Liberal Childishness

The secret is out.  Liberals are superannuated children.  Their recently unveiled Green New Deal is a pipe dream crafted in the minds of the very immature.  It is an idea that only the inexperienced and untutored could love.  Based solely on the fantasies of irresponsible politicians, it is a prescription for national disaster.

Alexandria Ocasia–Cortez is both young and enthusiastic.  She is also an attractive personality.  But why did Democrats anoint her their pied piper? She is plainly leading them over a cliff with her siren songs.  Perhaps it is because they too are immature socialists at their core.

We don’t know who first said it, but the observation that “if people are not socialists when they are twenty, they have no heart; yet is they are still socialists when they are forty, they have no head,” is apt.  AOC’s Green Dream was obviously not thought through.

In the space of little more than a decade we are told that we must get rid of all fossil fuels, retrofit every one of our homes, and build high-speed railroads from coast to coast.  Although this would mean dismantling countless industries, we are assured this will bring about an improved lifestyle.

Much of what we are told we must do is patently impossible.  There is no way we can replace all of our automobiles with electric vehicles in the time allotted.  Nor are we going to eschew airplane travel or consuming hamburgers. 

As for the cost of this nightmare, no precise figures have been attached to it.  Given the scope, however, this will be in the tens of trillions of dollars—and that is a conservative estimate.

So where will these dollars come from?  You guessed it; they will be commandeered from the wealthy.  Their marginal tax rate is to go up to between seventy and ninety percent.  Unfortunately, this will not be enough to pay for the entire Green Dream.  The rich are rich, but not that rich.

What is worse, once the wealthy are stripped of the incentive to earn more, they will stop investing and thus cease creating new jobs.  How do we know this?  Because is happened before—as during the Great Depression.  Having never studied history, of course, the young do not realize this.

Nor will confiscating everything the wealthy own do the job. This would be a one shot deal that could not address a long-term program.  The middle classes are therefore left to pick up the tab.  Their taxes will have to skyrocket.

One left-wing commentator declared that this prospect is not alarming. He compared what will be needed to what was done during World-War II.  At the time, the proportion of the national income spent by the government doubled.  This enabled us to mobilize to defeat the Nazis.

Why then, we are asked, shouldn’t we do the same to save the planet from over-heating?  This is described as a comparable emergency—only it is not.  AOC may insist that the sky will fall in a dozen years, but the government’s recent climate report only suggested that the GDP might lower by ten per cent in a century.

So for this we are supposed to destroy our civilization?   Needless to say, the young do not remember that during WWII there was strict rationing?  Few private automobiles were produced, while meat, butter and eggs became luxuries.  Is this belt-tightening necessary for a phony emergency—especially when there are superior alternatives?

To top off this Green irrationality, even if the goal of zero-carbon emissions were met, it would do no good.  With China and India increasing their carbon footprint, the overall level of pollution will rise.  Global warming would consequently continue despite the United States having voluntarily chosen collective poverty.

So why did so many Democratic politicians jump on the Green New Deal bandwagon?  Didn’t they realize the dire—even laughable—implications of the program?   Apparently many presidential aspirants did not.  They heard what sounded like a winning political slogan and decided they did not want to be outflanked by the opposition.

They were vulnerable to this foolishness precisely because their liberalism is grounded in socialist fantasies.  Socialism is utopian.  It does not accurately assess the future, but hides it behind a screen of impractical aspirations—just as children do.

Where then are the grown-ups?  Where are the adults who understand there are limits to what we can achieve?   If we are to improve our lives, we must deal with the world as it is.  Many liberals have evidently decided reality is too harsh for them to accept.  Too bad!

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus

Kennesaw State University