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| Greens under the bed |
| 2009-07-26 |
| Once the lure of communism seduced the idealistic. Today’s environmental ideologues risk becoming just as dangerous. Britain is, thankfully, an ideologically barren land. The split between Right and Left is no longer ideological, but tribal. Are you a nice social liberal who believes in markets, or a nasty social liberal who believes in markets? Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, published this week, reveal a different age, one in which fascism and communism were locked in a seemingly definitive battle for souls. Blunt talks of “the religious quality” of the enthusiasm for the Left among the students of Cambridge. There is only one ideology in today’s developed world that exercises a similar grip. If Blunt were young today, he would not be red; he would be green. His band of angry young men would find Gore where once they found Marx. Blunt evokes a febrile atmosphere in which each student felt his own decision had the power to shape the future. Where once they raged about the fleecing of the proletariat and quaked at the march of fascism, Blunt and his circle, transposed to today’s college bar, would rage about the fleecing of the planet and quake at its imminent destruction. If you squint, red and green look disarmingly similar. ...We are at the early stage of the green movement. A time akin to pre-Bolshevik socialism, when all believed in the destruction of the capitalist system, but were still relatively moderate about the means of getting there. We are at the stage of naive dreamers and fantasists. Russia was home to the late 19th-century Narodnik movement, in which rich sons of the aristocracy headed into the countryside to tell the peasants it was their moral imperative to become a revolutionary class. They retreated, baffled, to their riches when the patronised peasants didn’t want to revolt. Zac Goldsmith and Prince Charles look like modern Narodniks, talking glib green from the safety of their gilded lives. Indulge me in some historical determinism. We, the peasants, are failing to rise up and embrace the need to change. We will not choose to give up modern life, with all its polluting seductions. Our intransigent refusal to choose green will be met by a new militancy from those who believe we must be saved from ourselves. Ultra-green states cannot arise without some form of forced switch to autocracy; the dictatorship of the environmentalists |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #12 LOTP - That's a nice thought and I do concur but how, precisely, do you propose that happen? In practical terms: which politician on the national stage could be elected President in 2012 to lead the drive to dismantle leviathan? In a similar vein: aside from Reagan has any other President in the past century made any significant attempt to reduce the size, scope & reach of our federal government? For example: during my last stint in grad school I ran across a summation of the regulatory state that concluded that each year the federal government issues 10,000 - 15,000 new laws, rules & regulations governing all aspects of small business and its interaction with everything it might touch and concern. If that pace was maintained (it actually accelerated greatly under W and has exploded under Obama but I'm citing the old and almost certainly lower number here) there would today, a decade later, be 100,000 - 150,000 new laws, rules & regulations at the *federal* level with which any new small business must comply or face a barrage of regulatory actions & litigation (since many laws include private rights of action). Layer those upon two hundred years of accumulated federal bureaucratic bloat and the various & sundry state and local laws & regulations and I submit that it is no longer possible for a person involved in a small business to comply with the law because it has become impossible to determine what the law actually is. Drilling down one more level (to really belabor my point): as a sometime small business owner I know that there are 52 working weeks per year each of which offers around 100 possible working hours. At the midline level of the annual federal regulatory barrage, 12,500 new problems for the small business owner annually, I could work 100 hours per week with zero days off and that would leave me approximately 25 minutes to examine, comprehend, research & comply with each new federal law, rule & regulation issued in *that year*. Obviously I'd have to hire some competent helpers if I intended to comply with the pre-existing body of federal regulation. And probably one or two others to perform compliance duties imposed under state & local law (and God forbid we do business across state lines & trip multiple state regulatory schemes). With my half-dozen or so regulatory compliance people in place I could then consider hiring someone to actually produce a good or service. Any politicians out there addressing those issues? If not there's absolutely no hope of breaking the levers of power, hitting the "reset" button or our country coming to its collective (no pun intended) senses. I'll believe there's a slight chance of our pulling back from the abyss when I see serious advocates for things like: exempting small businesses completely from federal regulation; implementing a voluntary opt-out provision whereby consumers & businesses might interact completely outside our tort law constructs; a Constitutional Amendment requiring that no citizen pay more than a net effective cumulative (federal, state & local; income / sales / cap gains / embedded taxes in goods & services / etc.) tax of (pick your number: 10%, 15%, 20%) of his or her gross income from all sources per year; a Constitutional Amendment requiring federal spending below (pick your number: 10%, 12%, 15%) of the previous year's private sector GDP; a Constitutional Amendment requiring that regulatory costs (imposed actions, compliance, related litigation, etc.) not exceed (pick you number: 3%, 5%, 7%) of the annual private sector GDP with costs only counted and alleged savings not considered; a restructuring of federal regulatory agencies such that all regulations are stayed pending litigation over unintended consequences (defined as other than consequences discussed & acknowledged ahead of time by Congress or the agency in question) and all regulations found to have unintended consequences automatically rendered unenforceable; etc. My point isn't to suggest that I've all the answeres (I'm sure most of the regulars here could offer far more sane & workeable suggestions than I) but merely to suggest what some of the possible answers might look like. Is there any serious person near the top of either major political party offering anything that remotely resembles a real rollback of government? If that persons exists today I'm unaware of them. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2009-07-26 18:14 |
| #11 Ratchets have reversible levers. Or you could use an end wrench, imminently reversible. |
| Posted by: badanov 2009-07-26 17:55 |
| #10 Hey! I know someone with "Reset" buttons! |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-07-26 16:48 |
| #9 Unless, of course, those levers get broken. |
| Posted by: lotp 2009-07-26 16:47 |
| #8 And when the ratchet has turned sufficiently far enough the lure of near-absolute power, or at least the perceived impossibility of rolling it back, will lead politicians of all stripes to simply wield said power rather than railing against it. The problem isn't (and for a very long time hasn't been) the particular political bent of those working the levers of power in our federal government but the fact that those levers have become all-encompassing and there's no path back from whence we came. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2009-07-26 15:14 |
| #7 The ratchet doesn't need to turn all the way every year or every administration, as long as it only tightens in one direction and goes 'clickclickclick' when you try to go the other way. |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2009-07-26 14:18 |
| #6 The problem with the analysis is that today's Greens are about as Marxist as Groucho, Harpo and Chico. If you want to transform a society into a communist society it takes big brass ones, being able to not only forment violence against capitalists, but to take part in it as well. They don't have to. They can set up their tax farming scheme where Goldman Sachs and George Soros can sell the right to engage in industrial activity and us peons can buy it, but then later on we'll be stuck defending the 'capitalist' system they implement now, OR of course, as an alternative, we could nationalize Goldman Sachs and whatever Soros does. Their system isn't designed to implement communism, it's to make us choose between their chickenshit crony capitalism and whatever crony capitalism or communism we will eventually adopt of our own. Take health care, for example. FDR was one of the main drivers of health-insurance-as-a-benefit; LBJ was a main driver for medicaire and medicaid. What did this result in? A broken system. What are the alternatives we're presented with? "The Dirty Republican" system, which is basically described as this awful mess (done by those filthy idiot capitalist rethuglicans FDR and LBJ) OR we can go with the glorious socialist system proposed by that wonderful Democrat President Zero. Isn't it funny how we're all to blame for the mess the previous Democrat presidents invented but the only answer is giving a Democrat president more power? |
| Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2009-07-26 14:16 |
| #5 They We've been on this track for a century now but for the most part it has happened so slowly that most folks don't understand just how far away from the Founding Father's ideas we really are today. And, sadly, a huge swath of the people wouldn't care if they did know having been indoctrinated into the cult of "why should I care what a bunch of dead white males think?" At this stage of our history the process is likely irreversible. Even the great Ronald Reagan could do no more than temporarily slow the rate of growth of a federal government that has become oppressive via its sheer bulk and despite its good or bad intentions. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2009-07-26 14:02 |
| #4 That's close enough to communism for me. Whether it's the far left or the far right, they always end up wanting to control our every thought and choice. The label doesn't matter. The intent to destroy human dignity and freedom does. |
| Posted by: lotp 2009-07-26 12:52 |
| #3 The idea that Greens and liberals can transform anything more complicated that an iced latte is absurd. Bad, remember Lenin was "just a man" at one time too. I think you treat our enemies a bit too non-chalantly. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2009-07-26 12:21 |
| #2 The greens are collectivists, and statists -- they want to treat humanity as a subservient collective that does teh will of the "enlightened" (the "intellectuals" at the core of the movement) and demolish the things that can stop them: individualism and capitalism. They intend to develop and use a massive state as the mechanism to achieve thier rule. That's close enough to communism for me. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2009-07-26 12:18 |
| #1 The problem with the analysis is that today's Greens are about as Marxist as Groucho, Harpo and Chico. If you want to transform a society into a communist society it takes big brass ones, being able to not only forment violence against capitalists, but to take part in it as well. I know it makes today's crazier conservatives feel good to point out that liberals such as Obama are Marxist and will turn the country into some sort of Marxist state, but the reality is that Obama, his Obamettes and the Obamanation have neither the political will, nor the intent to transform society into a communist or socialist society. The talk the talk, but they just can't take the steps needed. That said, what the Obamanation is doing is playing a very, very deadly dangerous game which can easily fly out of control with racial politics and with the flaunting of existing law, such as the armed robberies more formerly known as the Chrysler and GM bankruptcies. The idea that Greens and liberals can transform anything more complicated that an iced latte is absurd. |
| Posted by: badanov 2009-07-26 11:18 |