The moral limits to growth

David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, has a column in today’s paper on the “next culture war” which neatly sums up the emerging orthodoxy on moral limits to growth.

“If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.”

It goes on:

“A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.”