Yet, history has shown that societies
operating on the principle of force are corrupt and failing. This is the case
in every situation where forced sacrifice (fascism/socialism/communism) was the
governing principle of society. With that said, it is important to understand
the real meaning and consequences of the philosophy that guides both left and
right in all parts of the world. That philosophy is pragmatism, the idea that
activism (force) accomplishes good.
Inevitably, they blindly advocate more government
power in response to the wreckage they have created. They voice the loudest
moral certitude that government control will improve the situation against the
capitalists while denying all along that it is their forceful policies that are
actually destroying society, not the capitalists.
Eventually,
they arrive at total force under the false premise that this would accomplish
the most good of all. They argue that giving power to technocrats will be more
efficient and produce more jobs and affluence – if only the people agreed to
work for the collective rather than mere profit. You end up with
totalitarianism and everything this implies, poverty, decline, political murders
and mass death.
The
proponents of the Green New Deal insist that men belong to society and that
government is tasked with the responsibility of directing men’s actions and
appropriating their property for the sake of the whole. This falsely implies
the efficacy of coercion.
If you doubt the truth of
this charge against the Green New Deal, consider the attitude taken by Ms.
Ocasio-Cortez when she assumed office as a representative of her district in
New York. Her local officials were in the process of making a “deal” with
Amazon to build new
facilities and create as much as 25,000 new jobs in return
for some tax concessions. Ignorant of the long-range benefits of this deal for her voters,
she voiced demands that moved Amazon out of the deal. Her attitude toward
Amazon was applauded by other progressives as a principled stand; but her “stance” could
only have been truly principled if she hated the profit motive and its true positive impact
on the lives of her constituents. Her communistic impulses could be the only
reason for
opposing Amazon’s
interests. This is not principle; it is nihilism. This is real damage
to real people.
The
unfortunate truth for progressives, the fact they vehemently deny, is that the
more force they exert, the more damage they do to society. You need only look
at the results of fascist and communistic societies throughout history to see
this. Forget that every new proponent of progressive policies criticizes the
cruelty of past coercive societies, while promising that, this time, they will
get it right. Forget that these promises merely start a new cycle of cruelty
and control. Forget that the new boss is the same as the old boss because it is
the principles of centralized government, the use of force in society that
keeps being repeated each time.
The
Green New Deal requires that men limit or give up their right to use reason. If
you squash reason, who in society will create the products that will make life
better? Certainly not the government. Certainly not the technocrats. And over
time, the more force they use in society, the more convinced honest people
become that reason will not be allowed to flourish; so therefore, there is no
reason to work hard. What could society expect of the more able people; that
they work hard for the sake of the collective? No, they will do what they have
always done in the face of oppression. They will pursue subsistence and nothing
more. Therefore, altruism and collective force are impractical.
Totalitarian
societies always crumble after their mass murders. They crumble because they
are killing or suppressing the best minds. Therefore, progressive and
democratic socialist societies are fraught with economic turmoil and recession,
corruption and theft. They limit and restrict the free use of the mind and they
lead the people on a path toward destruction. Force in society does not work.
The
idea of “social justice”, imposed by government, removes all restrictions on
government’s power. Once the lives of individuals are less important than the
“rights” of the collective, the stage is set for ever more stringent
exploitation of good citizens. Because force does not create a vibrant economy,
because collectivism always fails, the leaders must charge productive
individuals with “crimes against the people” to cover up their own failures. So
when you hear arguments such as “it takes a village”, “you didn’t build that”,
“the rich are not paying their fair share”, “we need more shared sacrifice”,
“capitalism isn’t working”, what you are hearing is the call for a society
based upon force. You are hearing the call to dictatorship and you can be sure,
by the inexorable logic of ideas, that the result will be lots and lots of dead
people…most of whom only wanted to live honest lives in freedom.
The
Green New Deal is the next step in the incremental movement to increase force
against disarmed citizens. At first, the progressives demanded minor examples
of force, such as innocuous rules, regulations, higher taxes and government
programs to allegedly solve one or more (invented) problem of capitalism. Their
goal, however, has not been to fix society but to establish the principle of
force which, once established, sets the precedent for ever wider expansions of
government. The Green New Deal is only the ultimate expression of a total
takeover of the lives of all people by government. It is the ultimate holocaust,
the builder, not of new green buildings but of concentration camps fraught with
social experiments by ruthless doctors of control. Do not doubt that the Green
New Deal will be the ultimate nightmare of death and destruction. That is why
progressives like Ms. Cortez are so insistent that it is the solution to all of
our problems. She intends to be the slave driver.
In
our schools today, future citizens are taught that government can make things
better through regulations and re-distribution (force). This means that progressives
are teaching our children that government has the moral authority, for the sake
of society, to decide when to interfere in peoples’ lives; when to use force.
Children are taught that good citizenship involves the forcible re-distribution
of their future earnings for the sake of the less fortunate. They are also
taught that capitalism contains many flaws that the government is responsible
for correcting, effectively teaching young people that force is the preferred
and only practical way of accomplishing change. When they take over, they will
make sure that the bad people, the capitalists, the racists, the white supremacists,
the white people, as a whole, will be punished for what they have done –
although what they have done is based on the identity of skin tone.
Scapegoating is the new political correctness. This will not be a free society.
Teachers
ignore the fact that government-initiated force eliminates the ability of
future citizens to think and make unbiased judgments. In a bizarre twist of
logic, they think they are building good minds and good citizens...when, in
fact, they are creating the busy bodies who will harass the able and the
accomplished people in society. Their acceptance of the principle of force in
society leads them to denigrate reason in favor of altruistic moral premises.
These children are unaware they are losing their critical faculties and
learning to acquiesce to government-sponsored theft.
There
is always a “broken window” with such measures. Someone must pay for the
government programs and suffer losses - but schools seldom teach children about
the pitfalls of a government that must take money in order to equalize them.
The idea that there can never be a justification for exerting force against the
individual is seldom mentioned. This is because children are taught that ideas
like the Green New Deal have made things better in the past.
Limited
government, restricted to using force only in defense of individual rights, is
the only system that liberates the human mind to innovate and produce. It
allows people to accumulate wealth, create new products, build large industries
and trade value for value. The basic principle of limited government exposes
the lie of coercive systems like the Green New Deal. Progressives and other
proponents of coercive systems portray themselves as advanced thinkers seeking
to improve capitalism (by means of force), but the truth is they are thugs
seeking to transform society into dictatorship.
Any
system that uses force (by means of economic intervention) poses dangers to
society and will achieve the same results as both Soviet communism and Nazi
fascism. They are no different from those systems; they represent no serious
departure from them and should be feared and avoided.
Any
argument claiming that capitalism has failed is categorically false. This is
because capitalism is about voluntary trade whose focus is exchanging value for
value. In the overwhelming number of cases, mutual benefit to all parties is
what happens in capitalism. The consequence of capitalism is an improving
standard of living, better products and happiness. This is because capitalism
is the only system that eliminates force as a system of economic control.
The
Marxist claim that capitalism is inherently exploitative, that all transactions
are zero-sum, and that capitalism will someday be replaced by socialism are
patently false and amount to an effort by the Marxists to create the very
circumstances they require in order to take power. There is no mystical
movement from capitalism to socialism, no exploitation, no worker’s
disenfranchisement and no force exerted by companies who can only survive by convincing
customers to trade with them; and by proving to employees that they are
providing value in return for value. The lie of Marxism is that capitalism is
dictatorship.
Marxism is a series of calculated lies,
old-wives-tales, pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy and balderdash. Anyone who
claims that capitalism has failed, that it must be fixed by some form of force,
is an anti-capitalist making false charges. It is like saying that a hammer is
necessary to fix a computer chip. The idea that you can fix capitalism by
violating the principles of capitalism (individual rights and free capital
accumulation) should be rejected out of hand…and that means that the entire
philosophy of today’s progressives should be rejected as a scam.
Copyright 2019 by Robert Villegas
To purchase The Green New Deal versus the Call to Reason, go to https://amzn.to/2YEyASM
