Terence P. Jeffrey
Human Events
8/3/2010
When the Commerce Department reported Friday that the economy had grown at a humble 2.4 percent in the second quarter, even the liberal Washington Post suggested President Barack Obama’s policies were not leading to the sort of economic growth necessary to reduce unemployment, which has risen from 7.7 percent to 9.5 percent since Obama took office.
“The recovery is fading, and a troubling pattern is setting in: economic growth that is too slow to put Americans back to work,” said the first paragraph in the Post’s report on the new GDP numbers.
But in the worldview presented in an early environmentalist manifesto co-authored by Stanford University’s Paul and Anne Ehrlich and John P. Holdren—who is now director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy–sluggish growth would not be seen as the “troubling pattern” the Post perceives it to be. In fact, it might be viewed as a positive.
…Holdren (who advises Obama on climate change and health care) expressed in his 1973 book “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions.” That vision held that the world could be a better place if Americans worked, produced and earned less.
“In the longer term, it may be that the solution to the employment problem will require a reduction in the amount of work done by each worker in order to create more jobs,” wrote Holdren and his co-authors…
Read the complete article at Human Events.
