Ron Paul Liberty Report
  • Home
  • Archives
  • About

The Left Looks Backward (Again)

2/18/2019

 
Picture
By Thomas DiLorenzo

​The so-called Green New Deal that was recently posted as a congressional Resolution and endorsed by many high-profile Democrats is essentially a twenty-first century version of the 1888 utopian novel, Looking Backward, by the Marxist-inspired writer Edward Bellamy.  The main character of the novel, one Julian West, falls asleep for 113 years and awakes in the year 2000 delighting in the fact that America had been turned into a socialist utopia.  A major theme of the novel is that all the evils of society can be eradicated by more-or-less totalitarian government controls, mandates, and regulations.  That is also the theme of the Green New Deal.

In Bellamy’s utopia private property is abolished and all industry is nationalized.  Government guarantees “jobs for everyone,” as does the Green New Deal.  Education is “free” (another Green New Deal promise) and everyone is paid the same by the government, the sole employer.  Special efforts are made to assure that men and women are all paid the same.  This is another key point of the Green New Deal.  Everyone retired at age 45 with a good taxpayer-funded pension.

Numerous Edward Bellamy Societies sprung up, established by socialist intellectuals of the day such as John Dewey, who founded the Edward Bellamy Society of New York. Looking Backward also spawned numerous small socialist communes, all of which collapsed in failure – a warning sign of what would become of twentieth-century socialism everywhere.

Bellamy did not want to use the word “socialism” to describe his scheme, for most Americans considered it to be dangerous, destructive, and un-American.  They were of course right.  Ever since then the socialist Left has continued to attempt to bamboozle the public with euphemisms for its socialist schemes like “liberalism,” “progressivism,” “economic democracy,” “social justice,” “liberation theology,” “industrial policy,” “Medicare for All,” and now, “The Green New Deal.”  But green socialism is still socialism.

The Green New Deal is a bundle of absurdities founded on a fallacy.  The fallacy is that the original New Deal saved America from the Great Depression.  It did not.  In 1929 the U.S. unemployment rate was 3.2% and skyrocketed to 24.9% by 1933.  But by 1938, after five years of the New Deal, the unemployment rate was still 19% and was stuck at 14.6% in 1940 on the eve of World War II.  The Great Depression did not end until the war was over, the military was demobilized, and the federal budget was cut by about two-thirds from 1945 to 1948.  The year 1946 was the most vigorous year of private-sector economic growth in all of American history, with private consumption and investment spending increasing by 30%.  No other year has ever come close.

That the New Deal not only did not end the Great Depression but made it more severe and longer-lasting has become the accepted wisdom of the economics profession.  In a 2004 article in the prestigious American Economic Review economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian concluded that “New Deal policies did not lift the economy out of the Depression . . . the abandonment of these policies coincided with the strong recovery of the 1940s” (emphasis added).

The Green New Deal is even more ambitious – and potentially far more economically destructive – than FDR’s New Deal and is even more utopian than Edward Bellamy’s novel.  It calls for a fifteen-member congressional committee to centrally plan most of the U.S. economy.  It calls it a “Ten-Year Plan,” reminiscent of the old Soviet “Five-Year Plans.”  As with Soviet socialism, it presumes that a small committee of politicians can “plan” the entire economy better than the millions of workers, business people, investors, consumers, and all other market participants can.  This was called “the fatal conceit” of socialism by Nobel laureate economist F. A. Hayek, and is a key reason for the worldwide failures of socialism, a failure that is on vivid display today in “democratic socialist” Venezuela.

Congresswoman Sandy Ocasio (as she is known to those with whom she grew up and went to school with in affluent Westchester County, New York), the most outspoken champion of the Green New Deal, can be thought of as a modern-day Julian West. Upon waking from a 29-year slumber she envisions a green utopia that would include a government rebuilding of the entire infrastructure of the U.S.; the elimination of all fossil fuels, cars, and airplanes; the refitting of all houses and other buildings in the country to her liking; “rebuilding” of all of manufacturing and agriculture by government bureaucrats; government mandates that all jobs be “high-paying union jobs”; government-mandated “family-sustaining wages”; mandatory paid vacations; enforcement of “wage and hour standards”; taxpayer-funded, socialized health care, housing, and “economic security”; government guarantee of clean water, air, and access to nature”; and the payment of salaries of those who are “unwilling to work.”  And as she says, this is just the beginning.  The Green New Deal is The Road to Serfdom on steroids and a recipe for totalitarian socialism.


This article was originally published at LewRockwell.com

Comments are closed.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015



  • Home
  • Archives
  • About