Negative growth via socialism is being forced to live with less.  Growth via free market capitalism is choosing to do more with less. 
 
It’s all about power.  The serpent told Eve that if she ate the apple, SHE would be God.  Things have not changed that much.  People still want to be god, and they attempt to become god by having power over others.  In a previous generation, the political term was Communism which used the Economic concepts of Socialism.  Today, they’re calling it The Great Reset.  It’s the title of my podcast #112.  Their long-term plan is to cause so much chaos that we will beg them to take over.  I asked Ginger, “Why would George Soros donate money to defund the police in Austin, Texas?  Answer: When chaos breaks out, we cede more power to the government to quell the violence.
Harking back to my days in Management, I used to tell groups, “They call it an ORGANIZATION because it is a growing thing.  Like your skin, which is shedding cells as we’re sitting here, the organization is an organ.  It’s either growing or dying.  There is no stable state.”
Yet, we as humans WANT a stable state.  Sorry, not on this side of heaven.  Your organization is either growing or dying.  Your business is growing or dying.  Your church is growing or dying.  Your marriage is growing or dying.  The economy is growing or dying.  
In the economics textbook, I use at Dallas Baptist University, the author Gregory Mankiw states it very clearly: Policies either cause efficiency when society gets the maximum benefits from its scarce resources.  This is called growing the size of the pie.  Or Policies seek equality, where there is a distribution of economic prosperity uniformly among the members of society.  These policies are concerned with how the pie is divided into individual slices.  Everything involving redistribution is no-growth because it steals productive capital and uses power to give it to someone else.  This violates the 8th commandment: Don’t steal.  
I boldly announce in class: Each policy can be put into only one category, meaning: The policy either grows the pie or divides the pie.  My students are watching one of the clearest examples of both, in back-to-back presidential administrations: Trumpenomics grew the pie, and Bidenomics is distributing it. 
 
The Degrowth Craze
Andy Kessler, writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, calls it “The Deadly De-Growth Craze: Stagnant societies eventually slide into oppression, chaos, anarchy and ruin”  
Mr. Kessler writes, “The modern world is constantly subjected to crackpot movements that eventually fail, but not before causing serious damage. Karl Marx was a crackpot.  The latest is Modern Monetary Theory and unlimited dollar creation for government spending, which caused today’s runaway inflation.”  I explain in greater detail the foolishness of Modern Monetary Theory, in podcast # 31 titled the Myth of Modern Monetary Theory.  But for today, I’ll summarize by emphasizing it IS a myth.  You can change economic policy, but you can’t change economic law.  Modern Monetary Theory attempts to change economic law and fails miserably. 
Mr. Kessler reports that the no-growth crowd demands that we put well-being ahead of profit.  Hold it.  Let’s take a peek behind the curtain of these great Oz pretenders.  They’re assuming that profit does NOT produce well-being.  Profit is well-being because it creates more jobs instead of government honeypots to pay people not to work. Growth is fuel. That computer you’re watching this podcast on: ...