Plunder and Deceit: Big Government's Exploitation of Young People and the Future

by Mark R. Levin

  The Heritage Foundation’s findings underscore the problem. It reports that “On average, unlawful immigrant households received $24,721 per household in government benefits and services in FY 2010. This figure includes direct benefits, means-tested benefits, education, and population-based services received by the household but excludes the cost of public goods, interest on the government debt, and other payments for prior government functions. By contrast, unlawful immigrant households on average paid only $10,334 in taxes. Thus, unlawful immigrant households received $2.40 in benefits and services for each dollar paid in taxes.”60 “All unlawful immigrant households together [in 2010] received $93.7 billion per year in government benefits and services and paid $39.2 billion, yielding an aggregate annual deficit of $54.5 billion.”61

  Under Obama’s recent unconstitutional executive amnesty, the CBO concluded that should it be implemented, between 2 million and 2.5 million illegal immigrants will “have received approval for deferred action” by 2017. Therefore, many will become eligible for Social Security, Medicare, and the earned income tax credit. “Those who are approved for deferred action are considered lawfully present in the country but do not gain legal status. However, they can, and most do, receive authorization to work. Because they are deemed lawfully present during the period of their deferred status, they are eligible to receive Medicare and Social Security benefits if they meet the programs’ requirements.”62 Those granted deferred status and work permits are also eligible for the earned income tax credit.63 Therefore, the drain on already hemorrhaging federal entitlements and programs is further exacerbated.

  The worst of the statists and their surrogates seek political opportunism and racial balkanization as a means to holding or acquiring governing power.64 And they are intent on accomplishing these ends through mostly unlawful and unconstitutional means, such as Obama’s executive and administrative fiats. Even now, with the expectation that a substantial percentage of newly naturalized aliens would vote for the Democratic Party’s 2016 nominee for president, the Department of Homeland Security’s Task Force on New Americans is reportedly focusing resources on urging 9 million green card holders (aliens and noncitizens) to become naturalized American citizens as quickly as possible, in hopes of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.65 Others perpetuate the myths and outright deceptions about the economic and societal benefits of unrelenting, unassimilated waves of immigration. These are among the forces that are driving the immigration agenda. And they are succeeding. After analyzing current census data, CIS reports that legal and illegal immigration will reach an astounding 51 million in the next eight years, which represents 82 percent of the population growth in America, meaning that the immigrant population is growing four times faster than the native-born population. The Census Bureau projects the 2023 total immigrant population will reach 14.8 percent, the highest level ever reported.66

  The American people are broadly opposed to these immigration policies. According to The Pew Research Center, 69 percent of Americans want to restrict and control immigration rates—72 percent of whites, 66 percent of blacks, and 59 percent of Hispanics.67 Gallup reports that by two to one, Americans want immigration levels reduced68; and Reuters found that by nearly three to one, Americans want immigration levels reduced.69

  The phrase E Pluribus Unum, “out of many, one,” is part of the centerpiece of the Great Seal of the United States. It speaks to the unity of the states and the people, despite their diverse backgrounds, as one American identity with a distinctly American culture. The most troublesome aspect of unbridled immigration and hostility toward assimilation is the certainty with which it will disunite and unravel America—as millions of new immigrants self-segregate into ethnic, racial, and religious enclaves. It also clearly and hugely influences adversely the economy, employment, governmental spending, and more. And those who will suffer most are, yet again, younger people and future generations, who will inherit what has been wrought.

  SEVEN

  * * *

  ON THE ENVIRONMENT

  SO YOU THOUGHT THE environmental movement was about clean air, clean water, and polar bears? Such messages are especially seductive to younger people, albeit hugely deceptive and manipulative.

  John Beale is a former top-ranking Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official in the Obama administration who was sentenced to prison for fraud. But starting in mid-2009, he told congressional investigators he was working on a “green economics” project to “modify the DNA of the capitalist system.” As reported by Fox News, “he argued that environmental regulation was reaching its ‘limits’ because ‘the fundamental dynamic of the capitalistic system is for businesses and individuals to try to externalize costs.”1

  Beale is among a growing number of self-appointed statists, mostly unknown to the public, who have insinuated themselves into positions of governance or hold themselves out as experts, and whose real ideology and agenda extend far beyond clean air and water. For example, in a recent interview, fanatical anticapitalist and “climate activist” Naomi Klein proclaimed that “Capitalism increasingly is a discredited system because it is seen as a system that venerates greed above all else. . . . There’s a benefit to climate discussion to name a system that lots of people already have problems with for other reasons.” She continued, “I don’t know why it is so important to save capitalism. It is a pretty battered brand. . . . Just focusing on climate is getting us nowhere. . . . Many, many more people recognize the need to change our economy. . . . If climate can be our lens to catalyze this economic transformation that so many people need for other even more pressing reasons then that may be a winning combination.” Klein added, “This economic system is failing the vast majority of people. . . . [Capitalism] is also waging a war on the planet’s life support system.”2

  Much of the so-called environmental movement today has transmuted into an aggressively nefarious and primitive faction. In the last fifteen years, many of the tenets of utopian statism have coalesced around something called the “degrowth” movement. Originating in Europe but now taking a firm hold in the United States, the “degrowthers,” as I shall characterize them, include in their ranks none other than President Barack Obama. On January 17, 2008, Obama made clear his hostility toward, of all things, electricity generated from coal and coal-powered plants. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal . . . under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. . . .”3 Obama added, “. . . So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”4

  Degrowthers define their agenda as follows: “Sustainable degrowth is a downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well-being and enhances ecological conditions and equity on the planet. It calls for a future where societies live within their ecological means, with open localized economies and resources more equally distributed through new forms of democratic institutions.”5 It “is an essential economic strategy to pursue in overdeveloped countries like the United States—for the well-being of the planet, of underdeveloped populations, and yes, even of the sick, stressed, and overweight ‘consumer’ populations of overdeveloped countries.”6

  For its proponents and adherents, degrowth has quickly developed into a pseudo-religion and public-policy obsession. In fact, the degrowthers insist their ideology reaches far beyond the environment or even its odium for capitalism and is an all-encompassing lifestyle and governing philosophy. Some of its leading advocates argue that “Degrowth is not just an economic concept. We shall show that it is a frame constituted by a large array of concerns, goals, strategies and actions. As a result, degrowth has now become a confluence point where streams of critical ideas and political action converge.”7 Degrowth is “an interpretative frame for a social movement, understood as the mechanism through whi
ch actors engage in a collective action.”8

  The degrowthers seek to eliminate carbon sources of energy and redistribute wealth according to terms they consider equitable. They reject the traditional economic reality that acknowledges growth as improving living conditions generally but especially for the impoverished. They embrace the notions of “less competition, large scale redistribution, sharing and reduction of excessive incomes and wealth.”9 Degrowthers want to engage in polices that will set “a maximum income, or maximum wealth, to weaken envy as a motor of consumerism, and opening borders (“no-border”) to reduce means to keep inequality between rich and poor countries.”10 And they demand reparations by supporting a “concept of ecological debt, or the demand that the Global North pays for past and present colonial exploitation in the Global South.”11

  French economist and leading degrowther Serge Latouche asserts that “We are currently witnessing the steady commercialization of everything in the world. Applied to every domain in this way, capitalism cannot help but destroy the planet much as it destroys society, since the very idea of the market depends on unlimited excess and domination.”12 He also abhors economic growth and wealth creation, the very attributes necessary to improve the human condition and societies: “A society based on economic contraction cannot exist under capitalism.”13 Indeed, on July 18, 2014, scores of extreme groups throughout the world endorsed a proclamation titled the Margarita Declaration on Climate Change (“changing the system not the climate”), which calls for, among other things, an end to the “capitalist hegemonic system.”14

  Degrowth is “usually characterized by a strong utopian dimension.” Its foundations rely on a version of “economic relations based on sharing, gifts and reciprocity, where social relations and conviviality are central.”15

  To implement this utopian vision of radical egalitarian outcomes, the degrowth movement employs strategies such as “alternative building, opposition and research, and in relation to capitalism, they can be ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘post capitalist’ and ‘despite capitalism.’ ”16 The degrowthers insist that governments establish a living wage and reduce the workweek to twenty hours.17 Apparently discounting the fact that the population of the globe has increased by several billion human beings in the intervening years, they call for bringing “material production back down to the levels of the 1960s and 1970s” and “return[ing] to small-scale farming.”18 And degrowthers “[d]ecree a moratorium on technological innovation, pending an in-depth assessment of its achievements and a reorientation of scientific and technical research according to new aspirations.”19 Imagine the power and breadth of the police state necessary to enforce this form of antediluvian autocracy.

  We need not look far. In 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared, in part: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”20

  Over forty-years ago, philosopher and author Ayn Rand, in her book Return of the Primitive—The Anti-Industrial Revolution, wrote presciently that the statists had changed their line of attack. “Instead of their old promises that collectivism would create universal abundance and their denunciations of capitalism for creating poverty, they are now denouncing capitalism for creating abundance. Instead of promising comfort and security for everyone, they are now denouncing people for being comfortable and secure.”21 She continued: “The demand to ‘restrict’ technology is the demand to restrict man’s mind. It is nature—i.e., reality—that makes both these goals impossible to achieve. Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whether and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind—not the state—that withers away.”22 “To restrict technology would require omniscience—a total knowledge of all the possible effects and consequences of a given development for all the potential innovators of the future. Short of such omniscience, restrictions mean the attempt to regulate the unknown, to limit the unborn, to set rules for the undiscovered.”23 “A stagnant technology is the equivalent of a stagnant mind. A ‘restricted’ technology is the equivalent of a censored mind.”24

  The degrowthers would deindustrialize advanced economies, destroy modernity, and turn plenty into scarcity. As utopian statists, or what I have characterized in the past as enviro-statists, degrowthers reject experience, knowledge, and science, for a paradisiacal abstraction, while claiming to have mastered them all. Ultimately, for the more fanatical among them, the ultimate purpose is revolution and transformation; the environment is incidental if not extraneous to their central mission, except as a cunning strategem.

  Most Americans do not wish to throw themselves into a regressive, primal lifestyle. They enjoy the abundance of untold human benefits and improvements resulting from entrepreneurship, capitalism, and economic growth. Consequently, the degrowth movement has attempted to conceal its paganlike militant opposition to fossil fuels and carbon dioxide by mainstreaming its agenda with politically generated and well-funded campaigns promoting what was once called “man-made global cooling,” then “man-made global warming,” and now “man-made climate change.” Nonetheless, like most dogmatists, the degrowthers are impatient. The revolution is now and change must be immediate. Thus, the degrowthers’ agenda is built around hysterical doomsday predictions of environmental armageddon, which can only be avoided by the imposition of their severe, ideologically driven agenda.

  Dr. Mark J. Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan, compiled a list of “18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970,” including the end of Western civilization in fifteen or thirty years; the end of the nation and the world as a suitable place for human habitation; and an increase in the death rate of at least 100 to 200 million people each year during the next ten years due to starvation. By 2000, most of the world will be in famine; by 1985, air pollution will reduce sunlight on earth, requiring city populations to wear gas masks; the rate of nitrogen in the atmosphere will be so significant that in time none of our land will be usable; two hundred thousand Americans will die in 1973 from smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles; before 1990, the world will run out of lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver; by 2000, there will be no more crude oil; after 2000, the world will run out of copper; in twenty-five years between 75 and 80 percent of all species of animals will be extinct; and so on.25

  In 2008, Dr. John Brignell, retired professor of industrial instrumentation at the University of Southampton in Britain, composed a list of more than five hundred alarmist claims made in news reports of damage supposedly caused by “man-made global warning,” which are so utterly preposterous I was compelled to publish them in my book Liberty and Tyranny, but are too numerous to list here.26

  In this milieu of statist-generated delirium, the degrowthers ensconced in the federal government are imposing on society infinite “ameliorative” rules, regulations, and coercive edicts, and the necessary fines, penalties, and even jail sentences to enforce them. And those who object to these governmental commands and challenge the “science” behind them are ridiculed and dismissed as, among other things, “climate-change deniers” or “
flat-earthers.”

  In the last several years, particularly during the Obama administration, the federal government has embraced key elements of the degrowther movement and issued a rash of “major” regulations. Major regulations are rules that are likely to result in “(1) An annual effect on the economy of $100 million or more; (2) A major increase in costs or prices for consumers, individual industries, Federal, State, or local government agencies, or geographic regions; or (3) Significant adverse effects on competition, employment, investment, productivity, innovation, or on the ability of United States–based enterprises to compete with foreign-based enterprises in domestic or export markets.”27

  The EPA is the main federal governmental fortress for the degrowth agenda. Consistent with the ideological aims of the degrowth movement, the EPA has dedicated itself to gutting the production of carbon-based resources such as coal, oil, and natural gas as supplies of relatively cheap and abundant electricity and fuel. In recent years, the EPA has tenaciously ramped up its regulatory efforts to cripple the production of energy from these sources. Since 2010, the EPA has issued sixty-five major regulations affecting all manner of industries.28 In 2014 alone, the EPA promulgated thirteen major regulations.29 Affected industries include: energy companies (particularly coal companies); the auto industry; commercial and solid waste incinerators; portland cement manufacturing; oceangoing ships; petrochemical companies; the airline industry; the construction industry; and home builders and contractors.30 In 2015, the EPA is completing twenty-five major regulations and plans on proposing twenty-six new major regulations.31 Affected industries include, again, energy companies, the auto industry, and construction, as well as farming.32 The Heritage Foundation concludes that by 2038, the carbon-dioxide rules alone, which phase out the use of coal, an abundant natural resource in the United States, will cost the nation nearly six hundred thousand jobs and an aggregate gross domestic product decrease of $2.23 trillion.33