Saturday, May 7, 2016

The Great Left Wing Secret

     “The worst thing you can do to the liberals is deprive them of their grievances.” – Bill Moyers, at the Democratic National Convention, 8/13/1980

     With the above comment, Bill Moyers, a hard-left liberal verging on outrightly socialist, unwisely lifted the curtain on a bit of knowledge his ideological companions would have committed mass murder to keep secret. Fortunately – for the Democrats, not for the nation – his comment was not widely disseminated, nor was it deeply pondered even by those who heard it. Rather than beat around the bush as I normally do, I’ll say it loud:

To the Left, social and economic problems are tools.
They don’t want them solved.

     The dynamic here could hardly be more obvious. Socioeconomic problems are the meat upon which the Left feeds. It will normally work to produce and exacerbate them. It then uses them as arguments for putting it in power – “We care!” – but, when given power, carefully avoids doing anything that would relieve those problems. As Moyers implied above, when the grievances are gone, so is the Left’s raison d’etre.

     This is on my mind this morning because of this brief article by Australian jewel Joanne Nova:

     Tony Abbott’s plan is one of the most efficient and effective programs anywhere in the world. But the Green hero is really enemy number one. Apparently giving the eco-cartel what they say they want is a disaster. Don’t look now, but green underpants are showing. Who cares about carbon reduction or trees? Givem’ power and money!

     Gillard’s carbon tax cost $5310 per ton. Abbott’s plan at $10/ton this round is 531 times greener. The Direct Action plan uses a reverse auction to buy the cheapest carbon reduction in Australia. In the third round another half billion dollars has bought 47m tons of carbon reduction at an even cheaper price than the first two rounds. Most it achieved by planting or restoring greenery and trees.

     The real problem with the Direct Action plan is manifold — a/ it doesn’t specifically punish the “big polluders” (those big independent companies that don’t need the government to survive). b/ it doesn’t reward the right patrons — there’s no money for the parasitic windmills and solar industries. And c/ It is more like the real free market solution the eco-fans say they want — showing that the fake free market idea of imposing an economy-wide carbon trading scheme is useless, overpriced, and inefficient. Direct Action fails to reward those financial houses and the conglomerate big-gov entities like the EU and UN, all of whom have been part of the lobbying cheer-squad for 20 years.

     You don’t have to be a warmista to appreciate the significance of the above. Stipulate, merely for the sake of argument, that reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is an important undertaking. Isn’t a cheaper way of doing it, that also intrudes less upon the great engines of the economy, preferable to a more expensive, more intrusive scheme? To ask the question is to answer it...and it makes the ecofascist Left absolutely furious.

     The supposed problem of “global warming” powered by excess atmospheric CO2 is a Leftist tool. It energizes Leftist activists, who must feel they have a Cause to rouse themselves from their habitual torpor. It creates a focus for a catastrophist campaign by which to appeal to left-inclined and uncommitted voters. “Don’t take it away! -- especially not at a trifling cost compared to the gigantic scheme we’ve cooked up, which creates so many opportunities for intensified coercion and graft!”

     Note how American left-liberals so carefully conceal their immense hatred for the late Ronald Reagan. They pretend to respect him – no other course would be socially acceptable today – but in point of fact he did them great damage. While Reagan didn’t succeed at reducing the size of the federal government, his administration’s policies did stabilize the dollar, restart the economy, drastically lower unemployment, quell union-driven unrest, reinforce and reanimate the armed forces, cow the Soviet Union and Khomeini’s Iran, and improve America’s international standing. He solved problems, which is something the Left cannot abide.

     As thoroughly disheartened as I am by current political trends and events, this strikes me as something worth employing strategically. First, analyze how Leftist policies have created, perpetuated, and deepened the very problems they claim only they will solve. Second, use the Left’s failure to improve those matters when given power to indict their motives.

     On the Right, attacking an opponent’s motives rather than his policy pronouncements has been regarded as dirty pool for far too long. Note that it’s a principal tactic of the Left. Recently, United States Senator Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren decided to attack Donald Trump’s motives, rather than his policy prescriptions. She took to Twitter to do it, calling him “racist, sexist, and xenophobic.” Doesn’t that make it fair game to go after her motives? Say, her motives for deceitfully styling herself an Amerind to secure a cushy post at Harvard? Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it?

     And what about Hillary Clinton’s motives for wanting to cripple the coal industry? Might she be drooling over the prospect of producing tens of thousands more clients for the welfare state, so that she’d have an argument for raising taxes? Hmmm?

     Just a few tidbits to chew over with your Saturday Cheerios.®

2 comments:

Tim Turner said...

This is tangential to your post, Fran, and there are more recent quotes that say basically the same thing. If I had the guts and the time, I'd gather them all together and post them in the comment section to every post on climate change in dailykos, huffington, etc.

"The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War...one must say clearly that de facto we distribute the world's wealth by climate policy.... One has to rid oneself of the illusion that international climate politics have anything to do with environmental concerns." -- Otto Edenhofer, IPCC Working Group III co-chair, Nov. 14, 2010.

Tim Turner said...

And speaking of motives, even though Trump has said in the past that he is in favor of government-sponosored health care, couldn't he attack the Affordable Care Act not only on how it was passed, but how it was written? If there ever was legislation that guaranteed a bloated, inefficient bueracracy, *and* included kickbacks and pork to special interests, Obamacare is it.

In Trump-style: "Let's face it, folks, the Affordable Care Act isn't. It's not affordable. Most everybody's rates have gotten less affordable. Employers are cutting back hours to avoid it. Insurance companies are dropping parts of it even as they're raising their rates to try to cover it. States are dropping it completely.

"Hillary tried to do this before when her husband was in the White House. Now I'm all for health care, but fortunately we stopped this loony. inefficient, bloated nonsense when she tried it. But what happened? The democrats got together late one night using skullduggery to get this monstrous thing called Obamacare passsed against the will of the people. You heard the lies. 'You'll keep your doctor.' 'You'll pay less.' Heck, we even had one of the guys who engineered it TELL us they had to lie to get it passed!

"If the American people deserve health care, they deserve common-sense health care that WORKS. You know me. I can help get the American people the health care they want and deserve. As president, I will encourage Congresss to rescind - or at least defund - Obamacare. Then I will work with both Republicans and Democrats to work out a deal that gives Americans great health care that really IS affordable!

"Is that gonna be a tough deal to work out? You bet it is. But hey! That's what I do. As your president, I will do everything I can for all Americans, and it won't be in legislation passed on the sly. . . legislation that has to be passed before the American people can know what's in it."