Wealth is Bad

Wealth is the enemy, that is, if you are to believe the opinions displayed in a documentary airing frequently on the Green Channel over the next few weeks. The documentary titled "Planet Earth: The Future" was actually first broadcast on the BBC in 2006.

Rarely do you hear wealth discussed as being a problem. After all, it is the creation of wealth that lifts millions of people out of the grasp of disease and starvation each year, it is wealth that allows affluent people to donate and volunteer billions upon billions of dollars worth of aid to charitable causes such as Haiti earthquake relief and the World Wildlife Fund, and it is wealth alone that has allowed each successive generation of free market Americans to enjoy a better quality of life than the previous generation.

Among those speaking on the documentary, however, wealth clearly is a problem for it delivers exactly as economists would attest--it allows for a higher standard of living for humans. And this is bad.

Why is wealth so bad according to environmentalists?

There are several reasons for this but the first and most important is that it allows for a disproportionately large human population--today's being perhaps twice as large as what the Earth is capable of sustaining. (Six versus the optimum three billion individuals.) Each of these resource gobbling parasitic humans must live off the dwindling natural resources of the planet and in doing so must encroach further and further into the habitats of stressed flora and fauna for survival.

I have underestimated the aptitude of every socialist the world over for embracing economic structures that destroy wealth. I have said time and time again that their policies would lead to accidental (though predictable) impoverishment.

I should be more selective with my accusations.

There are a certain number of socialists that wish to institute global socialism not because of a misunderstanding of economic outcomes, but precisely because they do understand that socialism will put the brakes on a developing world that can feed and clothe and cure the diseases of its people. What better way to attain the target of three billion humans than to starve or infect them?

The next presentation for Planet Earth: The Future will be on the Green Channel on April 22.