Green New Dealers propose to rebuild structures that are already built and to build any and every new thing (homes, buildings, machines, computers, cars) with new machines as power sources. Out with the old and in with the new. They propose to modify lots of things already built. This means throwing away your old windows, walls and cars and replacing them with newer and more expensive kinds. It means doing the same for the machines and factories that build every good you buy.
The Green New Deal forces us to be poorer. Every good you buy or want to buy will rise in price. Instead of buying a furnace filter for $4, the new and “better” one will cost $8. A car that costs $25,000 will cost $50,000. You’ll experience a rise in your cost of living. You’ll be poorer. Less carbon dioxide will be emitted, maybe, but government regulations will make matters much worse. One way in this case is to halt invention, discovery and efficient innovations to bring down costs. If capitalism and free markets are thwarted, gasses of all kinds will probably rise instead of fall. If government legislates geothermal energy sources, the amounts of sulfur dioxide might rise. If we build 10,000 windmills instead of using readily-available natural gas to make power, we might end up with higher gas emissions. If discovery of new low-emission energy sources is thwarted by the Green New Deal, it will result in higher emissions.
Maybe the planet would be cooler because the Green New Deal reduced carbon dioxide emissions, maybe, and maybe not, because the basic proposition itself is highly questionable. Climate science is highly contestable. The proposition that mankind is warming the planet is far from being a known truth.
This program involves throwing away lots of what we already have and duplicating everything with less efficient structures and systems. Instead of making your clothes and building your cars and roads with low-cost machines, we’d build them with more expensive power sources. The prices for all the materials needed to rebuild everything and make the new power sources would rise. You cannot eat a windmill. You can only eat an orange or an apple. The prices of these and every other good you buy for your personal use would also rise steeply, and you’d be the poorer for it.
Saving labor, which means not using as much labor, by using efficient machines results in the goods you buy costing you less. Your buying power rises. Your pay goes further. The Green New Deal does the opposite. It requires greater labor by using inefficient machines and by wasting time and labor rebuilding the machines and dwellings we already have. Your pay doesn’t go as far.
The New Dealers propose to pay for it all by taxes and “printing money”. It will take printing money, lots of it. Taxes won’t cover the huge amounts required.
The Treasury can print money (non-interest bearing notes) itself directly if Congress authorizes it to. The other method, which differs only in bookkeeping, is to authorize the Federal Reserve to issue non-interest bearing notes to the Treasury. Congress then appropriates the money that’s been created (printed). Congress legislates what the money is used for, and it passes regulations to make us obey how we build everything, how we work and what we consume. The economy becomes a centrally-planned or command economy, in other words, a socialist or communist economy.
Printing money causes prices to rise, as noted above. They rise unevenly. The people who build windmills benefit, while the people who eat oranges lose. The overall real effects are that people are put to work using less efficient (more costly and more labor-using) methods. They can’t produce as much in the time they spend working. There are fewer videos, oranges and computers being made. Productivity goes down. This means that our real output or product of our labor goes down. We become poorer. There is less to go around.
For what? Why? Because we’ve adopted false ideas. One is that our survival depends on our reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. Another is that our government has the capability of re-ordering our economic system to reduce our emissions without lowering our standard of living, in fact, that it magically can raise it by this program.
The new New Deal’s color doesn’t make it or America beautiful or bountiful. The Green New Deal thwarts and ends industrial progress in general, but that progress in the past few hundred years is what has brought about an abundance of goods and enabled far more human beings to live and enjoy them. That progress has brought about the sustainable growth that the Green New Dealers say they want, but which they threaten to terminate.
8:52 am on February 9, 2019 Email Michael S. Rozeff
