The Green New Deal - A False Promise

The following is excerpted from my book, The Green New Deal versus the Call to Reason. 

The philosophy of the Green New Deal is the philosophy of force against man. It is coercive government hidden under false promises of a better life. More than this it is the idea that force is a practical means for improving society. It holds that the end justifies the means.

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.

Progressive policies are failures that lead to more failures that eventually lead to totalitarianism; which is the biggest, bloodiest failure in the history of man. Yet, progressives do not see the illogic of their position. They consider central planning to be a practical form of political power and they blindly advocate more of it despite the evidence of the impracticality of their policies.

The inexorable logic of the progressive position is that once they gain power, their solutions for solving human problems will create a better world. Yet, inevitably, progressive attitudes toward capitalism (that it exploits people and elevates the profit motive) require a fight against any activity that results in market dominance and high profits. These policies are couched under protestations of protecting people against predators while, in fact, the progressives are the predators. Their confiscations destroy the rights and affluence of the people. The eventual wreckage of their policies begins to accumulate.

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.

What we need is the opposite of the Green New Deal. We need a complete separation of economy and government. We need to keep government out of the business of regulating our lives and restricting our choices. When we accomplish this kind of society, we establish the principle that government can make no laws that interfere with the free trade of individuals.

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