The Green New Deal

February 14, 2019 By Norman Rogers

Apparently, the inmates have taken over the asylum, led by the former barmaid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now a member of Congress. The Green New Deal is a bizarre plan to create a cultural revolution in the United States. The role of Mao’s little red book is replaced by the musings of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). After the green revolution, happiness will reign throughout the land.

Ms. Ocasio can’t even make a credible threat to our economic well-being. According to the Green New Deal, if we don’t prevent global warming, we will lose $500 billion of annual economic output by 2100. The current GDP of the U.S. is $20 trillion. Assuming modest real growth of one percent per year, GDP will be $44 trillion (in current dollars) by 2100. Losing $500 billion or 1.1 percent of 2100 economic output is clearly minor and would be made up by 2101. The Green New Deal advocates instantly destroy their own argument with their own numbers. ...........The reports of the IPCC and of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) are political documents masquerading as scientific studies...............The Green New Deal mostly has nothing to do with climate change. The program has a strong resemblance to the Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens found in the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union (the “Stalin” constitution)............

Although we live in a golden age of prosperity and opportunity, we also live in an age of ignorance. Ms. Ocasio has a college degree in economics but is apparently a sucker for socialistic ideas that were already thoroughly discredited by 1950. Think of George Orwell’s books 1984 and Animal Farm, and the seminal critique of socialism The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek.  Somehow socialism always turns cruel and brutal. There is no better recounting than the Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But facts and history are less important than the feeling of being ignored suffered by so many intellectuals and academics. Those intellectuals and academics fill the void in their lives with leftist religion.....................Read more