Now, after seemingly rushing to push this legislation through Congress, the truth is coming to light. The Penn Wharton Budget Model has found that this bill will only reduce inflation by a mere 0.1 percent over five years, a fact that the Congressional Budget Office corroborates. So, what exactly are we dealing with here? A scaled-down version of the failed Build Back Better Act, masquerading as a solution to our economic woes, while in reality, it is “the single most significant legislation to combat climate change in our nation’s history,” as the Biden-Harris Department of Treasury proudly proclaimed in a release last November.
Let’s break this down. The Inflation Reduction Act allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices, extends enhanced Obamacare subsidies for three years at a cost of
64 billion, and claims to reduce the deficit by $300 billion.
But hold on—this bill also increases taxes just as America teeters on the brink of recession and boosts funding for the IRS by a jaw-dropping $80 billion, making it larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined. Is this really what Americans need right now?
Financial experts are sounding the alarm on this nearly trillion-dollar boondoggle. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink pointed out in April that it’s hard to envision inflation dropping to two percent, given the reckless spending spree initiated by Biden and the Democrat-led 117th Congress.
“I think two is a hard number. We have restructured how we frame our economic policy. We have a trillion dollars of fiscal stimulus in the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Act, and the [Inflation Reduction Act],” Fink emphasized during an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street.
Meanwhile, the Consumer Price Index in July surged by 2.9 percent year-over-year, a clear indicator that the administration’s policies are failing.
Fox News’s Larry Kudlow, who served as the director of the National Economic Council during the Trump administration, didn’t hold back in his critique of the Inflation Reduction Act. He stated, “There is not one single iota, scintilla, whit, shred or morsel of economic growth incentives in this bill. Not a single comma, semicolon, dotted ‘i’ or crossed ‘t’ of growth. Nothing.”
So, what’s the takeaway here? The Biden-Harris administration is pushing a narrative that simply doesn’t hold water. With a name like the Inflation Reduction Act, one would expect a focus on economic stability and growth. Instead, we see a politically motivated agenda that prioritizes climate change over the pressing needs of American families. It’s time for the American people to wake up and recognize the hypocrisy and double standards at play. This isn’t just politics as usual; it’s a dangerous game that could have lasting repercussions as we head into the 2024 election.
]]>The EU in particular has been aggressive in expediting similar programs which now threaten the agricultural base of half of Europe. This has led to rising farmer protests and given momentum to “far-right” movements, a prospect that the social engineers at the EU Commission seem to fear more than anything else. Their solution? They are attempting to bribe farmers with subsidies and have offered to lessen the number of visits farms would receive from bureaucratic agents armed with fines and red tape. How nice of them…
As Jeremy Clarkson has cleverly proven in his show ‘Clarkson’s Farm’, trying to operate an agricultural business almost anywhere in Europe or the UK is a regulatory nightmare that would put most farmers in the US out of business immediately (America is headed in this direction). And that’s without the benefit of carbon emissions rules. Subsidies are the only thing keeping them alive, but the real trick is that the strict regulations force farmers into a position where they need subsidies. It’s a government enforced racket.
Europeans suffered supply chain collapse and true famine during and after WWII and the experience is still burned into their collective cultural memory. It’s hard to say if the bribery scheme will work out the way the EU elites hope. Once carbon rules are passed and accepted as the norm, though, there’s no chance that they will be rescinded. They will continue to be enforced even when food inflation skyrockets again and mass starvation becomes a reality.
In the US, staunch opposition from conservatives prevented the direct passage of the Green New Deal. Biden denied his administration had any intention of pursuing GND policies in 2020 during a debate with Donald Trump.
Biden was asked by moderator Chris Wallace if he supported the Green New Deal:
- “No, I don’t support the Green New Deal,” Biden said.
- “Oh you don’t? Oh, well, that’s a big statement,” Trump interrupted.
- “I support the Biden plan that I put forward,” Biden said, “which is different than what (Trump) calls the ‘radical’ Green New Deal.”
Of course, Biden would later covertly embed carbon policies into his “Inflation Reduction Act” – A piece of legislation that utterly failed to accomplish its name (CPI measurements have gone down, but inflation has not), but succeeded in launching the first stage of climate controls outlined in the GND. Biden has continued to deny that the GND is a goal of his administration, but Kamala Harris seems to have spilled the beans in her first major media interview since she became the Democratic candidate.
Holy Shlit this is so bad
In the first clip, Kamala just admitted that the Inflation Reduction Act was a backdoor way to get the Green New Deal passed
She totally forgot the cover story they've been saying all alongpic.twitter.com/MeijpHA5lX
— Jack Poso
(@JackPosobiec) August 29, 2024
“I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective and decisions is my values have not changed…You mentioned the Green New Deal. I have always believed – and I have worked on it – that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”
Running damage control, the Harris campaign claimed after the interview that she “does not” support the Green New Deal. Except, she just said that her “values have not changed” in reference to the Green New Deal. The ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ was a Trojan horse, and it’s only the beginning if Harris becomes president.
Man-made climate change theory is perhaps the biggest scientific fraud in our modern era, with absolutely no hard evidence that global warming is caused by human industrial or agricultural activity. Official temperature records used by climate scientists only date back to the 1880s; this is a tiny sliver of time in the Earth’s climate history. When we examine the long term temperature record there have been numerous warming periods long before human created emissions.
When we compare long term temperature records to the long term carbon record, it becomes clear that carbon-based emissions have little to no influence over the Earth’s climate. Correlation is not proof of causation, and in many cases there isn’t even evidence of correlation.
The Green New Deal has nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with environmental communism. One of the primary reasons why the GND failed to gain public support was because it included “Climate Justice” protocols which are designed to redistribute the wealth of richer nations over to poor nations. This same agenda has been promoted by globalist institutions like the Summit For A New Global Financing Pact, which has called for the IMF and World Bank to “administrate” these carbon taxes.
In other words, the globalists get billions (or trillions) in funds annually through carbon regulations, then they use that cash as leverage to pressure nations to adopt whatever policies they want. In the meantime, richer western nations break down economically until everyone is equally poor and the globalists control the planetary pocket book. In essence, it’s a modern-day form of feudalism in the name of a climate crisis that doesn’t exist.
]]>The reality is that Bidenomics is working exactly as it was intended to work. Like Kamala Harris said, “Bidenomics is working!”
It’s challenging to suspend disbelief in this notion because no matter how badly Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the regime operates, most Americans work under the assumption that they’re not trying to tank the economy. It’s easier to blame incompetence, wokeness, and poor fiscal policies than to assume a darker intention. But the intention of tanking the economy comes from a false but persistent ideology that the regime won’t say out loud. They want to replace the system with Modern Monetary Theory and to do that requires everything that’s happening right now.
In other words, they think they’re doing “good” by destroying what we know to be a strong and vibrant American form of capitalism. This is how we know their intentions. If they openly discussed installing Modern Monetary Theory in America, their actions would be exactly what they are today.
MMT requires high unemployment, inflation, and a massive population surge from external sources. Does any of that sound familiar? As much as I loathe Wikipedia, their initial overview of Modern Monetary Theory is actually quite accurate:
Modern monetary theory or modern money theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial assets needed to pay taxes and satisfy savings desires.
According to MMT, governments do not need to worry about accumulating debt since they can pay interest by printing money. MMT argues that the primary risk once the economy reaches full employment is inflation, which acts as the only constraint on spending. MMT also argues that inflation can be controlled by increasing taxes on everyone, to reduce the spending capacity of the private sector.
MMT is opposed to the mainstream understanding of macroeconomic theory and has been criticized heavily by many mainstream economists. MMT is also strongly opposed by members of the Austrian school of economics, with Murray Rothbard stating that MMT practices are equivalent to “counterfeiting” and that government control of the money supply will inevitably lead to hyperinflation.
We know two things for sure. First, the Biden-Harris regime is working behind the scenes to lay the foundation for a near future iteration of Modern Monetary Theory. The reason we know this is ironic because it appears to have been an unintentional admission by the Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, Jared Bernstein.
According to Fox News back in May:
A viral video of President Joe Biden’s chief economic adviser, Jared Bernstein, appearing to struggle to explain how monetary policy works has raised new questions about the administration’s handling of the economy.
Bernstein, who chairs the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was interviewed for a new film called, “Finding the Money,” a documentary made by advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – a controversial line of economic thought. One of MMT’s central tenets is that government budget deficits don’t matter for countries like the U.S. that borrow money in their own currencies. Proponents argue this means the government should use tax and spending policies to manage the economy and address inflation instead of the central bank’s monetary policies.
“The U.S. government can’t go bankrupt, because we can print our own money,” Bernstein says in the video. He was then asked by the interviewer, “Like you said, they print the dollar, so why does the government even borrow?”
Bernstein’s reply seems to indicate uncertainty – at best – about monetary policy.
“Again, some of this stuff gets – some of the language and concepts are just confusing. The government definitely prints money, and it definitely lends that money by selling bonds. Is that what they do? They sell bonds, yeah, they sell bonds. Right? Since they sell bonds, and people buy the bonds, and lend them the money,” Bernstein replied.
If reading that makes you think he sounds like an idiot, watching it is even more disturbing.
The other thing we know for sure is that many Democrats have been pushing for the foundation of MMT to be built for years. If you don’t recall hearing many of them mention Modern Monetary Theory, it’s because they’ve been using a different name: The Green New Deal.
As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former Chief of Staff Saikat Chakrabarti famously noted, the Green New Deal wasn’t about the environment. It was about economic change. He would know. He’s the primary architect of the legislative abomination.
The Daily Caller noted his comments from 2019:
“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said to Inslee’s climate director, Sam Ricketts.
“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” Chakrabarti added.
So when Kamala Harris says Bidenomics is working, she’s not misspeaking. She’s not delusional. Bidenomics is working exactly as it was always intended to work, as is the entirety of the Biden-Harris regime. We have to stop assuming they’re just idiots and realize that to be that stupid requires intent.
If you take a test with 100 multiple-choice questions, one can expect to get around a quarter of them right if they just answer “C” on every question. That’s based on ignorance and incompetence. To get EVERY question wrong means they know the right answer and they’re willfully picking the wrong one. That’s insidious intent and that’s exactly what we’re seeing from the Biden-Harris regime. They’re getting literally everything “wrong.”
The regime has acted to raise crime, inflation, and the illegal alien population. They have acted to reduce security, access, and freedom. These are all extremely important precursors to an economic collapse that would allow them to usher in Modern Monetary Theory as the “solution.”
In fact, it would be the only possible “solution” once the debt reaches a point of no return, which many believe has already happened.
Over the remaining months of the election I am going to be working to educate as many as possible about MMT, economic collapse, and Bidenomics. If, God forbid, Harris is able to steal the 2024 election, then I will shift focus to educating how we fight back before it’s too late. All of this will be done through my revived project, the Economic Collapse Newsletter on Substack.
]]>
(DCNF)—Republican Attorney General Steven Marshall of Alabama warned Tuesday that a lawsuit from Hawaii could bypass Congress and impose the “Green New Deal” on Americans.
The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous Oct. 31 decision that a lawsuit by Honolulu against major oil companies could proceed, claiming the energy companies engaged in a “disinformation campaign.” Marshall, who led over a dozen other states in filing a brief urging the United States Supreme Court to take up the case, noted that the case could increase costs for residents of his state.
“Twenty states have banded together to be able to file this brief with the Supreme Court. While it is directed to the Hawaii case, which procedurally is in the right posture for the Supreme Court to consider, the impact of this case is widespread,” Marshall told “America’s Newsroom” co-host Dana Perino. “Clearly on the cases you’ve described going on around the country, but also we need to look no further than what the New York AG done recently in suing JBS, trying to use the efforts of state court to regulate certain industries around climate change.”
Democratic Attorney General Letitia James of New York sued JBS, the largest meat-packing company in the United States, in February, claiming the company misled consumers about its effects on climate change.
“The efforts in Hawaii are to bankrupt the fossil fuel industry,” Marshall told Perino. “But that directly impacts the pocketbooks of consumers in Alabama and others across the country in the cost of fossil fuels. The reality is not only is this effort one to deal with damages and money, but also it is through the injunctive power of trial courts to change the way the fossil fuel industry does their business, again, outside the rule of law.”
The Green New Deal involves halting the use of fossil fuels and mandating the use of so-called “green” energy.
“These are radical environmental groups who have an agenda funded by billionaires across the country directly trying to get the Green New Deal in a way they can’t through Congress and the ballot box,” Marshall said.
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]]>Since 1998, Democrats have controlled California’s state legislature. They adopted ineffective, misguided and economically damaging energy and climate legislation that created skyrocketing electricity prices for California residents, businesses and organizations.
But despite the Golden State’s supposedly “climate-friendly” legislative schemes, its 2021 average retail electricity price was the highest in the entire country at 19.65 cents per kilowatt hour, an increase of 224.6 percent from the 1999 price of 8.75 cents per kilowatt hour.
The 10 other states in the western U.S. region have a 2021 average retail electricity price of only 9.19 cents per kilowatt hour.
Energy Information Administration (EIA) data shows that the average retail electricity price for the entire country from 1999 to 2021 only grew by 67.16 percent – 6.64 cents per kilowatt hour from 1999 to 11.10 cents per kilowatt hour in 2021.
EIA is the principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System responsible for collecting, analyzing and disseminating energy information. The EIA average retail electricity price data provided the total electric industry price in each state, which includes price information from all full-service providers, restructured retail service providers, energy-only providers and delivery-only service providers. These electric service provider categories comprise the total electricity supply services utilized within each state.
Moreover, the data are established for residential, commercial, industrial, transportation and other consumer categories with an overall total price average included for each state as well the average across the United States.
California shoots itself in the foot with clean energy measures
According to Bloomberg, the jump in demand for natural gas, supply constraints and aging infrastructure has left the region vulnerable to price spikes. Also, the rainy winter has bought up challenges in the green energy transition, proving Californians are not ready yet to sacrifice their use of fossil fuels.
“Unfortunately for Californians, they’re going through this bumpy energy transition where everything doesn’t just fit exactly,” Wood Mackenzie Ltd Research Director Eugene Kim said. “It’s a battle between longer-term energy transition versus your immediate needs.”
Limited storage, damage to a key pipeline and a surge in demand have sent natural gas prices soaring in the state.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and other state politicians were adamant in pushing climate proposals that poured investment into the energy transition, moving away from natural gas and nuclear generation and discouraging significant investment in storage and pipeline capacity.
However, as residents complain of monthly electricity bills approaching $800, the governor has had no choice but to call for an investigation into the prices. (Related: Communist California has mandated unlimited electricity “basic service” at fixed monthly rates for consumers – will end in a grid-down disaster.)
A prolonged drought followed by a wet and chilly winter at first stymied the state’s hydropower capacity and then crippled its short-term solar generation. The gap has left California ill-equipped to deal with any surge in demand or disruption to supply, both of which have happened in recent months. The cold winter has also made Californians crank up their heating systems and has left working gas stockpiles in the Pacific region at their lowest level for this time of year since at least 2010.
Follow NewEnergyReport.com to catch the latest updates on electricity prices.
Watch the video below that talks about California’s energy crisis.
This video is from the Millennial Millie Clips channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- Renewables NOT ENOUGH to cover Europe’s energy needs.
- Relying solely on wind and solar power requires the TAKEOVER of so much land compared to fossil fuels.
- The race toward renewable energy is DOOMING the UK’s power grid and will lead to rolling blackouts.
- BLACKOUT bill: Minnesota lawmakers pass legislation banning use of coal, oil and gas for state’s electricity grid.
Sources include:
]]>The company had been backed by two Australian billionaires, Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes and former CEO of Fortescue Metals Group Andrew Forrest.
In a vague media statement on Jan. 11, the solar venture said it has “made the difficult decision to enter voluntary administration.”
The move will “unlock a path forward” for Sun Cable to “access additional capital for continued development of its marque project, the Australia-Asia Power Link (AAPowerLink).
The company describes AAPowerLink on its website as the world’s largest solar energy infrastructure project, which will harness solar energy from the Northern Territory, one of the sunniest locations on Earth.
The energy will then be supplied to Darwin and Singapore 24/7 through a 5,000 km transmission system.
“The appointment followed the absence of alignment with the objectives of all shareholders,” the company said.
“Whilst funding proposals were provided, consensus on the future direction and funding structure of the company could not be achieved.”
The solar venture has appointed global advisory firm FTI Consulting as its administrator, noting that FRI will work with Sun Cable and key stakeholders to “determine appropriate next steps for the business.”
“This will likely involve a process to seek expressions of interest for either a recapitalisation or sale of the business.”
Project Well Placed For Completion
David Griffin, founder and CEO of Sun Cable, said the company has made “extraordinary progress in developing the AAPowerLink”, which “remains well placed for completion.”
He maintained that the demand for delivering “reliable, dispatchable 24/7 renewable energy” in the Northern Territory and the region has “risen materially.”
Meanwhile, Cannon-Brookes, Chair of Sun Cable, said he was confident it will “play a huge role in delivering green energy for the world, right here from Australia.”
“I fully back this ambition and the team, and look forward to supporting the company’s next chapter.”
The collapse of Sun Cable comes despite the centre-left Labor government’s push for net-zero emissions by 2050, having committed $4.7 billion (US $3.2 billion) to fund renewable energy infrastructure in New South Wales in December.
“Recently, large-scale solar generation has begun rapid expansion. Large-scale solar generation has grown from negligible levels before 2016 to four percent of all Australian electricity generation in 2021, representing a five-year growth rate of 1,747 percent,” said the government’s climate change department on its website.
In Australia, rooftop solar PV systems remained the largest full-time equivalent employer among renewable energy types.
However, the share of renewable energy jobs has declined each year since 2012, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
A 2021 report by the International Energy Agency found that “relatively high investment costs, lack of dedicated auctions and competition from solar PV and battery storage projects prevent the faster expansion of concentrated solar panel.”
Expensive Transition to Renewables
While renewable energy has been touted by the government as a cheap solution for climate change, a Canadian study found that if all costs are considered, wind and solar are actually more expensive to produce electricity and such a transition would be environmentally nonviable.
“When we look at the environmental impact of our energy systems, we have to look at the entire value chain,” the first author of the study Dr. Lars Schernikau said in SAGE talks in May. Schernikau is an energy economist and commodity trader.
“There is a production of raw materials that we have to consider. There’s the processing of raw materials that we have to consider. There’s the transportation of raw materials and products that we have to consider,” he said.
“Of course, there’s the actual operation, the combustion of materials, whatever we do with the production. And then there’s the recycling. So these are the main steps where we have to consider our environmental impact.”
Schernikau said there’re non-emission issues to consider as well, such as energy efficiency, material efficiency, space requirement, waste requirement, the effect on animal and plant life, and the effect on health and safety.
“Wind and Solar have zero CO2? Why? Because during combustion, they don’t produce CO2. But when you look at the entire value chain, they produce a lot of CO2,” said Schernikau.
Harry Lee contributed to this article. Cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
]]>The Cold War era was rife with projects and organizations to carry out this vision, from Bretton Woods and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the area of international finance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in military affairs to the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom used to spread progressive, US-friendly propaganda. These organizations all had mainly deleterious influences—I have previously indicated how Bretton Woods and the modern international financial system can best be described as financial imperialism—but in one area American interventionism is to this day universally acclaimed as benign: the Green Revolution.
The Official History of the Green Revolution
Population growth was considered a major problem in the sixties. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University in his 1968 Population Bomb predicted widespread hunger as soon as the 1970s and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. The world simply could not feed a larger human population. Although mainly focused on environmental damage from pesticide use, Rachel Carson’s famous 1962 book, Silent Spring, made similar points. Human population was bound to continue to grow, and this would result in untold suffering and environmental damage.
A key and imminent danger in the 1960s was India: always on the verge on starvation, only massive imports of American wheat kept the specter of mass death away. Then, in 1965, catastrophe struck: drought across most of the subcontinent caused the Indian harvest to fail. As the drought continued into the two following years, it appeared that Ehrlich’s and the other Neo-Malthusians’ predictions had come true.
Then, a miracle happened: in stepped a man, a veritable demigod, to judge by the worship lavished on him by contemporary normies. Norman E. Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, had since the forties been researching and breeding new wheat varieties in Mexico, initially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and after 1964 as leader of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo, CIMMYT, initially funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Mexican government).
Borlaug bred high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties that were widely adapted to different ecological environments. Since the early sixties, he had been working with M.S. Swaminathan of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, and together they planted Borlaug’s new dwarf wheat varieties in northern India. Success was immediate: 1968 returned a bumper crop, as the new wheat yields were the highest ever recorded in India.
It appeared that the population doomers had been wrong. So said Borlaug himself when he in 1970 received the Nobel Peace Prize: in his acceptance speech, he proclaimed victory in the perpetual war between “two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction.” But the war was not over, he warned, and only continuous funding for technological research into food production and limits on reproduction could avert disaster.
Governments and philanthropists rose to the challenge, and capital poured into agricultural research of the Borlaugian variety as new international institutes were set up to continue the work Borlaug had begun in Mexico and in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines (founded in 1960). The Green Revolution eradicated the scourge of famine, and since agriculture with Borlaugian technology had much higher yields, masses of land were liberated from agricultural use and returned to nature. A 2021 study in the Journal of Political Economy estimates that gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the developing world would have been up to 50 percent lower had it not been for Borlaug, Swaminathan and the other international Brahmins ready and willing to guide the unwashed masses of ignorant peasants.
There is a twofold problem with this account of agricultural history: it is based on bad economics, and its connection to the actual history of Indian agriculture is tangential at best.
The Green Revolutionaries’ Bad Economics
Celebrating the Green Revolution rests on two fundamental errors in economic reasoning: Malthusianism and misunderstanding agricultural economics.
Malthusianism is the mistaken belief that human population will grow faster than the food supply; in Thomas Malthus’s formulation, population growth follows a geometric progression (2, 4, 8, 16 …) and food supply an arithmetic progression (2, 3, 4, 5 …). As a result, mankind is destined, apart from brief periods, to live at the margin of subsistence: only disease, war, and famine will limit population growth.
The problem with Malthusianism is that it’s completely wrong, both as a matter of theory and of historical record. For one, food production and population growth are clearly not independent variables, since human labor is a key input in food production, a point made by Joseph A. Schumpeter. More fundamentally, as Ludwig von Mises explained, the Malthusian law of population is only a biological law—it is true for all animal species, but men are not simply animals. With the use of reason, they can refrain from mindless procreative activity, and they will do so if they themselves must support the result of said activity. Malthus himself clearly saw this and amended his theory in the second and later editions of his famous Essay on the Principle of Population (Frédéric Bastiat, as is his wont, has a much better and more optimistic explanation of the population principle).
Neither do the technophiliacs understand the economics of agriculture and food production. Ester Boserup, who is a key inspiration for the following brief explanation, developed the correct understanding of this issue in the 1960s, after studying Indian farming. The ignorance of Borlaug and company and their cheerleaders today and in the past is thus hardly excusable: the exact same historical conditions that they saw as “Malthusian,” after all, inspired Boserup to lay out the correct understanding of the matter.
As population grows, the labor supply expands, and more labor is applied to agricultural plots. The land’s yield therefore increases, although the returns on additional labor input diminish—as per the law of returns. Once the return on additional labor input is insufficient to justify it, new land is instead brought into cultivation, and once the land has been cleared, the physical productivity of labor increases. Since clearing new land requires some additional effort, farmers always have to weigh the potential returns from new lands versus the returns from more intensive cultivation of already cleared lands.
We can see this clearly in monetary terms: as more labor is applied to working the land, wages fall and land rents rise. As land rents and land values rise, the potential value of unsettled lands increases, and as wages fall, the expenditure needed to clear the land falls. Once the expected return on new lands outweighs the estimated cost of bringing it into cultivation, labor will be applied to clearing new lands. Then land rents will fall and wages rise until bringing more land into agricultural use is no longer deemed profitable.
Thus, population and food production expand in unison, sometimes due to more intensive cultivation, sometimes due to an increase in the area cultivated. The same analysis holds under more capitalistic conditions (i.e., when farmers have more tools and other capital inputs available): the return on applying more capital goods to present land is compared to potential returns from applying capital goods to expanding the cultivated land area. Even the most primitive form of agriculture is, of course, capitalistic, as agriculture is a roundabout production process, in which productive effort is widely separated in time from valuable output.
Indian agriculture in the 1960s functioned well, except when it was impeded by government meddling and institutional barriers. Such meddling can be extremely destructive, as Mao Zedong had shown in China just a few years previously during the Great Leap Forward. However, there was nothing Malthusian about that episode nor, as we shall see, about the alleged famine in India in the 1960s.
The 1960s Indian Famine: Bad History
The 1960s famine in India launched the Green Revolution and the international fame of its main protagonist, Norman Borlaug. From the outset, however, the narrative was skewed by political considerations.
American agriculture was heavily subsidized in the sixties, resulting in huge surplus production. This surplus could not be sold at the market price, at least not without bankrupting American farmers. Under typical interventionist logic, the American government intervened to subsidize the export of American farm products to maintain an artificially high price in the domestic market.
India was thereby inundated by cheap American wheat in the early sixties, but as G.D. Stone writes, this did not alleviate India’s food shortages—it caused them. In a simple case of farmers adjusting to their comparative advantage, Indians shifted their production to cash crops (such as sugarcane and jute) for export and thereby financed their imports of cheap American grain.
The drought of 1965 and the following years was real enough, but its impact was not simply a failure of food crops. The jute and sugarcane crops suffered, leading to real hardship for agricultural laborers. But this hardship never amounted to widespread famine. This did not matter for the narrative, however: in 1965, the American president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was trying to get Congress to approve a new farm bill with increased subsidies for agricultural exports and foreign aid in the shape of the Food for Peace plan. Reports of Indian drought were a godsend: faced with a recalcitrant Congress, Johnson played up the specter of drought and mass starvation. His legislation duly passed, and even more American grain was shipped to India, which doubtlessly did help alleviate some hardship in the short term.
Playing up the dire situation in India naturally also fed the agenda of Borlaug and company. The special wheat varieties bred in Mexico were widely introduced across northern India, and as the drought conveniently ended, the first harvest yielded a massive crop. Borlaug took credit, quite undisturbed by the coincidence that nearly all crop yields were at record levels in India and in neighboring China. The alleged success of American technocracy also played into the wider political narrative of American progressive leadership of the “free world”: in 1968, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), William Gaud, addressed the Society for International Development in Washington, DC, claiming that foreign aid and wise agricultural policies had fostered “a new revolution. Not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.”
The Green Revolution, led by government and NGO technocrats and financed mainly by Western development agencies, was off to the races. The breeding of hybrid rice and wheat varieties by the International Rice Research Institute and CIMMYT, respectively, was the flagship of modernity in farming. But even on its own terms, this is misleading at best. What happened was that agriculture in the developed world as well as in the West shifted to a very intensive cultivation that required a lot of capital inputs. Borlaug’s wheat varieties are a case in point, as Stone points out: only when large amounts of fertilizer were applied did these varieties outyield native Indian tall wheats. Technologies, it turns out, are not exogenous forces that are simply imposed and reshape the environment. The local people had developed crops and techniques suited to their situation, and it’s unlikely that Borlaug’s wheat would have been widely used had the Indian government (and foreign aid agencies) not at the same time massively subsidized the use of fertilizer and the construction of new irrigation systems.
The Reality of the Green Revolution
A last line of defense for the proponents of the Green Revolution’s benefits is that it has resulted in efficient food production, liberated labor for nonagricultural work, and that we can now go on to use modern genetic technologies to increase the quality of food and avoid malnutrition. Thus, for example, otherwise sensible people like Bjørn Lomborg have long championed the introduction of “golden rice”—a rice variety genetically engineered to be high in vitamin A—as a solution to malnutrition in rice-growing countries.
But the technocrats and their cheerleaders forget to mention or ignore the fact that the Green Revolution has itself been a cause of malnutrition. As wheat yields increased in India according to Stone, for instance, the relative price of wheat declined, and wheat thereby outcompeted alternative food sources rich in protein and micronutrients. Malnutrition rates in India thereby rose as a direct result of the Green Revolution. A similar development occurred in developed countries, for different but analogous reasons.
When it comes to technology freeing up labor, what has really happened is that overinvestment of capital in agriculture has reduced the demand for agricultural labor, but this has not increased the demand for labor elsewhere. On the contrary, since less capital is available for investment in nonagricultural sectors, the demand for labor and wages elsewhere has not risen. Thus, the Green Revolution has been an important contributing factor in the growth of third-world slums where people subsist on low-paying jobs and government handouts.
All in all, as we should expect when dealing with technocrats driven by progressive hubris to intervene in the economy’s natural development, the Green Revolution was not a blessing, the victory of wise scientists over the propensity of stupid peasants to breed uncontrollably. Rather, it has been an ecological, nutritional, and social disaster.
About the Author
Kristoffer Mousten Hansen is a research assistant at the Institute for Economic Policy at Leipzig University. He received his PhD from the University of Angers and is a former Mises Institute research fellow.
Article cross-posted from Mises.
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