Martin Wolf has (once again) declared in the Financial Times that the fate of democracy rests on economic growth. As he said, in advance of the Budget:

[Reeves'] first priority must be to get whatever growth she can. 

Growth made democracy possible, he claims, and only growth can now save it, in his opinion. But this claim is built on two ideas that no longer stand up to scrutiny.

The first is that economic growth of the sort that defined the second half of the 20th century can be revived.

The second is that the government must wait for the private sector to deliver this growth before it can act.

Both ideas are fundamentally wrong.

First, growth is not coming back in the form he imagines, whether he thinks it necessary or not. Wolf might lament the collapse of postwar productivity miracles and clearly longs for their return, believing a combination of AI, other disruptive technologies, and greatly relaxed labour laws — allowing companies to dispense with their employees at will to the detriment of employees everywhere — might deliver them again. Doing so, he describes this sacrificing of people to capital as an act of creative destruction, an idea ascribed by people like Wolf to Schumpeter, but which he seems to think virtuous, when I seriously doubt that Schumpeter held such a view, as I discussed here recently.

The fundamental fact that Wolf ignores is that we live on a finite planet. The gains of the past, about which he enthuses, were built on cheap energy, abundant abuse of materials without taking into consideration the consequences of doing so, and a willingness to ignore the external costs imposed on society as a result of that indifference. That era is over. We face climate breakdown now. We are already on a dire path to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming because we pretended that infinite growth was possible, and Wolf still wants more of the same. This is economic, social and climate madness.  He might wish for increased productivity from consuming (and abusing) ever more of the world 's natural resources, whilst showing complete contempt for the rights of working people, but the stalling productivity numbers he quotes in his article do not show a failure of effort or the consequence of laws protecting labour rights; they show the natural consequence of economies hitting planetary and social limits.

Second, and more dangerously, Wolf assumes that when growth slows, the state must shrink too. He repeats the household-budget myth: that tax revenues fund spending, and if “the economy” has faltered, then the government cannot afford the services people need. This is simply false. A government like the UK's, which issues its own currency, never runs out of money. It can always pay for the labour and resources that are available within its borders. The idea that political choice is constrained by what the private sector chooses to do is the logic of neoliberal defeatism. Wolf is clearly still a believer in that.

Moreover, Wolf suggests the economy is “zero-sum” now, effectively arguing that redistribution is killing the goal of growth. Yet the real zero-sum game is the hoarding of wealth by a rentier class while essential services are starved of investment. Redistribution is a political choice, not a productivity function.

Worse still is his argument that businesses must be freer to fire workers to embrace innovation. But workers are not the block to progress. Under-investment, financial speculation, and corporate short-termism are.

And he demands that taxes must rise because the state is supposedly out of money, without ever asking why we should continue subsidising unearned income, wealth extraction and corporate tax abuse. If taxes rise, they should rise to curb wasteful inequality and to free up real resources for public use, not to “pay back” some fictional debt to the private sector.

The reality is that democracy does not depend on everyone buying another car, or building another airport, or burning more carbon, so that consumption numbers look pretty in a spreadsheet. Democracy depends on everyone being safe, housed, cared for, educated and able to participate in society. None of those requires extractive growth. They require political will.

The real challenge we face is not how to restart a growth engine that has already driven us to the edge of environmental collapse. It is how to redesign the economy so that the resources we already have are used to meet human and ecological needs. That is the issue at the heart of a politics of care. Wolf clearly does not care: his is the politics of an old man apparently quite indifferent to the impact of his wishes on generations still at work (whom he treats with contempt), and those to come after them (whom he seemingly consigns to oblivion).

What we must do is decide that fiscal policy must serve social purposes rather than the profit expectations of the wealthy. If we do that, then we can:

• Fund the NHS and social care adequately.
• Build the homes people need.
• Invest in a green transition that preserves life.
• Guarantee full employment at living wages.
• Ensure that technology improves lives rather than replacing livelihoods.

Wolf asks the wrong question. The issue is not whether growth can save democracy. The issue is whether democracy can save us from the economic ideology that demands endless growth without ever meeting basic needs, which must be the absolute priority of every economy, especially if democracy is to be saved from the far right.

We must stop letting neoliberal economists tell us the state is powerless. The state is the economy's creator of money, guarantor of stability and steward of shared resources. It should act like it.

It is time to abandon the growth-fetish that has failed us. It is time to recognise that democracy, prosperity and care can thrive without worshipping at the altar of GDP.

It is time that people like Martin Wolf stopped being treated as if they had something valuable to say. They haven't. Their ideas are well past their sell-by dates. It's time to bin them for the sake of the well-being of both people and our planet.

And if this article sounds angry, it is because I am. The world can no longer afford the sort of folly Wolf promotes. It is time for his day on the FT to be done.