David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

June 9, 2008

Cap and Trade: The End of America

This week, the Senate opened debate on the most massive tax increase in history and a government takeover of private industry that makes Roosevelt's New Deal look tiny by comparison. The sheer chutzpah it takes to even offer such a thing is breathtaking, matched only by how frightened we all should be by the sheer economic destruction it would inevitably cause and the loss of freedom to which it would directly lead.

I am speaking, of course, of the ever-so-benign-sounding “cap and trade” bill. This bill would criminalize the normal energy usage and that goes with a prosperous economy and the needs of daily first-world life. It would steadily reduce, over a period of several years, the total amount of carbon emissions permitted, but auction off  “allowances” to the tune of $3.32 trillion to businesses of Congress' choosing. (Hmm, going to your local congressman or senator to purchase exemption from a tyrannical law. Gee, that doesn't sound rife for bribery, graft and corruption at all . . .)

If this sounds familiar, it's an accurate replication of the crooked income tax system that Congress has foisted upon us: High rates that crush the incentive for investment and risk-taking, seize the rewards thereof, yet are riddled with loopholes for all those with the means to grease the palms of those in power who make the decisions. And those of us without – which is most of us – take it in the shorts.

But this goes much farther. This is simply a direct frontal assault on freedom, standards of living and America as we have known it. For, you see, this is cloaked in the cover of “being green,” which is the most dangerous movement in politics today. Why is it the most dangerous? Primarily because it has no opposition whatsoever, so gutless and cowardly are all politicians in the face of the Sierra Club and their fellow enviro-wackos.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. And right now, there is a total vacuum when it comes to standing up for free markets, personal liberty and the freedom to live as one chooses. No one has the guts to tell these tree-hugging lunatics where to shove their CF light bulb mandates, their all-consuming hatred of the car and, most of all, their cult-like blind belief in non-existent global warming as the universal justification for this blatant government thuggery. (What better excuse for huge government than a “global crisis”? And if one doesn't exist, they'll just invent it!)

And if we do not grow a spine and fight back, no matter what we'll be called for doing it, there isn't going to be an America left we can recognize. Which brings me to the secondary reason the radical greens are the most dangerous lobby today: Their real color is red – as in communism.

When the Cold War had a lull starting in 1989 – let's disabuse ourselves of the naïve notion that it ever ended – the remaining believers in Marxism found a home in the far-left environmental crowd. They found common cause in promoting big government. And at first, they were fairly harmless. But as they found that being green was a issue that few were willing to stand against, it rapidly grew in power. A sympathetic, liberally biased media carried much of its water – and still does.

Fast forward to 2008, and Big Green (or Big Red, if you prefer) is now the monster ready to swallow the U.S. economy and radically remake society in their totalitarian and anti-human image. Their agenda is nothing short of forcing living standards downward, taking away energy and the destruction of suburbia and the independence that's part and parcel of it. (Which is ironic, since suburbia was created entirely as a response to unchecked liberal ideas wrecking inner cities in the 1960s. At least lefties clean up after themselves, I suppose.)

Whether it's radical greenies who view people as an invader of and pest upon nature (yet somehow are never consistent and commit suicide to help solve the “problem”), or Marxist reds who haven't gotten over Cold War defeat and still want to turn every city into New Moscow so as to somehow prove that central planning isn't always doomed to abject failure, we must stop this naked attempt to expand government and destroy free markets and personal liberty for the sake of the biggest con job in recent history – the lie that nature is at risk.

Even if they were somehow right, it cannot possibly justify what they are determined to do. We must fight it with every ounce of our being. The nation the founders bequeathed us is at stake, and its survival is by no means certain. And if this isn't sufficient to justify invoking our Declaration right and duty to throw off such government that is evincing its design to reduce us under absolute despotism, then nothing is.

Perhaps it's fitting that green and red make brown – because this whole cap-and-trade thing truly is crap. And needs to be flushed before it smells any worse than it already does.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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