George, that Rifkin quote is right in line with a previous conversation we had about the “sprawl” problem, in which the leftists among us wish to legislate land scarcity among us since Providence has blessed us with room to grow.
I wonder if you saw the recent New York Times Magazine article in which a UC-Berkeley professor argued that in America, food is too cheap. The article is chock-full, if you don’t mind the pun, of such phrases as:
? “a veritable mountain of cheap grain”
? “this surfeit of calories”
? “a flood tide of cheap American grain”
? “the Republic of Fat.”
I think these are more examples of how right Dar?o Fern?ndez-Morera was when he wrote, in American Academy and the Survival of Marxist Ideals, that once it became patently evident that Marxist theories failed abysmally in their “nineteenth-century pie-in-the-sky promises of socialist abundance” but rather “produced misery wherever they have been thoroughly implemented,” the socialists changed tack defensively to claim “that an alleged drawback is really an advantage” ? which Fern?ndez-Morera called the “Misery As An Ideal” approach.
In other words, no longer do socialists promise to save us by bringing us a greater prosperity ? they seek to save us from prosperity.
