The Green New Deal

If there was any pretense that the environmental movement was only a disguise for communism, then the “Green New Deal” has exposed their true intentions.  Although the Green New Deal is a program proposed by the Green Party in previous election cycles, we have now reached a point where it will be considered as new legislation in the US House of Representatives in the next session.

 

The Green New Deal is being advanced as the last best hope to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.  This is a classic example of the statement by then Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: "You never let a serious crisis go to waste.  And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

If there is any doubt that the Green New Deal is not about climate change a brief review of its proposals are in order.  The full text of the proposed legislation can be found at this link:

The Green New Deal Proposal

These are some of the highlights:

(B) COMPOSITION. —The select committee shall be composed of 15 members appointed by the Speaker, of whom 6 may be appointed on the recommendation of the Minority Leader. The Speaker shall designate one member of the select committee as its chair. A vacancy in the membership of the select committee shall be filled in the same manner as the original appointment.

Note that the speaker in the next congress will likely be Nancy Pelosi and she would appoint 9 of 15 the members.

(i) The select committee shall have authority to develop a detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization plan (hereinafter in this section referred to as the “Plan for a Green New Deal” or the “Plan”) for the transition of the United States economy to become greenhouse gas emissions neutral and to significantly draw down greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and oceans and to promote economic and environmental justice and equality.

The last sentence tells all: “promote economic and environmental justice and equality”.  Economic equality, the concept used for over a century to pave the road to serfdom.

(B) INVESTIGATIVE JURISDICTION. —In furtherance of the mandate set forth in paragraph (2)(A), the select committee shall have the authority to investigate, study, make findings, convene experts and leaders from industry, academia, local communities, labor, finance, technology and any other industry or group that the select committee deems to be a relevant resource. The select committee may, at its discretion and as its members may deem appropriate, hold public hearings in connection with any aspect of its investigative functions.

In this section the select committee gives itself the authority to investigate any individual, business, organization, or government agency.  This is the same process used during the French revolution known as the Revolutionary Tribunal.  The Revolutionary Tribunal instituted the “Reign of Terror” using execution by guillotine to enforce its rulings.

(6) SCOPE OF THE PLAN FOR A GREEN NEW DEAL AND THE DRAFT LEGISLATION. —

 (A) The Plan for a Green New Deal (and the draft legislation) shall be developed with the objective of reaching the following outcomes within the target window of 10 years from the start of execution of the Plan:

(iii) upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety;

(iv) eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries, including by investing in local-scale agriculture in communities across the country;

(v) eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure, and upgrading water infrastructure to ensure universal access to clean water;

In subsection (A) (iii) the select committee grants itself the power to “upgrading every residential and industrial building”.  This is incredible.  Imagine thinking that the Federal Government will somehow remodel every structure in the USA.  Even worse, combine the new power to remodel your home with the previous power of investigation.  This would give the special committee (the SC) the right to investigate and prosecute you for not using a high efficiency washing machine.  Also, once inside your home would the SC investigate to discover unauthorized weapons?  What about unauthorized literature?

In subsections (A) (iv) and (v) the SC gives itself the authority to “eliminate” greenhouse gas emissions from “the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries”.  Note that eliminate means zero use of fossil fuels.  So, natural gas, diesel, gasoline, or coal will not be used in manufacturing, agricultural and other industries.  This same principle of elimination is applied to transportation.  How many solar/electric powered airliners will be available for this phase of the program?

Finally, in subsection (A) (v) there will be an assurance of access to clean water.  Clean water will become scarcer without access to inexpensive energy and chemicals.

(B) The Plan for a Green New Deal (and the draft legislation) shall recognize that a national, industrial, economic mobilization of this scope and scale is a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone participating in the transformation. In furtherance of the foregoing, the Plan (and the draft legislation) shall:

(i) provide all members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one;

Subsection (B) (i) codifies a national minimum wage that would be called a living wage.  This language currently refers to a wage of $15.00 per hour.

(iii) require strong enforcement of labor, workplace safety, and wage standards that recognize the rights of workers to organize and unionize free of coercion,

Subsection (B) (iii) recognizes “the rights of workers to organize and unionize free of coercion”.  This is hilarious, as the vast majority of the coercion against workers now is applied by the unions.

(v) protect and enforce sovereign rights and land rights of tribal nations;

Subsection (B) (v) will cause some difficulties for the SC if the tribal nations decide that they want to continue drilling for oil and gas and mining for coal.

(vi) mitigate deeply entrenched racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth (including, without limitation, ensuring that federal and other investment will be equitably distributed to historically impoverished, low income, deindustrialized or other marginalized communities in such a way that builds wealth and ownership at the community level);

Subsection (B) (vi) intends to mitigate regional inequalities in income.  Does the SC intend to bring the income levels of the lower regions up to the level of Washington DC?  Or would it be more equitable for the Washington DC region income level decline to the level of the lower income regions.?

(vii) include additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care programs and any others as the select committee may deem appropriate to promote economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism;

Subsection (B) (vii) will bestow upon us the blessings of basic income programs and universal health care.  But those are not the only programs, we would also receive “any others as the select committee may deem appropriate to promote economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism”.  This of course is the language used to describe public ownership of the means of production.

In Section C we find this: “The Plan (and the draft legislation) shall, accordingly, ensure that the majority of financing of the Plan shall be accomplished by the federal government, using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks,”.  This means that not only will the SC seize the means of production they will also have their own banking system.

Is this a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or is it a plan for the Federal Government to completely and finally take over all aspects of the economy?

A very useful source of information on this subject can be found at this link:

Contra Krugman Ep. 168

Can There be an "After Socialism"?

The following essay by  Alan Charles Kors was published by The Atlas Society on September 27, 2003:

https://atlassociety.org/objectivism/atlas-university/deeper-dive-blog/3962-can-there-be-an-after-socialism

This is a powerfully worded indictment of politicians and intellectuals for their lack of atonement for supporting socialism.  One of the highlights from the essay is this paragraph:

"No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag Archipelago: "No, no one would have to answer. No one would be looked into." Until that happens, there is no "after socialism.""

For detailed statistics of the human carnage under socialism see this website:

http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/?fref=gc

The Question

Eugene D. Genovese was a historian and university professor.  In the summer of 1994 his article titled "The Question" was published in Dissent Magazine.  The full article can be read at the following link:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1353953160genovesethequestion.pdf

Highlights from this article:

The Question: "What did you know, and when did you know it?" For at the age of fifteen I became a Communist, and, although expelled from the party in 1950 at age twenty, I remained a supporter of the international movement and of the Soviet Union until there was nothing left to support. Now, as everyone knows, in a noble effort to liberate the human race from violence and oppression we broke all records for mass slaughter, piling up tens of millions of corpses in less than three-quarters of a century.

About twenty years ago, picking up on some passages in Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge, I wondered if Comrade Stalin had not killed more communists than were killed by all the bourgeois, imperialist, Fascist, and Nazi regimes put together.

We easily forget the economic rationale that Marx taught us, namely, that socialism would have to provide unprecedented abundance if it were to sustain social liberation of any kind. With a few notable exceptions, leftists no longer find it fashionable to discuss economics at all beyond the now routine rejection of a "command economy" and some disingenuous mumbling about the necessity for markets. But where is there a serious attempt to determine the extent to which any socialism could function without a command economy or to show how a socialist economy could integrate markets?

Am I crazy to think that if we do not understand why and how we did what we did, we shall certainly end by doing it again—and again? Crazy I may be, but I try not to be a fool., And only a fool would trust those who are now playing possum with even a modicum of political power.

The horrors did not arise from perversions of radical ideology but from the ideology itself. We were led into complicity with mass murder and the desecration of our professed ideals not by Stalinist or other corruptions of high ideals, much less by unfortunate twists in some presumably objec­tive course of historical development, but by a deep flaw in our very understanding of human nature—its frailty and its possibilities—and by our inability to replace the moral and ethical baseline long provided by the religion we have dismissed with indifference, not to say con­tempt.

Our whole project of "human liberation" has rested on a series of gigantic illusions. The catastrophic consequences of our failure during this century—not merely the body count but the monotonous recurrence of despotism and wan­ton cruelty—cannot be dismissed as aberra­tions. Slimmed down to a technologically appropriate scale, they have followed in the wake of victories by radical egalitarian move­ments throughout history. We have yet to answer our right-wing critics' claims, which are regrettably well documented, that through­out history, from ancient times to the peasant wars of the sixteenth century to the Reign of Terror and beyond, social movements that have espoused radical egalitarianism and participa­tory democracy have begun with mass murder and ended in despotism.

The allegedly high ideals we placed at the center of our ideology and politics are precisely what need to be reexamined, but they can no longer even be made a subject for discussion in the mass media and our universities, to say nothing of the left itself. They are givens: an unattainable equality of condition; a radical democracy that has always ended in the tyranny it is supposed to overcome; a celebration of human goodness or malleability, accompanied by the daily announcement of newly discovered "inalienable rights" to personal self-expres­sion; destruction of all hierarchy and elites, as if ideological repudiation has ever prevented or ever could prevent the formation and reforma­tion of hierarchies and elites; condemnation of "illegitimate" authority in the absence of any notion of what might constitute legitimate authority; and, at the root of all, a thorough secularization of society, bolstered by the monstrous lie that the constitutional separation of church and state was meant to separate religion from society. And we have yet to reassess the anti-Americanism—the self-hatred implicit in the attitude we have generally affected toward our country —that has led us into countless stupidities and worse.
 

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice

A recent article from The Objective Standard, Vol. 7, No. 1 by Craig Biddle is a very well written and detailed examination of the basic political issue of our time.  I have copied the introduction and conclusion to this article below but there is so much depth to this article that I can not provide an adequate summary.  Please take the time and effort required to read the entire article at the following link:

http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2012-spring/individualism-collectivism/

Introduction

The fundamental political conflict in America today is, as it has been for a century, individualism vs. collectivism. Does the individual’s life belong to him—or does it belong to the group, the community, society, or the state? With government expanding ever more rapidly—seizing and spending more and more of our money on “entitlement” programs and corporate bailouts, and intruding on our businesses and lives in increasingly onerous ways—the need for clarity on this issue has never been greater.

Individualism is the idea that the individual’s life belongs to him and that he has an inalienable right to live it as he sees fit, to act on his own judgment, to keep and use the product of his effort, and to pursue the values of his choosing. It’s the idea that the individual is sovereign, an end in himself, and the fundamental unit of moral concern. This is the ideal that the American Founders set forth and sought to establish when they drafted the Declaration and the Constitution and created a country in which the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness were to be recognized and protected.

Collectivism is the idea that the individual’s life belongs not to him but to the group or society of which he is merely a part, that he has no rights, and that he must sacrifice his values and goals for the group’s “greater good.” According to collectivism, the group or society is the basic unit of moral concern, and the individual is of value only insofar as he serves the group. As one advocate of this idea puts it: “Man has no rights except those which society permits him to enjoy. From the day of his birth until the day of his death society allows him to enjoy certain so-called rights and deprives him of others; not . . . because society desires especially to favor or oppress the individual, but because its own preservation, welfare, and happiness are the prime considerations.”1

Individualism or collectivism—which of these ideas is correct? Which has the facts on its side?

Conclusion

Such is the state of politics in America today, and this is the choice we face: Americans can either continue to ignore the fact that collectivism is utterly corrupt from the ground up, and thus continue down the road to statism and tyranny—or we can look at reality, use our minds, acknowledge the absurdities of collectivism and the atrocities that follow from it, and shout the truth from the rooftops and across the Internet.

What would happen if we did the latter? As Ayn Rand said, “You would be surprised how quickly the ideologists of collectivism retreat when they encounter a confident, intellectual adversary. Their case rests on appealing to human confusion, ignorance, dishonesty, cowardice, despair. Take the side they dare not approach; appeal to human intelligence.”

On Appeasing Envy

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has re-published an article written by Henry Hazlitt in 1972.  The entire article is available at this link:

http://mises.org/daily/1952/On-Appeasing-Envy

In my opinion these are the highlights:

Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levelers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves.”

And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr. Justice Holmes writing: “I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.”

In the envious the thirst for social advancement is insatiable. As soon as they have risen one rung in the social or economic ladder, their eyes are fixed upon the next. They envy those who are higher up, no matter by how little. In fact, they are more likely to envy their immediate friends or neighbors, who are just a little bit better off, than celebrities or millionaires who are incomparably better off. The position of the latter seems unattainable, but of the neighbor who has just a minimal advantage they are tempted to think: “I might almost be in his place.”

Moreover, the envious are more likely to be mollified by seeing others deprived of some advantage than by gaining it for themselves. It is not what they lack that chiefly troubles them, but what others have. The envious are not satisfied with equality; they secretly yearn for superiority and revenge. In the French Revolution of 1848, a woman coal-heaver is said to have remarked to a richly dressed lady: “Yes, madam, everything’s going to be equal now; I shall go in silks and you’ll carry coal.”

Envy is implacable. Concessions merely whet its appetite for more concessions. As Schoeck writes: “Man's envy is at its most intense where all are almost equal; his calls for redistribution are loudest when there is virtually nothing to redistribute.”

Sometimes the motive of appeasing other people's envy is openly avowed. Socialists will often talk as if some form of superbly equalized destitution were preferable to “maldistributed” plenty. A national income that is rapidly growing in absolute terms for practically everyone will be deplored because it is making the rich richer. An implied and sometimes avowed principle of the British Labour Party leaders after World War II was that “Nobody should have what everybody can't have.”

But the main objective test of a social proposal is not merely whether it emphasizes equality more than abundance, but whether it goes further and attempts to promote equality at the expense of abundance. Is the proposed measure intended primarily to help the poor, or to penalize the rich? And would it in fact punish the rich at the cost of also hurting everyone else?

This is the actual effect of steeply progressive income taxes and confiscatory inheritance taxes. These are not only counterproductive fiscally (bringing in less revenue from the higher brackets than lower rates would have brought), but they discourage or confiscate the capital accumulation and investment that would have increased national productivity and real wages. Most of the confiscated funds are then dissipated by the government in current consumption expenditures. The long-run effect of such tax rates, of course, is to leave the working poor worse off than they would otherwise have been.

There are economists who will admit all this, but will answer that it is nonetheless politically necessary to impose such near-confiscatory taxes, or to enact similar redistributive measures, in order to placate the dissatisfied and the envious — in order, in fact, to prevent actual revolution.

This argument is the reverse of the truth. The effect of trying to appease envy is to provoke more of it.

Workers of the world, Unite!

On Saturday 10/2/10 organized labor and left wing political organizations held a rally on the mall in Washington DC.  The title for this rally is “One Nation Working Together”.  The following video highlights some of the “socially progressive” organizations, signs, and literature that were prevalent at this rally:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkw7n9Qagu8&feature=player_embedded