"Suppose we were to grant the questionable claim that the private sector is more “efficient” at allocating resources, primarily by keeping costs down, than the government. So what? How does this show that higher efficiency is something worth achieving more than other desirable aspects of economic activity, such as job security, poverty alleviation, and macroeconomic stability? It does not, at all."

"In any case, the only realistic way to impose these energetic constraints is to have strong public and collective control over the dominant sectors of the economy. It is important to qualify this claim and remove some possible misconceptions. A valerist system would still permit the existence of private exchange markets. You can still go to the local market and eat at your favorite restaurant; the government will not take those things away from you. But to prevent large corporations from accumulating too much wealth and power, and to prevent them from becoming energy guzzlers that threaten the planet’s ecological stability, the state should be involved in their ownership and administration, which in many cases will involve some type of nationalization. In so doing, the valerist state would also put the brakes on the ruthless tendencies of modern capitalism to plunder natural resources and commodify them for large profits in global markets.

In summary, the fundamental features of valerism as an economic system are the following: an average energy consumption rate between 30,000 and 70,000 kilocalories, the organization of economic life around the principle of stability instead of growth, collective and democratic control over the extraction and distribution of natural resources, and a tightly regulated exchange market in which private individuals can try to obtain profits by buying and selling certain goods and services through mutual consent. This program would allow us to move toward a more egalitarian society. Just as importantly, it would also facilitate the survival and stability of industrial civilization."

https://monthlyreview.org/2021/02/01/the-ecological-state/

"Sentiment analysis reveals, for instance, that financial markets, supposedly built around risk modeling, are driven as much by the mood of investors as by empirical reality. This turn to sentiment erodes the interpretive and communicative roles that liberal societies have traditionally granted to scientists, journalists, and professional experts of various kinds. The world of publicly available facts that these figures marshaled and mediated for ordinary citizens becomes increasingly divorced from the hidden world accessed by the miners of private data, with the result that new sets of insiders and outsiders are created and the workings of power become increasingly opaque. The ground is laid for conspiracy theories to replace consensus about reality. According to Davies, we have entered a new regime of truth, one with scant time for the shibboleths and separations — “between public and private, between state and market, politics and media, and between the three branches of government (executive, legislative, judiciary)” — that defined the liberal order."

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-liberal-trust-crisis

the nazis were so socialist that they single-handedly ended the cooperative movement in Germany. So socialist!

"From being a luxury item and a sign of privilege, the car has thus become a vital necessity. You have to have one so as to escape from the urban hell of the cars. Capitalist industry has thus won the game: the superfluous has become necessary. There’s no longer any need to persuade people that they want a car; its necessity is a fact of life. It is true that one may have one’s doubts when watching the motorized escape along the exodus roads. Between 8 and 9:30 a.m., between 5:30 and 7 p.m., and on weekends for five and six hours the escape routes stretch out into bumper-to-bumper processions going (at best) the speed of a bicyclist and in a dense cloud of gasoline fumes. What remains of the car’s advantages? What is left when, inevitably, the top speed on the roads is limited to exactly the speed of the slowest car?"

"If the car is to prevail, there’s still one solution: get rid of the cities. That is, string them out for hundreds of miles along enormous roads, making them into highway suburbs. That’s what’s been done in the United States. Ivan Illich sums up the effect in these startling figures: “The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”"

"You aren’t free to have a car or not because the suburban world is designed to be a function of the car and, more and more, so is the city world. That is why the ideal revolutionary solution, which is to do away with the car in favour of the bicycle, the streetcar, the bus, and the driverless taxi, is not even applicable any longer in the big commuter cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Trappes, or even Brussels, which are built by and for the automobile. These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime."

http://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/