, is a realisation that many rightwingers, including Sunak, are avoiding for as long as they can.
We know that many simply don’t like free market capitalism and wish to see it end. But this idea that it should go because it’s inefficient is simply ludicrous. One obvious reason for that statement is that it is based upon the economic analysis of George Monbiot. Hmm, yes, well…..
There’s nothing at all in either capitalism or free markets that insists upon economic growth. They’re both good ways of getting it, certainly, but the growth is not a necessary precondition for either of the systems or their blend.
However, what each are separately and both are together is efficient. Efficient in the use of resources to gain a certain output that is. For the obvious reasons that inputs are a cost to capitalists therefore capitalists economise upon inputs. This is not complex logic.
We’ve also tested this in that grand experiment we call the 20th century. The capitalist and free market (agreed, many to greater and lesser degrees capitalist and free market) economies gained total factor productivity in a way the planned and socialist economies did not. Paul Krugman’s on record musing that perhaps the Soviet Union managed no increase in economic efficiency at all in 70 years. All growth came from greater resource use, none from better resource use.
We’ve also another test of this in the emissions scenarios that underpin climate change worries. The capitalist and market (ie, A1) outcomes are considerably better than the non-market ones (ie, B2). Yes, in everything.
Economic efficiency means lower resource use for any given standard of living - equally, a higher standard of living for any given resource use. That’s just definitional. Given that free market capitalism is more efficient with resource use than other economic systems therefore - for any given standard of living - free market capitalism is the most environmentally friendly.
But here we’ve got the intelligentsia speaking unto the nation and claiming entirely the opposite.
Of course, some of this is simply delusion and that’s not a rarity on newspaper opinion pages. But we do have a distinct impression that for at least some this is driven not by matters environmental but by that desire to do down free market capitalism. We can definitely think of a few who, if convinced that free markets and capitalism were environmentally optimal, would prefer to damn the environment rather than support liberal economics.