The Green New Deal: Poverty for Everyone!
by Eric Rozenman
August 5, 2019 at 4:00 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14665/green-new-deal-poverty "The interesting thing about the Green New Deal... is it wasn't originally a climate thing at all... Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing." — Saikat Chakrabarti, the outgoing chief of staff for freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
Chakrabarti seems to have deduced two things. First, he saw a glass largely full and still filling but for some still empty, and concluded he must first shatter the glass. After that, he apparently failed to consider that the dystopian streets of San Francisco -- homeless people living in tents and defecating on sidewalks near high-rent high-rises, and the middle class and affordable housing squeezed by heavy taxes and constrictive zoning -- might be a result of local "progressive" politics. The problem is that if his "change-the-entire-economy-thing" would ever be imposed, America as a whole might resemble those dystopian streets. If Soviet Russia, Cuba or Venezuela come to mind, consider India before 2014, when its prime minister, Narendra Modi, was elected.
A free economy, in which countless healthy, growing businesses can spring up and actually hire countless people, and that way offer economic advancement for everyone? Not for Bose in the 1940s. And not, it seems, for today for many who have not looked at how socialism really works -- or unfortunately does not work.
