Between Green Dreams and Liberties: Worldviews in Conflict

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The conflict is not a mere choice between engines and batteries. It’s a choice between the merits and prosperity of free enterprise and the tyranny and poverty of “collectivist variants.”

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Ronald Reagan relished every chance to skewer the ludicrous economic results of Marxist policies.

Indeed, the Gipper often shared self-deprecating jokes from those forced behind the Iron Curtain, which was their small rebellion to find laughter amidst the misery.

Take, for example, the time Reagan highlighted the fact that in the USSR, only one in seven households owned a car — probably because the entire process took a decade, from payment to delivery.

A decade!

Imagine the scene: A buyer shells out his rubles and innocuously asks whether to return for his car in the morning or in the afternoon.

The salesperson, baffled, retorts, “Ten years from now, what difference does it make?”

The punchline was, “Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.”

Although this joke had American audiences in stitches, it was meant to share the truth about communism’s grim reality — a “utopia” of shortages, wastefulness, inefficiency, and long waits.

It’s a system that created a shoe shortage by churning out 800 million pairs of shoes that nobody wanted, a point we covered here. And it’s a system where a child could grow from a kindergartener to a teen, all while their family waited for their first automobile.

These are the stark costs of forsaking the principles of a free market.

For our part, we’re witnessing the fallout from America’s own collectivist zealotry, most notably in the “green” sector.

Previously we recounted how electric vehicles, despite gobs of taxpayer subsidies, are gathering dust on dealer lots because the public isn’t ready to ditch their gas-powered engines.

But even that fact doesn’t depict the EV bloodbath at hand.

For instance, Ford announced that it “lost roughly $36,000 on each EV in the third quarter” of 2023 and has decided to curtail production of the F-150 Lightning.

Will customers notice the change?

Probably not, as the EV pickup truck only sold 24,165 units last year.

Meanwhile, by comparison, the company’s flagship F-150 gas guzzler sold an astonishing 750,000 vehicles.

It looks like Ford’s stomach for progressive eco-signaling has a limit, and that limit can be calculated by subtracting 24,165 from 750,000.

In similar news, General Motors has suspended sales of its Blazer EV SUV because of numerous “software” issues. Apparently “complaints have piled up on social media about glitches including inoperable window switches and batteries that won’t charge,” notes the Wall Street Journal.

Shoot, even the luxury brand Mercedes-Benz is feeling the financial pinch. The CEO called the EV market a “pretty brutal space” and questioned whether the “current status quo” was “sustainable” in the long run.

The watchdog group Consumer Reports sheds more light on the lackluster sales, reporting that “new EVs have 79 percent more problems than [traditional] vehicles.”

And yet, the central planners remain undeterred, refusing to take No as an answer, as they rush to throw billions more down the “green” sinkhole.

At first glance, their actions may mystify. However, a closer look unveils the real agenda.

The drive behind electric vehicles, solar energy, and wind power, as well as the push to swap beef for bugs, restrict coffee output, and regulate cow farts, isn’t about combating “climate change.”

On the contrary, this fanatical campaign is about consolidating control — the totalitarian itch must be scratched.

Don’t take my word for it, though.

H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute has the receipts.

Consider the words of Saikat Chakrabarti, once chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. He boasted in 2019 that the “Green New Deal” was never really about the climate. It was, as he confessed, an ambitious plan to “change-the-entire-economy.”

Or take Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. She proudly declared that adherence to the Paris Climate Accord would fundamentally alter the “economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

And now “experts” associated with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are demanding that left-wing climate scientists be given carte blanche authority to “make policy prescriptions” and “oversee their implementation,” cutting out lawmakers and all that messy representative democracy stuff that gets in the way.

Seriously.

IPCC Vice-Chair Sonia Seneviratne said,

“At some point, we need to say that if you want to achieve this aim set by policymakers, then certain policies need to be implemented. As climate change becomes worse and worse, it is becoming more difficult to be policy relevant without being prescriptive.”

The World Economic Forum has become a stage for this kind of hubris, one that champions power over people, with industry tycoons and political figures brainstorming ways to “manage” the masses.

This thinking epitomizes what is commonly referred to as “globalism.”

But not every world leader is on board.

Argentina’s Javier Milei recently rebuked the Davos snobs, and he did it right to their faces.

The opening salvo:

“Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.

Unfortunately, in recent decades, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism. Some have been motivated by well-meaning individuals who are willing to help others, and others have been motivated by the wish to belong to a privileged caste.

We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world. Rather, they are the root cause. Do believe me: no one is in better place than us, Argentines, to testify to these two points.”

Milei explained that not only is capitalism a better economic model to “end hunger, poverty, and extreme poverty across our planet,” but it is morally superior to boot because it “respect[s] the property rights of individuals.”

Fact check: true!

So, as the EV market falters and political forces double down on interventionist failures, we must be reminded of the actual conflict.

It’s not a mere choice between engines and batteries.

This is a clash of worldviews: the merits of free enterprise against the “collectivist variants,” as Milei calls them.

“Do not yield to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself,” said the Argentinian president.

Let’s hope for more leaders like Milei with the courage to define the worldview terms at play and resist the tide of collectivism attempting to make an ignoble comeback.

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