The Green Recession

10,000 years ago, in the agricultural revolution, man's produc-tivity first reached a level where he produced more than he con-sumed. The producers thus freed some members of society to become parasites, such as bureaucrats, priests, lawyers, kings, generals, and soldiers.

The earlier productive states subjugated the neighboring states either directly, or if they resisted, by destroying their towns and villages and laying their fields waste (the latter a regular tactic of the Roman army).

Productivity kept increasing, taking a vast leap forward with the industrial revolution and a second leap with the electronic revolution. Each such leap meant an increase of the parasites at the expense of the producers. A visit to a US supermarket is al-most beyond belief: the opulent wealth of meat, produce, and baked goods comes from agriculture, which employs no more than 2.76% of the population! The total remaining manufactur-ing of all goods, including mining and construction, is a mere 26.3% of the population (1988 figures). The remaining 71% of the population do not manufacture, i.e. do not create wealth. They include indispensable professions such as truck drivers (they move wealth, but do not create it), but the fraction is mainly made up of parasites such as policy analysts, administrators, government officials, criminals, and politicians.

The reason why they have chosen to do so is to stop the in-dustrial progress which is passing them by and will eventually diminish their influence to zero.

But here I am less interested in motivation than results. Much (most?) of the present recession and economic hardships is due to the successful destructive action of the Green parasites. A few instances are common knowledge. The Clean Air Act cost $40 billion last year, payable by you. The "Northern Spotted Owl" is an artificially defined, non-biological subspecies of the spotted owl, which is alive, well and abundant from Washington State down to Texas. Yet for that fraudulent subspecies 6,000 families are to be left without a breadwinner.

But there is much more. There is no industry that has not been decimated, if not eliminated or driven abroad, by the Green prohibitions, regulations and senseless rituals. The paper in-dustry had to spend billions to reduce their output of harmless dioxins from almost nothing to virtually nothing at all. The amount of chemicals in each ton of paper will rise by 23% over 5 years. Guess who pays for that. As in other industries, the paper industry is led by wimps who have no idea of what is going on and who have committed themselves to a recycling rate of 40% by the mid-90s, i.e. to selling low-quality, high-cost refuse. Guess again who pays for that.

The industry of the rust belt has been brought to a stop, not by foreign competition, but by the EPA's insane requirements of cleaning up the air by an additional percentage point; not in Los Angeles or Denver or other cities lying in basins and genuinely suffering from air pollution but everywhere, including the wide open spaces where the deer and the antelope roam. Guess who pays for that.

But laying waste fields is an exaggeration you may think. Far from it. The Roman hordes set their adversaries' fields afire only for the first year to drive them into slavery over the winter, after executing the resistance leaders, the land was back and ready to be worked by its former owners for tribute to the Roman legions. The EPA is nowhere near as benign, merciful or generous; it lays land waste forever, or at least until the American people begin to realize what is being done to them. Many hard- working couples, knowing that paper securities are ultimately worth a few calories per inch when you burn them, put their lives' saving into a farm or ranch to live out their lives in healthy country work. Enter the EPA to tell them, yes, the land is yours, but you are not allowed to do anything with it. For if some of it is under water for more than 6 days in succession, it counts as wetlands, which must be preserved for the pleasure of the parasites. Six days! That means that there is no land the EPA cannot confiscate as wetlands. Any parking lot is wetlands. The sole reason why the EPA does not confiscate it is that, unlike agricultural land, it is not engaged in production of anything.

The wonder is that the recession is not yet a depression. But give the Greens free reign and it will set in.