westexas,

While being fully aware that your critique of BAU is essentially Malthusian, the graphic you linked reminded me of the mental image conjured up by this quote. It describes the philosophy of one of Malthus' fellow heretical pessimists, Thorstein Veblen:

The machine was not concerned with values and profits; it ground out goods. Hence the businessman would have no function to perform--unless he turned engineer. But as a member of the leisure class he was not interested in engineering; he wanted to accumulate. And this was something the machine was not set up to do at all. So the businessman achieved his end, not by working within the framework of the social machine, but by conspiring against it! His function was not to help make goods, but to cause breakdown in the regular flow of output so that values would flucturate and he could capitaize on the confusion to reap a profit. And so, on top of the machinelike dependability of the actual production apparatus in the world, the businessman built a superstructure of credit, loans, and make believe capitaliztions. Below, society turned over in its mechanical routine; above the strucutre of finance swayed and shifted. And as the financial counterpart to the real world teetered, opportunities for profit constantly appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. But the price of this profit seeking was high; it was the constant disturbing, undoing, even conscious misdirecting of the efforts of society to provision itself.

--Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers