Bruno Walther's "Environmental Logic"

That disgusting, self-retarded eco-soviet Bruno Walther has another letter in today's Taipei Times:

"These days, pursuing economic growth for growth’s sake is becoming counterproductive for two reasons: First, logic dictates that growth simply cannot go on forever on a limited planet. Second, given the planet’s natural limits, further economic growth done the conventional way — by overusing declining resources and producing noxious wastes — increasingly undermines our ability to live happy, fulfilling lives."

Quick fisk: first, note his use of the verb "pursuing" without a subject; this is a common rhetorical tactic allowing the anti-individualist premise to be slipped into mind unnoticed by those ill-prepared for intellectual self-defense - it buys Walther two lines of argument for the space needed to mention only one; second, notice the variation on this tactic in the predicate of his first "reason", wherein he slips the unprepared reader the fixed wealth fallacy that economic growth is zero-sum behind a claim about finite natural resources; third, consider the enormous weight of that dual assumption that not only does waste undermine a person's ability to be happy but that that is true in the unspecified, but presumably universal, plural sense; and finally, reflect on that plural sense - is it not that very anti-individualist premise disguised earlier by his use of the passive voice but now emerging explicitly under that inconspicuous little word "our"?

Bruno Walther is so bad as to be beneath my contempt - his writing is as waywardly retarded as it is instinctively predatory - but he is not yet beneath the contempt of a great many English-speaking Taiwanese students who may read or listen to him.