A DIVERSE GROUP OF PEOPLE REMOVING THEIR LIBERAL BLINDFOLDS.

With the political pendulum swinging to the right, conservative victory is likely in the upcoming election. Some say this rightward swing is so pronounced that conservative ascendancy in federal and state government is likely, perhaps, for years to come.

If that is the case, the diminishing or even the demise of contemporary liberal environmentalism is virtually assured.

Which means, it’s time to start designing the conservative environmentalism that will replace it.

Those of you who consider yourself green to the core may despair at hearing this, but you should be celebrating instead. By making this transition, environmentalism will be shedding a number of debilitating dysfunctions that are endemic in liberalism.

One liberal dysfunction that a conservative environmentalism wouldn’t suffer is a systemic blindness that affects all of liberalism in all of its issue areas, environmental and otherwise.

ASSUME YOU ARE WRONG

I learned about this blindness as I experienced my own evolution from eco-radical to conservative environmentalist. Early in my transition, I ran across a way of managing our relationship with Nature that, at the time, was named “Holistic Resource Management” (changed now to Holistic Management). According to this management system, when dealing with nature in a way designed to produce a certain result, one should always “assume you are wrong.”

When I made passing mention of that in a conversation with my wife. Her response was short and to the point, “If you assume what you’re doing is wrong,” she said. “Why would you bother to do it?”

I had to admit that was a pretty good objection. As I thought more and read more about this very counter-intuitive directive, however, I realized it actually makes very good sense. In fact, I believe assuming that we are wrong can add to our chances of success of just about anything we do.

How’s that?

The reason we should assume we are wrong, according to Holistic Management, is to make sure that we monitor what we’re doing so that we’re aware of whether if it is working or not. To someone who is dealing with nature (or with anything in a results-directed way) the reason for monitoring what you’re doing should be obvious. If you don’t keep track of how things are going you could create an outcome that is very different than what you intend — an unintended consequence, so to speak — that could be very difficult, even impossible, to reverse.

However, if we assume we’re wrong (or at least that the possibility exists that we could be wrong), and we monitor what we’re doing, chances are pretty good that, if things do start to get off track, we will become aware of it. Having thus been alerted, we have the opportunity to stop doing what isn’t working and do something different or even to take a different approach altogether.

To clarify this with an example that has to do with our discussion here: If the people who were trying to save the threatened fish, the spikedace, on the Verde River (covered in a previous post ) had considered that there was a possibility that what they were doing might not work, they would have been much less likely to have continued to apply that policy until they had exterminated the very creature they claimed to be trying to save.

What caused the extermination of the spikedace in the Verde, then, is the fact that the liberal environmental groups that intimidated the U. S. Forest Service into removing grazing from the riverside assumed that they were right. They assumed they were right not only to the degree that they did not monitor the situation sufficiently to become aware of the fact that their policies were changing the river in such a way that it was becoming uninhabitable to the spikedace, but when U. S. Forest Service scientists did take note of that fact, the environmental groups exerted sufficient pressure to have those scientists removed from the case.

EVEN THE HORSE IS INCREDULOUS!

To this day those environmentalists consider the Verde debacle to be a success. They consider it a success in spite of the fact that, after the policy was installed, the river did change and the spikedace appears to have been extirpated (none have been seen in the river in 15 years). Those self-designated spikedace-savers consider what they did on the Verde to be a success because the campaign to save several “threatened” or “endangered” native fishes, including the Verde River spikedace, did succeed in getting grazing removed from 900 miles of riverside in the American Southwest.

This reveals the core flaw in contemporary liberalism, environmental and otherwise. Contemporary liberalism identifies solutions as a matter of the installation of policies — liberal policies. And once that policy is installed liberals consider the problem solved. In other words liberals always consider themselves to be right. That’s how liberals apply their own blinders, and that’s how they blindfold themselves to realistic assessments of the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of their policies.

Take the Drake Exclosure mentioned in a number of other posts: Environmentalists consider management of the denuded Drake to be “right” in spite of the fact that it has continued to deteriorate during 65+ years of being protected from being used (impacted) by humans.

PROTECTED SINCE 1946.

They consider their policy of protection to be “right”, in spite of the fact that the unprotected land outside the Drake is in better condition and supports a more diverse and more plentiful community of native plants and animals (see below).

OUTSIDE THE DRAKE, ALL NATIVE GRASSES (Photo taken same day.)

How about another example. In California it has been found that the “threatened” Bay Checkerspot butterfly has ceased to exist on land where grazing has been stopped, in some cases to “protect” the butterfly. Guess which land environmentalists consider to be managed the “right way.”

Moving beyond the environmental aspect of liberalism: Consider the Occupy Wall Streeters and their call for an equitable redistribution of wealth: Do you think they consider that policy to be the right thing to do? Absolutely.

Do they think they consider that there is any way in which it could be wrong? Absolutely not!

If the Occupiers get their way, and their policy is made law will they monitor to see if it’s working?

Or, if things start to go wrong (which happens every time this policy is tried), will they do everything they can to cover up its shortcomings? Will they propose more regulation? Stricter penalties? Will they say we need to give it more time? Will they blame their failures on others: the rich, the 1%, human greed, Republicans, Conservatives, Bitter clingers…..

Plug any other liberal crusade/campaign into the above scenario — universal healthcare, cap and trade, renewable energy, affirmative action, etc. — and it will fit perfectly.

All liberal policies and the actions that make up those policies are considered to be the right thing to do because they are morally right, at least within a liberal frame of reference.

To liberals we all have a right to have enough money, to have access to health care, to have a place to live, to have day care for our children, a diaper service. And, we have a right to a healthy environment, species have a right to not be made extinct, etc. And all liberal policies that facilitate those rights are also right.

Because liberals believe all of those policies are “the right thing to do,” to ask whether or not they work (whether they get the right results) is to utter an irrelevance. We’re all taught, “You should be honest no matter what the consequences.” Or, “If you do the right thing, whatever happens is what is supposed to happen.”

Complain about redistributionist tax policies, i. e. say they don’t work, and you will be called greedy or a pawn of wall street.

Get into an argument about energy policy and you’ll quickly be confronted with, “We have to develop alternative fuels because we’re going to run out of oil someday and drilling for oil just gets us into wars in the Middle East. Anyway, it wrecks the planet and just makes filthy rich oil companies even richer.”

Environmental policy? “Why shouldn’t we protect as many species as possible from the environmental impacts of humans? Humans don’t have the right to use the planet purely for our benefit, and the animals were here first anyway!”

Presenting all issues as a matter of right and wrong is what makes liberalism so seductive because it means you don’t have to be an ecologist to know what to do to keep a small, rare fish in Arizona from going extinct. Never mind if you exterminate the fish in the process. It’s not your fault the fish died out in spite of the fact you did the right thing to save it.

Nor do you have to know anything about ecology to know how to restore damaged rangeland in Arizona. You protect it. And if that land doesn’t get any better, in fact if it gets worse, you say you didn’t protect it soon enough, or long enough, and if the unprotected land next door is in better shape, you ignore it and continue to do what you know is “the right thing to do.”

Regarding the economy, reduce all issues to a simple matter of right and wrong and you don’t have to know anything about economics to know how to manage the largest economy on Earth. Do the right thing. Redistribute income. Put government in charge of health care, in charge of everything. As long as government is run by people like you, i. e. liberals, i. e. people who want to “do what’s right,” no matter what happens you can consider yourself morally superior to those who refuse to go along with you whatever the reason.

But is protecting the spikedace really the right thing to do if it exterminates the fish?

Is protecting rangeland, like that within the Drake Exclosure, really the right thing to do if it dooms that land to a future of deteriorating desertification?

And, Is creating a more equitable redistribution of wealth the right thing to do if it creates the kind of economic collapse happening, as I write this, in Greece, the country with the most aggressive redistributionist policies in Europe? Or Portugal. Or Spain, Or France, Or England…

Once again, we can thank one of the planet’s pre-eminent conservatives — Mother Nature, as well as the spikedace and other plants, animals and ecosystems — for showing us that issues — environmental, economic, political — are not just about morals (right and wrong) they are about practical matters, too — survival, ecological function, jobs, energy, wealth.

And we can thank them for demonstrating to us that results do matter.

All we have to do to avail ourselves of this insight is listen to Mother Nature, little fish, butterflies, the true condition of the economy, etc.. And the only way we can listen is if we assume we are wrong.

WHICH WORKS BEST?

CONSERVATIVES SUSTAIN A THREATENED FISH

LIBERALS EXTIRPATE IT

In the mid-1990s, two environmental groups intimidated the U. S. Forest Service to remove grazing from along the Verde River in central Arizona. The reason? The groups alleged the cows were a threat to a “threatened” fish — a 3” native minnow called the Spikedace. When the Forest Service caved to the groups’ threatened lawsuit and halted grazing along the river, trees invaded streamside meadows such as the one with the cowboys riding through it displayed on the header at the top of the your screen. Cattle acting as mowers had kept these lush oases relatively free of trees for more than a hundred years. Removing grazing, however, caused a dramatic ecological change along the entire “protected” area. When floodwaters coursed through these transformed meadows the invading trees created turbulence which in turn caused erosion. The result is shown in the photo above.

The final irony in all this is: no spikedace have been seen in the river since it was “protected,” but plenty were seen before that. What that means, in my estimation and the estimation of the government’s own scientists, is Liberal Environmentalism extirpated a threatened species.

CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM
The second photo shows one of the areas along the Verde that is privately owned. It continues to be grazed and managed by one of the ranchers who has remained in business in spite of Forest Service policies. On this section of the river, which is managed according to the principles of Conservative Environmentalism, the meadows remain intact.

Which one works best?

What do you want?

WHAT HAPPENED?!
(no spikedace were harmed in the making of this slide – I turned a photo upside down.)
When government scientists took note that the removal of grazing along the Verde had apparently altered the habitat in such a way that it had become inhospitable to spikedace, they proposed a study to confirm or deny this. Such a study, they hypothesized, might enable them to avert the total disappearance of spikedace from the Verde. The study might have done just that if not for a regional Forest Service fisheries biologist who was simultaneously serving as an officer with an environmental group publicly campaigning to remove grazing from all public land. This administrator used the opportunity provided by her position with the Forest Service to discredit the scientists and their proposed study. The harassment became so intense one of the scientists, the top native fish expert in the southwest, retired and left Arizona. The two other scientists on the team were replaced and the study scrapped.
To this day, none of the environmentalists nor the federal employees responsible for the demise of the spikedace and the serious reduction in numbers of the rest of the upper Verde’s native fish have been held accountable for this “taking” of a threatened species even though it is a federal crime. None have expressed regret that their action exterminated a population of a threatened species, nor have any of them proposed reversing the policy.

Instead the liberal environmentalist groups and the federal and state agencies involved have proposed to poison the river and to continue doing it periodically to kill the nonnative spikedace-eating predators that have thrived in the river since grazing was removed and the character of the habitat changed. After each poisoning they would restock the river with spikedace. They would have to stock it with more than spikedace because, ironically and tragically, the poison they would use would kill every living thing in the river with gills. That would include any other rare, threatened, or endangered species that live there, unknown numbers of invertebrates (which spikedace eat), and any spikedace that might have managed to survive the environmentalists’ first “solution.” Note that in other streams in which this poison has been used the living community has never fully recovered and any benefit to the species supposed to “benefit” has been temporary and illusory. Note also that the new spikedace would be stocked into a deep, cool, mud-bottomed river that is not longer suitable habitat for them.

Compounding the absurdity of this tragedy, the poison which the government and the enviros intend to use has been linked by published scientific research to the onset of Parkinson’s disease in humans.

THE CONSERVATIVE ALTERNATIVE or
WILL THE REAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS PLEASE STAND

When cattle grazing along the Verde was first alleged to be a threat to the spikedace and other native fish in the river, one rancher— a political conservative —immediately volunteered to move his cattle off Forest Service lands along the river on which he was leasing grazing access. He even voluntarily removed his animals off his private lands along the river, which he was not required to do. More than that, he enlisted friends to help plant willow saplings every ten feet on both sides of the river for 4 miles to help the river “return to nature.”

When it became clear that removing grazing wasn’t helping the spikedace, but was actually causing its numbers to plunge, this same rancher offered to resume controlled grazing of cattle along the riverside to try to restore it to a spikedace-friendly condition. (Controlled grazing means he would manage his cattle to achieve environmental goals as well as production goals.)

Beyond that, he offered to rewater an archaic stretch of riverbed with water he would normally use for irrigating crops and create a refugia in which to raise young spikedace to restock the river. The Forest Service turned down his offer to restore the habitat, and the Arizona Game and Fish Department blocked his plan to create a refugia for the fish.

When this happened the rancher pointed out to the Forest Service that the agreement he had signed with them when he removed his cattle from along the river contained the provision that, if this action didn’t work to bring back the fish, he could put his cows back on the river. When the USDA refused to keep this agreement he teamed with other ranchers and conservative activists to bring to light the fact that there were other situations, similar to the one on Verde, in which liberal environmental solutions had actually caused harm to the environment. And that there were activities generally associated with and championed by political conservatives (ranching and farming) that had benefited it.

For example, the government’s own researchers had determined that the largest known populations of spikedace and loach minnow (another “Threatened” native fish) occur on the Gila River in New Mexico where livestock are present or where other agricultural operations impact the river.

Adding weight to the claim that conservative environmentalists can be an endangered species’ best friend (and liberals their worst enemy), on two other streams in Arizona livestock exclusion was followed by the disappearance or severe reduction of populations of another threatened species, the Gila topminnow. Again, on other sections of those same streams, or on nearby streams, controlled grazing continues and so do the fish.

With that in mind, Verde River ranchers and their allies have been pressing for “equal protection under the law.” This would require that environmental laws be applied to environmentalists as well as to other users of the land.

Currently, with liberal environmentalism calling the shots, this is not the case. Before the removal of grazing from along the Verde, the “scientific studies” used as a justification for this action were collections of unproved assumptions and urban legends about how protection would benefit the environment and how grazing and other human activities threatened it. No consideration whatsoever was given to the fact that controlled grazing or any other human use would or could have any positive impacts on any aspect of the environment, including the health of native fish populations. Nor that the removal of these activities could have any negative impacts.

This myopia continues to be standard operating procedure on other streams in the American West in spite of what has happened on the Verde. Liberal environmentalists are still demanding the complete removal of controlled grazing from native fish habitat in direct contradiction of the best scientific information available, and agriculturists are continuing to be villainized without any consideration of scientifically supported evidence that they might be the primary reason why the habitat supports natives fish at all.

Members of the conservative coalition moved to action by the environmental debacles on the Verde and elsewhere are lobbying state governments and federal agencies to require that environmental decisions be based on studies that consider the positive value to the environment of productive human activities and the negative impacts of removing those activities.

Included in that campaign is an effort to require consultation with the EPA before any wildlife agency can release poison into the environment for any reason. At present this rather conservative measure, which is required by federal law, has yet to observed in cases of poisoning the nation’s waters to achieve liberal environmentalists’ “species recovery solutions.”

THE SCORECARD

LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM:

• Made decisions based on self-serving assumptions and urban legends rather than on the basis of the best science available or on the basis of actual experience.

• Not only extirpated the threatened fish they supposedly were “saving,” but altered the habitat in a way that harmed the food web on which those fish depended, many other species, other environmental functions and values, and the lives of people who were actually a boon to the values the environmentalists claim they were trying to save.

• Got a free pass on all of the above by being the beneficiary of political and media prejudice that groups “protecting” the environment can do no wrong.

• Have accepted no responsibility or ownership for what they have done and to this day are continuing to try to expand this failed approach to more and more streams.

• Tried to deflect responsibility for the harm they had caused by intimidating and working to discredit scientists who pointed out that their program was creating the exact opposite of what the environmentalists contended it would produce.

• Tried to cover up and remedy the disaster they had created by doing something that was even worse: releasing a poison into the environment that effected even more species, made the results more permanent, and poses a confirmed threat to human health.

CONSERVATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM:

• Ranchers played an important role in sustaining a healthy population of native fish (including spikedace) in the Verde River for more than a hundred years. In southern Arizona, ranchers have performed this function for more than 300 years.

• When the Verde ranchers were told they were causing a problem (even though it wasn’t true) at least one of the ranchers voluntarily removed his cattle from the river and even went the extra mile of planting thousands of willows to speed the river’s recovery.

• When it became obvious that the removal of controlled grazing was harming rather than helping the fish, ranchers offered to resume what did work and even went “above and beyond” to use their crop irrigation water to create a fish “nursery” to help bring back the spikedace.

• Ranchers cooperated with scientists to find out what was really going on. Liberal environmentalists refused to do so, and harassed scientists in order to create a coverup.

• Based on the findings of those scientists, ranchers continue to provide the only habitat on the Upper Verde River where native fish continue to hold on.

• Served as advocates for the environment and for the humans harmed and potentially harmed by the destructive actions of liberal environmentalism.

• Conservatives honored their agreements. Liberals did not.

As happens frequently in situations that make me uncomfortable, I couldn’t think of a clever and appropriately devastating rejoinder to make on the spot, so I just grunted and acted disinterested and hoped he would change the subject.

Later on it occurred to me that I should have called him on what was a totally cruel, tasteless, stupid, and completely empty comment—I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t want to be responsible (by wishing it) for the death of a couple of billion people, but when it comes to liberals, I’m not so sure anymore. 

A good retort to his comment, it occurred to me,  would have been to say, “Knowing how you feel about peace and love and all that I’m sure you would never condemn anyone else to be nuked or plagued or committ suicide, or even ask them to do it in your stead. So, I assume what you just said means you, and the other people who think like you, are volunteering to remove yourselves from the planet in order to save it from overpopulation. That is so courageous and self sacrificing, I’m totally in awe. When do you plan for this to happen, and is there anything you’d like me to do for you after you’re gone?”

While I was kicking myself for not having said the above, another thought came to mind that was much more of an awakening and absolutely chilling. It occurred to me that liberals really are removing themselves from the earth, and that they really are committing mass suicide, and they are doing it at a really startling rate. Shades of Hale-Bopp and Jonestown!

At that point I remembered a couple of environmentalists I knew, and a couple more I’m aware of, who killed themselves because they thought they were “part of the problem.” I thought of a woman in England whom I had heard had herself sterilized so she couldn’t increase her carbon footprint by producing other humans. I thought of myself and my wife who had essentially done the same thing—We didn’t have kids at least partially because we swallowed the “Earth is overpopulated” propaganda, too.

I also thought of an article by Mark Steyn called “It’s the Demography, Stupid”). In this article Steyn pointed out that in the U. S. there are only 2.07 births per woman. In Ireland 1.87. In New Zealand 1.79, Australia 1.76, and in Canada 1.5, which is well below replacement rate. Germany and Austria come in at 1.3. Russia and Italy at 1.2; and Spain is at 1.1, which is only about half replacement rate. This means, Steyn points out, that “Spain’s population is halving every generation. By 2050, Italy’s population will have fallen by 22%, Bulgaria’s by 36%, Estonia’s by 52%.” 

In America, demographic trends suggest that the majority of this attrition by far is happening among liberals. Steyn notes that, “In the 2004 election, John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest birthrates; George W. Bush took 25 of the 26 states with the highest.” By 2050, the 100 million more Americans who will be alive will be mostly red-staters.

The next time you talk to a liberal tell him or her goodbye, thank them for their sacrifice, and ask them if you can have their Prius or, better yet, their wine collection.

Ed Abbey, guru of modern radical environmentalism, promised his followers that they would live to “piss on the graves of their enemies.” It appears that he may have had it backwards.

But before you start thinking that liberalism and liberal environmentalism contain the seeds of their own suicide, you should consider the fact that this movement is a very, very good recruiter.

That is the real issue here, and it is the subject of the next and most important post of this blog yet.

What is unique about Ms. Martin’s approach became apparent whenever one of us said something like: “I want all the cows off public lands.”  or ” I want higher grazing fees,” or when a rancher said, “I want fewer regulations and fewer meetings like this to go to.” Whenever a demand like this was made, Tommie would ask the demander what he or she hoped to achieve by such an action. How we would expect the land to change as a result? How would it look? How would it make us feel? What would we want to change? And she would keep asking questions like this until we answered in terms of real world results: that we wanted less bare dirt. More plants. Healthier populations of wildlife, and so forth. 

The result was that, whenever Tommie used this technique, in almost every case, ranchers and environmentalists ended up affirming that they wanted the same results. Everyone wanted green mountainsides and more vital plant communities and populations of wildlife appropriate for the type of land it was. 

Realizing that we wanted so many of the same things made a huge change in the tone of the meeting. We had started the meeting by making the same demands ranchers and environmentalists always made in situations like this, and the mood had been typically confrontational. Each side cheered for their side and hooted at the demands made by the other side. But, the first time Tommie Martin’s facilitation led one of the ranchers to say he wanted something that was considered “environmental,” I remember that we all sat in stunned silence. At least I know I did. And as this happened a second and third time the meeting became more friendly. We joked. We laughed. Some people even hugged.

I remember being extremely impressed by what had happened, and very puzzled. After I thought about it, I decided that Tommie’s facilitation had revealed that there are two kinds of goals, and I labeled them: “Goals that Incite” and “Goals that Unite.” I also labeled these different kinds of goals “prescriptive” and “descriptive.” 

Prescriptive goals involve prescribing (or demanding) that a certain process or policy be adopted —”Get the cows off.” or (getting back to Obama) forcing energy companies to use wind power and solar rather than drill for more oil or develop cleaner ways to burn coal. 

Descriptive goals involve achieving certain results—greener rangelands, less dependence on foreign oil, or greater prosperity.

Prescriptive goals are “Goals that Incite” because no one, not even a two-year-old likes to be told what to do. 

Descriptive goals are more likely to be Goals that Unite, as they were at the meeting I described above, because, when you get right down to it, most of us really do want the same things. This is especially true with regard to the environment. Who doesn’t want clean air and clean water and healthy ecosystems? 

So, why do people who want the same things fight?

The best way to answer that question was given to me at a small get-together with a couple of friends at which I was showing my slides and talking about what I had discovered at that facilitated meeting.

When I pointed out that the ranchers and environmentalists at that meeting had discovered that they had the same goals, one of my friends, an ecologist and activist, was so offended she positively fumed.

“We have no right to set goals for nature.” she spat. “We need to do the right thing and whatever happens is what’s supposed to happen.

That explained to me better than anything else I have encountered why so few environmentalists were interested in the message that they could achieve what they wanted more effectively by working with ranchers (and other people they saw as environmental adversaries) than by fighting with them. I had made the mistake of believing that, for the people within the mainstream (liberal) environmental movement, environmental goals, such as healthy rangelands, functional watersheds, and healthy wildlife are primary, while, in truth, they are not. 

My friend, the ecologist/activist, and all the others who have no interest whatsoever in working with their adversaries to achieve Goals That Unite, made it very clear that for them and many other mainstream environmental activists, what is primary is getting other people to do what they (the environmentalists) think is “the right thing” regarding the environment, and that protecting endangered species, reducing the human “footprint” on the land, fighting global warming, and the whole list of environmental causes are the excuses they use to impose the regulations, elect the politicians, and win the lawsuits that enable them to dictate people’s actions vis a vis the environment, which means vis a vis everything.

And if the threatened fish disappears, the endangered bird nests somewhere else, and the rangeland turns into desert; that is what’s supposed to happen. You can’t blame them, and you can’t blame the policies they promote. 

My friend took issue with my “manage for common goals” solution to rangeland conflict because, to her, the question of how to manage the environment is a matter of moral judgement—and as with all moral matters, outcomes are irrelevant. How’s that? When we are exhorted to be honest or to follow the golden rule we are told that we must do so whatever the outcome. Whether it benefits us or not. The problem is, how we manage the environment has a practical as well as a moral side. Although the people who forced the removal of cattle from along the Verde River did it because they considered it the right thing to do (See earlier post). They also did it to save a “threatened” fish, and when their action exterminated the fish they and their method deserve to be held accountable.

What does this have to do with Barak Obama? The policies he has promised to bring to government, and is now in the process of enacting, have been sold on the basis of their morality. We’re supposed to abandon the most successful energy source humans have ever devised (fossil fuels) for a bunch of 1960s pipe dreams: windmills, biofuels, solar, and cogeneration (whatever that is), which are technologies into which we’ve poured billions for almost half a century and still they haven’t performed, because “it’s the right thing to do.” We’re supposed to negotiate without preconditions with enemies who place plenty of preconditions on us; turn loose murderers who can’t wait to murder more of us, kill ourselves via increased abortions and euthanasia disguised as restricting treatment to elders and others who are “low priorities” because a socialist economy won’t support as many of us. And last, but certainly not least, we’re supposed to scrap the most effective economy humans have ever devised—free market capitalism—for the real “failed policies of the past”—socialism. 

We’re supposed to do all of this for the flimsy reason that a lot of liberals think it is “the right thing to do.”

As for accountability: When the “chickens” of this transformation come home to roost, you know what’s going to happen. When the economy tanks, when our enemies gain strength and we weaken, when our freedoms disappear and government control is extended into every aspect of our lives, the proponents of these policies are going to tell us that this is “what’s supposed to happen.” They’re going to tell us that it’s is the best we can hope for. It’s what we have to do to live within our means—to keep from destroying the planet. They’re going to give us all these excuses when the real reason is these disasters are the best a socialist economy and policial system can produce.

When that happens will the fact that in a socialist society the people who live highest on the hog are the political leaders be any solace?