Sublime

Nevertheless, for all their repeated disconfirmation, and however much their logic leads inevitably and quite regularly to rather nasty, xenophobic lifeboat politics, the “Malthus in, Malthus out” conclusions of such reports, as Freeman describes them, have become a shibboleth of the green left.

Au prétexte que cet économiste avait commencé à écrire, à Toulouse, en 1765, ses fameuses Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, elle avait fait de ce père du libéralisme une sorte de gourou derrière lequel elle s’abritait pour justifier tous les excès du capitalisme moderne. Ainsi vantait-elle les positions optimistes

Inequality should not be replaced by an equality of poverty, but an equality of abundance. As the British suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst clarified succinctly on the front page of the Workers’ Dreadnought newspaper in 1923, arguing against the levelling-down egalitarianism popular then as now amongst some hair-shirted tendencies of left-wing thought: