Today’s Anti-Capitalists Want to Regulate What You Can Eat, How Often You Drive, and the Size of Your Home

It may sound cruel to say so, but such thinking closely mirrors that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Planned economics is enjoying yet another revival. Climate protection advocates and anti-capitalists are demanding that capitalism be abolished and replaced with a planned economy.

Otherwise, they claim, humanity has no chance of survival.

In Germany, a book called Das Ende des Kapitalismus (Englisch: The End of Capitalism) is a bestseller and its author, Ulrike Herrmann, has become a regular guest on all the talk shows. She openly promotes a planned economy, although this has already failed once in Germany—just like everywhere else it has been tried.

Unlike under classical socialism, in a planned economy, companies are not nationalized, they are allowed to remain in private hands. But it is the state that specifies precisely what and how much is produced.

There would be no more flights and no more private motor vehicles. The state would determine almost every facet of daily life—for example, there would no longer be any single-family houses and no one would be allowed to own a second home. New construction would be banned because it is harmful to the environment. Instead, existing land would be distributed “fairly,” with the state deciding how much space is appropriate for each individual. And the consumption of meat would only be allowed as an exception because meat production is harmful to the climate.

In general, people should not eat so much: 2,500 calories a day are enough, says Herrmann, who proposes a daily intake of 500 grams of fruit and vegetables, 232 grams of whole meal cereals or rice, 13 grams of eggs, and 7 grams of pork.

“At first glance, this menu may seem a bit meager, but Germans would be much healthier if they changed their eating habits,” reassures this critic of capitalism. And since people would be equal, they would also be happy: “Rationing sounds unpleasant. But perhaps life would even be more pleasant than it is today, because justice makes people happy.”

Such ideas are by no means new. The popular Canadian critic of capitalism and globalization, Naomi Klein, admits that she initially had no particular interest in climate change. Then, in 2014, she wrote a hefty 500-page tome called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.

Why did she suddenly become so interested?

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