This Won't Hurt A Bit...

The world is feeling the first pains (of many) stemming from the coercive "greening" of economies and societies. It's not happy. Whether it be due to spiking gasoline and electricity prices, rising food costs, supply chain disruptions, or all-of-the-above (see: ESG-born governmental collapse in Sri Lanka), people are not happy, and they're making sure everyone knows.

"Green" sounds great. After all, who doesn't want to live on a cleaner planet? As an abstract, it's lovely. In vague and generic terms, everyone wants to eat healthier food produced in a less impactful manner, everyone wants their energy to pollute less, and no one wants to be incinerated by a heating climate or drowned by rising sea levels.

Thus, you're apt to find broad support for those vague and generic stock-phrases and concepts. Green dreams run into trouble - and lots of it - when it comes time to turn that vagueness into concrete policies.

The Biden administration has been peddling its Green agenda with assertions that it'll actually be great for the economy and for our lives. Many new jobs, much economic growth, cheaper energy, and healthier living.

Anyone who understands Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window should be instantly skeptical. Anyone who understands that there is no more ruthless driver of efficiency than the pursuit of profit in a competitive marketplace should scoff at the notion that a massive reordering of the economy by our government could actually produce prosperity.

Yet, the administration has a passel of pet economists at hand to voice support and lend gravitas to its outlandish claims. Partisans, leftists, and crunchy-granola First Worlders have served as Orwellian sheep, bleating the spoon-fed mantras at us and drowning out questioners and dissenters.

Reality cannot be overruled by noise or insistence, however. Green energy cannot be made cheaper or large-scale viable by diktat. Agricultural productivity cannot be sustained if the means of its achievement are banned (see: the fertilizer bans that drove the Netherlands protests and the Sri Lanka collapse).

All to the great consternation of the frustrated utopians (I quote George Will, “the only kind there is,” he notes) who buy into the premise that it’s just greed and stubbornness standing in the way of sustainable, organic, locavore, and all the other stuff that’s folded into ESG.

I wrote just recently that "Green" is doomed. This is because it was sold as a painless improvement to our world, rather than a certain and substantial negative impact on our living standards. Its greatest advocates are the wealthy, who not coincidentally can best afford the higher gas, energy, and food prices, and who not coincidentally are best situated to feel the least impact from shortages.

Not many can sustain these luxury beliefs when reality sets in, and the masses who've been duped or otherwise done unto are now realizing that the "won't hurt a bit" promise is a big fat lie. A necessary lie, because it's been long known that those masses like "green" but won't voluntarily cough up even a few extra bucks to combat global warming. This is, of course, tradition. Lying to the voters to do what's best for them (read: what pleases us) is as old as politics, and at the heart of big government. Voters can't be trusted to know what's good for them, or so we've been told by the Best-and-Brightest. Therein lies the heart of William F. Buckley's famous aphorism:

The difference between statists and everyone else is that statists see the "service" part of public service as "management." As in, parents who have to wrangle their unruly children, not as equals tasked with representing the will of their constituents. This is why they can't be content running those cities that vote them into power - the urge to manage everyone, and not just those who want to be so managed, is too strong in them.

Many moons ago, a woman I briefly dated offered up the perfect explanatory remark for why she believed that the masses needed to be so managed:

Because we're smarter than they are.

Thing of it is - we're not their children, and they're not nearly as smart as they think they are. They're not inoculating us against smallpox or polio or measles, they're damaging our lives and pretending the pain is someone else’s doing. Camille Paglia observed:

liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother,”

affirming the parent-child metaphor.

Fortunately, we are adults, an adults can tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine. As they did in Sri Lanka and in Ghana and in The Netherlands and in Germany and in San Francisco and in other places where the policies of "Green" and "Woke" (but, I repeat myself) are being rejected by those 'must be managed' masses.

Pain is really good at waking people up.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.