The Economy Must Grow

We have arrived at a situation where economic growth means less prosperity. When wealth is measured as economic turnover it simply means that we are peddling a bit faster.
Economic growth once meant that more people sat on chairs instead of sitting on boxes, but these days, most probably you are simply paying the Gatekeeper.
By expanding the amount of state spending New Labour simply expanded the amount of obstacles we have to overcome to go about our daily lives.
On the one hand, advances in technology make us wealthier, yet on the other, increased economic activity has led to increased poverty. So we live in smaller houses, but clothes are cheaper, and cars are more comfortable. Technology means that many cancers are no longer fatal, yet many hospital wards are filthy.
At one time, economic growth was sure to mean an increased amount of tangible goods.
This is certainly true in agricultural and manufacturing economies. You can touch and feel and see the increased wealth.
But a service economy is an economy built on sand. Now you see the service, now it’s gone.
And the best way to grow a service economy is to create needs, and the best way to do this is to create regulations, impediments, obstacles:- all for our own good, of course.
For a little while we can persuade the rest of the world that our busyness is equal to their business, that our services are equal to their tangible goods, that the money spent on mental health care of perfectly normal children is the equivalent of building a bridge.
We persuade ourselves that our activity merits the wealth we see as our birth right, disguising the fact that much of this wealth is merely tribute from our informal empire.
The pound will remain high hopefully and the foreigner will still send us his tangible goods for a pittance. That is 'our' aim.
(If not, we can always bomb and pillage a new Libya.)
To continue the pretence, to cover our nakedness, we borrow somebody else’s clothes.
We just keep on calling in the profit on 'our' overseas investments and when it falls short we borrow, continuing the pretence that creating regulations is as good as creating chairs.
We reached the tipping point some years ago. It doesn’t pay for the brightest and the best to work and create true wealth. It’s a lot easier to work the system.
The economy must grow to keep the peasants running on the treadmill of taxation and debt.
Economic growth means the centralization of power and wealth, the maintenance of the world wide pyramid of power.
Areas of economic growth in recent years include the medication industry, the security industry and the regulation industry. I don't know if I'm any richer, but I'm definitely more controlled.