Do you think it can’t get much worse than COVID-19 lockdowns?
Think again.
An establishment-connected lefty professor says that in “the near future, the world may need to resort to lockdowns again — this time to tackle a climate emergency.”
“Under a ‘climate lockdown,’ governments would limit private-vehicle use, ban consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-saving measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling,” writes Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at the Economics of Innovation and Public Value Center at University College London, in a paper titled “Avoiding a Climate Lockdown.”
The title of her paper is very misleading. She believes climate lockdowns will be necessary unless we “overhaul our economic structures and do capitalism differently.”
Three obstacles to overhaul must be removed, she says, “business that is shareholder-driven instead of stakeholder-driven, finance that is used in inadequate and inappropriate ways, and government that is based on outdated economic thinking and faulty assumptions.” She is really talking about fascist economics, where governments set the policies of “private” sector firms:
[G]overnment assistance to business must be less about subsidies, guarantees, and bailouts, and more about building partnerships. This means attaching strict conditions to any corporate bailouts to ensure that taxpayer money is put to productive use and generates long-term public value, not short-term private profits…Because markets will not lead a green revolution on their own, government policy must steer them in that direction. This will require an entrepreneurial state that innovates, takes risks, and invests alongside the private sector.