A very good summation of the madness or these people. On the plus side, all the woke media platforms such as Buzzfeed, Huff Post, Vice, Fusion are collapsing and their mainstream equivalents (NYT, Guardian, Atlantic, New Statesman etc) are treading water, at best. Meanwhile the decidedly unwoke Joe Rogan gets $100 million or more from Spotify. Great stuff!

The writer says:

‘With capitalism in crisis, the radical Left gets a hearing, but the establishment stays in power.’

Yes, this is true. i have remarked for some years on the fact that even though the most appalling form of capitalism is dominant, the left has failed to come to power more or less everywhere. This is because, of course, the contemporary left has no interest – intellectual or financial – in the economics of production and distribution etc.

As excellent left-wing writers such as Matt Stoller have said, these things just don’t exist for the woke, modern left. They derive their incomes from the state, think tanks and NGOs etc so the concept of making and selling something means absolutely nothing to them. As Tim Pool often points out, these people don’t even understand that things have to be designed, made, and distributed. They literally think that food and goods just appear on the shelves, or deliver as if my magic by Amazon. (Well, Amazon is a form or magic I suppose, although I refuse to have anything to do with them).

In fact, it’s even worse. As Paul Embery states in his article, the modern left actively despises anybody who makes or sells anything for profit, from shop keepers to industrialists like Elon Must. Just look at the way that Democrat politicians in California are persecuting Elon Musk for the time of making something and employing thousands of people. One of them literally told him to ‘f**** off’.

These people embody a few strain of left-wing madness, the like of which we have never quite seen before. The results can be seen in cities like San Francisco, where crime is rewarded and small business are deliberately destroyed. It would have happened across the UK if Corbyn had to power. We had a narrow escape.

A key element of Wokenomics today is tied to climate change panic with allegedly no more than 12 years to save the planet from destruction. If Naomi Klein is right that “this changes everything” then capitalism’s central problem is not the unequal distribution of wealth or the exploitation of workers by capitalists but capitalism’s emphasis on economic growth and the alleged resulting destruction of the global climate. This is partly a neo-Malthusian view and partly taking the UN politicians’ alarms about climate change to their logical conclusion.

But the appeal is not to make workers better off, or to pay women for raising babies, it is to save the planet. And anyone who disagrees is an evil climate denier bent on destroying the only home we all have. The goal is to smash a somewhat cartoonish view of “capitalism” and replace it with a somewhat utopian view of green socialism, thereby saving the planet as well as creating social justice.

The big hole in the Green New Deal and its non-US versions is the Woke assumption that as goes the US (or Canada or Germany) so goes the planet. So if the US, representing 13% of global CO2 emissions or Canada representing 1.6% will change their economies and societies from capitalism to socialism that will save the planet ” regardless of what China (26% of global CO2 emissions and rising rapidly) and the growing Indian economy do.

Excellent essay. The fundamental value in this system is actually money – not justice- so everything that’s valuable should be paid for.
At its most extreme, this monetizes everything – from famlliy relationships to volunteering, and gives the State incredible responsibility/control in private lives and over children.
Of course, the issue of justice for all remains .

‘This is the trouble with Wokenomics ” it turns absolutely everything into a series of politicised, administrative value judgements. As such it goes even further in its ambitions than Marxist economics. Arbitrarily putting a price on a tonne of wheat or a tractor factory is economic insanity, but doing the same for motherhood, friendship, volunteering or personal responsibility is moral madness.. ‘

I would like to propose paying citizens to use the bathroom. Specifically going poo. With our increasingly unhealthy diets of highly processed/low fiber foods, passing a stool has become”well”quite laborious. And we all know the kind of mood it puts you in when you don’t “lay a good cable” to start your day. For these reasons, and the for the sake of a happy and harmonious “regular” society, the state should mandate all defecatory activity and issue stimulus [in more ways than one] checks at a rate of $40,000 per pound of poo, to be submitted annually as an attachment to your tax return, and to be processed by the IRS, who will now be known as the Internal Regularity Service.

I see the issue as being the over-commodification of everything. In the current culture there seems to be an expectation that exploiting for monetary reward is not only always acceptable but is to be encouraged. As a result many “goods” that were previously created by individuals or a community for common enjoyment are now bought and sold. One result of this is that the market drives out common goods. Often the people exploiting these goods have only a sketchy idea of their true value or the culture surrounding them. Weird though it may seem, the English sport of fellrunning is currently going through this process and the people responsible are too thick to realise they’re destroying precisely the essence of the sport that makes it attractive.

In the early 1960s my dad began giving me a weekly allowance of twenty-five cents in exchange for doing my chores. By the late 1960s my salary for mowing the lawn, taking out the rubbish, etc. was up to two dollars a week. I should have done these tasks out of the goodness of my heart and love for my parents; alas, I was greedy. I craved comic books, Hershey bars, and Saturday matinees.