Marx has a few words for the pro-shrinkage community

You know what’s funny about degrowth? Don’t worry. I’m going to tell you.

First things first. Not to be pedantic (but always to be pedantic), “degrowth” is not a thing. Name one item on this planet which can be said to “degrow.” I’ll wait.

Things grow and things shrink.

“When you name something, you are never perfectly describing what it is, but are instead influencing how it is perceived,” wrote

Jonathan Ireland

.

Degrowthers call themselves that because while “pro-shrinkage” is more accurate, it sounds about as stupid as is the underlying idea to which it refers. Pro-poverty and population control is even more accurate, and even less appealing.

Jeremiah Johnson

was very funny when he wrote that degrowthers “saw the conservative critique of leftism - ‘These leftists just want you to be poorer and hate nice things!’ - and said actually, that’s exactly right, yes, we definitely want to make you poorer and we do hate nice things.”

Lest you reasonably assume I’m making up a guy to get mad at, no, these people exist. As the GOAT Jerusalem Demsas pointed out, you can find them at public hearings, arguing against new housing “explicitly to combat population growth.”

I have to wonder how much lived experience these chuckleheads bring to these questions. As a former poor kid, I give involuntary poverty zero out of five stars.