The appalling fantasy of the Green New Deal

Well, when the Left has lost New York Magazine...

With the announcement and publication of the Green New Deal, released to much fanfare by the socialist "It" girl, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.- Twilight Zone, the GND's principal designer, Sean McElwee, has gleefully announced that, “The Green New Deal is what it means to be progressive."

So the curtain has been pulled back and it ain't pretty. NY Mag's Jonathan Chait, who is not exactly a charter member of the VRWC, went straight for the jugular: "Democrats Need an Ambitious Climate Plan. The Green New Deal Isn’t It."

The operating principle behind the Green New Deal is a no-enemies-to-the-left spirit of fostering unity among every faction of the progressive movement. Thus, at the same time, the plan avoids taking stances that are absolutely vital to reduce carbon emissions, it embraces policies that have nothing to do with climate change whatsoever. The Green New Deal includes the following non-climate provisions:

–A job with family-sustaining wages, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security

–High-quality education, including higher education and trade schools

–High-quality health care

–Safe, affordable, adequate housing

–An economic environment free of monopolies

–Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work.

Let all that sink in while we return to Sean McElwee, "a socialist organizer with a penchant for colorfully threatening to destroy his enemies," who --

... designed the Green New Deal as a framework to encompass every maximal demand of the left. “The Green New Deal is what it means to be progressive. Clean air, clean water, decarbonizing, green jobs, a just transition, and environmental justice are what it means to a progressive,” he tells Vox. “By definition that means politicians who don’t support those goals aren’t progressive. We need to hold that line. Get on the GND train or choo-choo, [expletive] we’re going to go right past you.”

And then Mr. Chait grossly understates:

It is difficult to see how the task of finding 218 votes in the House and 50 in the Senate is made any easier by attaching a plan to such goals as economic security for people who are "unwilling to work.”

Gee, yuh think?

Alas, I just do not have the time for disassembling the parts of the GND of which I could write with some expertise. But the GND and its proponents seem to me to betray a fundamental fallacy that progressives/Leftists/liberals/socialists (all the same thing these days) share: they seriously seem to think that the masses chafe and suffer under the present order and eagerly await their liberation at the hands of the enlightened, oh-so-altruistic progressives/Leftists/liberals/socialists who will make a new day dawn and inaugurate a political, social, and economic Age of Aquarius. As I explained back in 2010 in, "Where Obama dropped his molasses jug,"

I think that the Democrats' most fundamental mistake is twofold. First, they did not understand that "Hope and Change" was a catchy campaign slogan but can never be a governing philosophy. Second, they made the most common Leftist mistake there is: they really believed that "unwashed middle" America (in Katie Couric's eloquent phrase) truly wants statist control of their daily lives.

The former first. Barack Obama did not understand that people say they want change but almost never actually mean it. Anyone who has become the chairperson of a volunteer organization, whether a civic club, the county chapter of a political party or, say (cough) pastor of a church, soon learns that what people say they want and what they will actually support are extremely divergent.

What they really mean is that they want change to affect other people but not themselves: "change for thee, but not for me." Each wants more of what he already has with no adversity in his personal situation.

One quick point of the GND's utter buffonery -- it wants its goals accomplished by 2030, including this:

Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out high- speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle.

Wikipedia says there are presently 263 million cars and trucks in the United States. Statista adds,

However, of the 68.6 million passenger cars produced worldwide in 2016, less than four million automobiles were produced in the U.S. 

So at present rates of production it will take more than 65 years of domestic production to replace the cars and trucks on the road - but remember, GND does not want to replace the present fleet with better versions but with electric vehicles that use no petroleum fuel at all.

Where, exactly, will the industrial base to do that come from? Out of thin air, apparently, just like everything else in the GND. And an electric-vehicle industry exists less overseas than it does in the US, so don't count on foreign manufacturers to make up the shortfall.

But we can have this just because we want it, right?

What makes this appalling is that to accomplish even a small fraction of these goals means a government the micromanages every person of the country. Every economic decision of even marginal significance, including family finances and spending, comes under the socialist thumb.

What of any consequence would remain beyond the state’s reach? Not wages, working conditions, or labor-management relations; not health care; not money, banking, or financial services; not personal privacy; not transportation or communication; not education or scientific research; not farming or food supply; not nutrition or food quality; not marriage or divorce; not child care; not provision for retirement; not recreation; not insurance of any kind; not smoking or drinking; not gambling; not political campaign funding or publicity; not real estate development, house construction, or housing finance; not international travel, trade, or finance; not a thousand other areas and aspects of social life.

Sean McElwee is correct: this is the stark reality of progressivism unmasked in its undiluted form. What cannot be discussed honestly and succinctly is couched in lies and fraud, and then sold to the public as benevolence and compassion and saving the world. In the end, all that matters is that the leftist agenda, of which this document is now the cornerstone, incrementally becomes the law of the land.

That's progressivism, comrades, in all its fully-revealed horror. Here are links, see for yourself.

The actual text of the GND.

The authors' own FAQs.

How does air travel become "unnecessary"?

The real political goals

The 10 greatest insanities of the GND

OTOH, maybe AOC is really a covert Republican plant whose mission is simply to ridicularize the Democrat party! I mean, look who she roped in!

Update: Tom Maguire writes,

But this proposal, and especially the accompanying (and withdrawn) fact sheet isn’t merely ludicrously ambitious and devoid of common sense (Eliminate air travel?!? Retrofit “every” building in America?!?). It also reveals a stunning absence of basic knowledge of history and public finance.

One wonders whether Ms. AOC actually has the time and temperament to collaborate with experts and study an issue (yet another reason she is the Trump of the left!). Or did Democratic leadership cut her loose and send the real Washington hands off on other projects? Let her primary herself!

On to specifics. This passage on how the extreme environmental makeover might be financed may have sounded great in a college dorm. A freshman dorm. But this is a frightening level of ignorance about the structure, legal authorities, independence and role of the Federal Reserve when it comes from a Congressperson as part of a legislative package.

To which law Prof. Glenn Reynolds accurately appends, "She wasn’t elected for her knowledge or her competence."

And remember history's main lesson about socialism: