Socialism — Theft by Majority Vote

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today I will be talking about socialism and its new vehicle, the Green New Deal (GND).

Socialism – what is it?

Socialism is an economic system whereby the government owns the means of production and eliminates private property in most cases. Rather than a company having stockholders with a board of directors who answer to them it has the government with its central planning mechanism directing what is produced and what is not, and more importantly government bureaucracy directs where that produced material will go.

The objective is virtually impossible to make sustainable over time without disastrous results for the entire society. Why would anyone think that some central planning mechanism could determine how much paint, lumber, concrete, steel, etc., is needed in each state, county, and town in America? It has been tried in many places in the world for many years as it is always appealing to leftists the world over, and it has destroyed nation after nation wherever people allow themselves to be seduced by its false promises.

Socialism as slavery

In reality, socialism is a form of slavery, as is pure democracy, and that is why this country was founded as a Constitutional Republic. Socialism tells us that it is always acting for the common good and not for the good of greedy capitalists but in a multicultural society such as this one, the common good is very difficult to ascertain if it exists at all.. There is no common universal good to work for in multicultural societies only a multitude of diverse groups all working to achieve power and with it control over the system and over peoples’ lives.

Big media allies

Would-be socialists usually need allies in their struggle to gain power and dominance over the whole of society. In the case of today’s American Socialists, they ally with big media to aid their efforts and cover their misdeeds and mistakes, and deny critical information to their victims. Pure democracy is pure majority rule. It sounds so noble and grand to say we don’t need the Electoral College anymore because we are now sophisticated enough at this point in history to simply vote and let the majority prevail. People who put forward that majority rule argument are usually associated with groups who think they are, or soon will be, the majority. Socialists usually demand majority rule over individual rights as soon as they have, or think they have, a majority, so they are constantly proselytizing to gain numbers.

We sometimes forget that individual rights are important, and in fact, are most important to a free people. I remind people from time to time that a lynch mob is a majority and has only one dissenting vote. The law prevails and protects individuals from abuse by the majority, at least that’s what the law is supposed to do and when properly respected that’s what it does.

From benevolence to slavery

The slavery aspect of socialism manifests itself when a group of benevolent socialists gains control of the political and economic systems and disposes of individual rights. Once individual rights are no longer respected there is nothing to prevent all the benevolent socialists from robbing you and stealing your labor, thus you become their slave. In other words, the fruits of your labor are taken from you by force for the common good, as they define it.

When our new socialists, who in our scenario have power, decide to levy confiscatory taxes; say they propose to tax certain incomes at 70% or even higher, many people think that’s great because it doesn’t include them and they seem to have no problem with enslaving and robbing others at gunpoint. That is just class envy and greed, coupled with ignorance of how the income tax started originally and expanded continually over about 100 years. They don’t seem to understand or care that, just as with the income tax, the threshold limits will go up with the need for money. The idea that we are perverting a system of individual rights and private property that is vital in the world today also seems lost on them.

Introducing AOC

Along with the new out-in-the-open drive for socialism in the U.S. congress, we now have our newest socialist proponent and member of congress from the Bronx, New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or as she is known by her 2.8 million twitter followers, AOC. For the sake of brevity I will join her followers for today and refer to her as AOC. She is 29 years old and has apparently never accomplished much of anything in her life, except being a bartender, before she was elected to the United States Congress.

Her district is 70% non-white and she used that demographic to her advantage in campaigning door-to-door to show her face and let people know that she believes, as they do, that this is no longer a country for old white men. She comes across in interviews and speeches as ignorant to the extreme but she is smart enough to get herself elected to Congress and become a national voice all within a few days so she has to be reckoned with.

A C-minus-grade essay of a proposal

Once seated in Congress, as promised, she put together and filed her Green New Deal document. I have read it and my opinion of it is that if your high school freshman daughter brought that essay home from her freshman literature class with a C minus you would probably be concerned that she was not as smart as you thought. The document is just a utopian wish list of simplistic socialist benevolence to save the planet along with a lot of left wing racial identity politics from AOC’s mind of impossible nonsense, all coupled to a demand for authority to legally steal and loot the property of others.

Many prominent Democrats who happen to be announced presidential candidates have endorsed it, admittedly before reading it, including Senator Cory Booker, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Sanders was an original co-sponsor and is perhaps the nation’s best known socialist. You might remember his famous lament about waste by saying his store had 25 kinds of deodorant on the shelves.  I suppose the implication is that with central socialized planning there would only be one or two.

What about those long lines, Bernie?

Senator Sanders doesn’t tell us that with socialism, even if he, in his all knowing benevolence, did allow us to have one variety of deodorant we would have to stand in line for two days to buy it. He also doesn’t tell us that he has enough bathrooms in his three homes to shelve all 25 of those cans he saw on the shelf. The grandiose hypocrisy of people like Sanders is just a cover for a raw grab for power over as many people as possible.

Nancy Pelosi did not endorse the Green New Deal which tells me that she is far smarter than I have given her credit for in the past. She simply smiled, symbolically patted AOC on the head and said something like, nobody knows what it is but they are for it, right?

Socialism laid out: the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal is only 14 pages, at least on my printer, and it is supposedly about saving the environment and the planet. But along with it we get a wish list or demand list of leftist politics.  In fact, left wing politics, or progressivism, as they prefer, is the priority in the document rather than the environment. It alleges that identity politics is related to climate change: “A large racial wealth divide amounting to a difference of 20 times more wealth between the average white family and the average black family; and a gender earnings gap that results in women earning approximately 80% as much as men, at the median.”

It is the duty of the government to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous communities, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.From the archived text of the Green New Deal

Wow, that’s just about everybody in the country. I guess we’re all suffering from historic and/or current oppression so theft of our labor and assets is the answer. This goal or demand is just old wealth re-distributionist jargon or the legal right to steal, but most importantly re-distribution of poverty to all of us.

Environmental proposals for the next ten years

Let’s look at some of the goals of the GND that actually have something to do with the environment.  Please keep in mind that these are just a few of the goals of GND and they all must be accomplished within 10 years.

1. “Upgrade or replace every building in the US for state of the art energy efficiency.” Yes that’s right she wants to replace or upgrade all five million commercial and 127 million residential buildings in the US within 10 years. If such a course were possible at all, it would cost trillions and take decades.

2. ”Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, (yes, she said everywhere in a congressional document), build out high speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle.” Well, there goes that Paris vacation next year; it’s gone until we get the ocean railway.

3. “A job with a family sustaining wage, family and medical leave, and retirement security for every American.” What about those too lazy to work? Well, she has that one covered don’t you worry because economic security will be provided to all lazy, working or otherwise.

4. “Plant lots of trees.” Yep, that’s what she said, plant lots of trees is an actual sentence from this congressional document. It is a vague and basically worthless goal, but perhaps achievable.

The farting cows

5. You might not believe this but the phrase “farting cows” actually appears in the document as well. The actual words are, “We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”  There goes our steaks, and the milk for our cereal and what will our children drink? I guess all mothers can breast feed their children. Seriously folks, this is what happens when you actually turn an assignment like saving the planet over to someone who couldn’t make a C on a high school freshman essay.

There are many other items in the GND that are almost as silly but very short on methods of funding such as free healthcare for all, free education, etc., but I will only make you listen to five. If enacted this program of “save the planet” benevolence would lead to absolute poverty for the nation as a whole. It would cause massive inflation, shortages, bank runs and long lines for rationed commodities among other consequences, all bad.

Economic illiteracy

In conclusion, when and where along the road this republic has traveled for roughly 240 years did so much of its population become so economically illiterate? We should care about theft, and about the precedent of allowing the government to steal more than it already does, and we should be aware of the effect on all of us not just a few rich people. Even if we as a people have reached this state of immorality, it won’t work except to create a disaster.

AOC wants a 70% tax on incomes over $10 million. As I’ve said, all this would all be precedent setting, income destroying, and would lead to more money for the road bandits known as government agents. Money and people travel to where they are treated best by nations and by corporate structures within nations.  There are tradeoffs in this economic world, and if you start stealing and calling it legal, then morally it is nevertheless stealing and the tradeoff is freedom and prosperity.

Socialism and its twisted morality

Finally Folks, GND is not a serious document and is really quite silly but it does give us insight into today’s thinking with its morality based on theft as long as it’s by majority vote. That thinking seems to be that we can have anything, no matter how expensive, if the Federal Reserve extends enough credit. That thinking is very wrong and will lead to disaster. The only question, if this even gets a serious hearing, is how soon the disaster will arrive. The debate on the Senate floor, already scheduled by Mitch McConnell, should be epic if it happens and AOC says she insists on a full vote. When your enemy is destroying himself, don’t interfere. I think Winston Churchill quoting Sun Tzu.

At least that’s the way I see it.

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle.

Editor’s Note

Representative Ocasio-Cortez apparently listed her Green New Deal on her House Web page on February 5. By day’s end on February 7, the link resolved to HTTP Error 404: File Not Found. Two days later she tweeted about the takedown on Twitter.

But, like so many other leftist politicians and celebrities, she forgot about the new friend of conservative opposition research. That new friend is The Wayback Machine, or, as its curators call it more formally, The Web Archive. Sadly, the Web Archivists had time to take only one picture of the document before AOC scrubbed it. So it does not have all the details Mr. Castle quoted. But someone else saved the document as a PDF file.

Regular readers of CNAV will recall that CNAV itself did some “opposition research” on Professor Christine Blasey Ford. The Wayback Machine revealed the stages of her attempt to sanitize her on-line history.

CNAV tips its hat and offers kudos to the Web Archive—while noting duly that they never set out to be anyone’s opposition-research resource. In this regard, CNAV offers this warning to conservative and liberal alike. Be careful what you publish! Even deletion will not always suffice, if you fail to act swiftly. – Editor.