...I don't think I need to say that this is a death spiral...the Right more generally, worships unilateral action for its own sake, such as the invasion of Iraq...

This is where the physical challenges, and social equilibria intervene against them: pure "Freedom", especially in its degenerate form, does not lead to any more oil in the world, nor does it lead to an improved [energy efficiency] in the face of global warming. Pure interdependence is vulnerable to disequilibria, and thus, when established, eventually there is a political coalition that votes to gamble on a land rush mentality, destroying whatever positive progress was made during the previous period, simply because it is not sufficient to maintain political cohesion.

Or to say it another way, every time degenerate Liberty [pure interdependence] saves up a little money, degenerate Freedom goes to the casino, plays rigged games, chases scantily clad women and crawls back home, drunk, broke, and needing a prompt course of treatment for a Sexual Transmitted Disease.

He goes on to argue that we are currently reaching a wateshed moment, where the reactionary forces which profit most from degenerate Freedom are butting heads with resources limitations, and finding themselves now in a position of realizing that perpetual growth is unsustainable.

Not enough attention is paid directly to the other part of the problem - that the present system cannot produce certain kinds of happiness that people desire, and which, in theory, could be provided at much lower cost of scarcities than our current substitutes. In general, this part of the equation is attacked through its symptoms: inability of elections to produce candidates that generate enthusiasm, media monopolies, the poor quality of popular culture. The problem is that the underlying theory is one of false consciousness, that is that people are voting against their interests because of media pressure. While this is the case on the margins, the lack of Liberty is more essential. If there were a path towards a growing economy that relied upon the point of view of the left, then people would be taking it. They jump at even marginal chances.

This leads back to the mesoëconomic problem of lack of investment supply, which is, in turn related to both the physical constraints of the combustion economy, and to the gaps in the pattern of happiness that it can produce. This neatly ties together both the physical limits and the structural limits. The physical limits are the limits of supply of high return carbon based energy sources, the structural limits are the things that combustive energy cannot produce as changes in deep energy.

The end result is rationing, war, needless precarity and, ultimately, starvation. Unsurprisingly, such unpopular positions are being dressed up in the garb of the moralist, what he refers to as "theonomy," or religious economics, which go on to both justify, in religious terms (and we can think of neo-liberalism as a religion), the present inequitous order, the coming wave of starvation in the poorer parts of the world, and the resource wars which are already underway. These mathematically innovative proofs for religious belief (for what else, in fact, has the "Chicago School" been about for the past half century?) are akin to those devised in the 18th century to buttress god, king and country, e.g. the legitimacy of the last reactionary order: monarchical absolutism, or the divine right of kings:

..we can see what the degenerate freedom position of the right rests upon. First it must assure people that keeping disequilibria will overcome the physical limitations of the combustion economy, and that it will eventually solve...the structural limits. It tries to create a pseudo-scientific proof that the present system can do what it is not doing, and doesn't need to do what it can't do.

The first part is limited in that it does not have to, for political purposes, actually prove it can solve things like Global Warming or scarcity of Carbon Sources, or the lack of scalabilty. It just needs to lull people asleep long enough in saying that even if thing don't work out, the present temporary plurality will be dead and gone, or at least so rich as to be undisplacable.

The second part is also in contradiction. It is the reason for the rise of religious theonomy - theocratic economics - in the world. Being unable to convince people that the present economy doesn't need to do what it can't do, it tries to convince people that they don't want what they want, and nobody else should either. If they won't join you, beat them. Religious denial of pleasure is itself a pleasure, and it is a time honored gambit of top down economies to use it to reduce demand for goods and services.

This cannot be emphasized enough: the present system has a problem, that problem is that while it can redistribute consumption and production, it is not increasing real production fast enough to evaluate it's own future. This means there has been massive inflation in the cost of a dollar of future earnings. This asset inflation is good for those who rent dollars of future earnings, but generally bad for those of us who pay that rent. More over, it means that the periodic bailouts of those who own the rights to future dollars of earnings are going to accelerate. Each bailout further increases investment demand over the available investment supply.

How is this playing out today?

One of the first defining conflicts of this century was the response to 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. While public displeasure over Iraq has subsided, it has been replaced by the economic dislocation and strangulation which is a child of the reactionary policy which Iraq was the centerpiece for. Without Iraq, there would have been no Bush second term, nor the ability to rewrite the Federal Budget into an attempt to produce a Reactionary American Republic.

Indeed.

I would go on, and discuss what sort of hope Newberry has for what he terms the "coming progressive century," but at this point, I think it's a good idea for you to go read the whole article.

Think of it as an antidote, of sorts, for doom porn.