(February 16, 2019 at 12:10 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: Kindly point to anything about socialism in the resolution?
Oy vey. I've been thinking about how to respond to this, and what I keep coming back to is "Oh come on. Let's not be liars." Democrats and liberals in general are always so afraid to stand their ground. So let's grow a pair, stand up straight, and tell the truth.
The Green New Deal is associated with a raft of socialist programs-- jobs guarantees, universal healthcare, guaranteed income, redistribution to disadvantaged communities, and some vaguely termed rhetoric about people's ownership of the new green infrastructure which I take to mean that it will be protected from becoming privatized. I am personally fine with those goals, but it is socialism. Let's not claim that it's not.
You can obfuscate and say that many of those goals are independent of the Green New Deal. Sure. But without those elements, the Green New Deal offers nothing but hardship in transitioning to an environmentally sustainable economy. If we could just start building a bunch of expensive green things and that would make the economy sizzle and clean up the environment, then there would be no need of a Green New Deal.
When the critics of the Green New Deal say that it is a socialist take over of the economy, they are not wrong. The Green New Deal will be by far the largest part of our economy. And the Green New Deal is owned by the people. So it is factually a socialist take over of the economy.
The primary economic goal of the Green New Deal is to develop and mature a theory of economics that more accurately represents value. The big buggaboo in our current theory of economics is that many valuable things aren't profitable, and many profitable things aren't really valuable. When we talk about doing a rapid transition to a carbon neutral society, we ask who is going to pay for it. When we say that, we are talking about capital as if it isn't there. As if we don't have the capital to do it. We probably do. Instead of thinking in terms of money, think in terms of intrinsic value-- resources, manpower, talent. We have enough of all of those to rebuild a carbon neutral world. So why don't we? Because we don't see the profit in it. A carbon neutral world is surely a very valuable thing, but how do we monetize it? Especially when you take into account that the carbon neutral world is probably going to be far less oriented to consumerism, and creating products that no one really needs is no longer regarded as 'productivity'.
It is not possible to enact the Green New Deal in a way that won't entail socialism. We have to totally own it or lie like Trump.
We do not inherit the world from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
