The Future is Green

Carl Milsted, Jr on Apr 20 17:14:39

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Originally posted on May 24th, 2020 on the Green and Free site

Like it or not, the political future is green. The only question is whether it will be Watermelon Green or Country Club Green. Will the future be in the hands of stealth socialists wrapping their commie badness in a green veneer? Or will it be in the hands of conservatives who actually conserve?

Those are the choices before us. Environmental concern is not some kind of left wing conspiracy. It’s a combination of human nature and basic mathematics.

Human nature. Humans like some nature; it’s built into our genes. Millions of Americans hunt, fish, camp and grow their own food for the pleasure of it.

Basic mathematics. The human population has grown enormously over the past few centuries. The planet has not. That means less nature per human. Supply and Demand dictate a higher marginal value of a unit of nature preservation/restoration. This effect grows even greater with prosperity, as other human needs and desires are fulfilled.

Socialists did not create environmentalism. Socialists are cashing in on environmentalism.

And they are winning.

• The Left has overwhelming dominance in our biggest states.
• Conservatives are pariahs on campus, and subject to censorship by the modern media corporations.
• Corporate America in general is spouting Lefty rhetoric.
• Overt socialists are getting elected to Congress and came close to winning the Democratic Presidential nomination.

Yes, the Republican Party holds the Presidency, the Senate, and many state legislatures. [in May 2020] But for how long? Many of those legislative seats are held through Gerrymandering. Republicans hold the Presidency and Senate thanks to quirks in the Constitution. Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by nearly three million votes in 2016.

Many of the Republicans who do get elected are RHINOs, not True Conservatives. Notice how the Republicans failed to repeal Obamacare when they held both chambers of Congress and the Presidency.

The demographic data is more disturbing. Trump lost the vote in all age groups below 40. The Republican Party is dying — literally.

The younger generations have greater motivation to worry about vanishing nature, toxins in the environment, and yes, the possibility of global warming. If conservatives don’t to come to grips with this fact, conservatives are going to become an endangered species.

The Good News

The good news is that conservatives have a better toolbox for preserving and restoring nature than the socialists. We just have to use it!

Sound economics, true justice, private property, price incentives, and recognition of the limits of what government can do could all be directed towards preserving, and even restoring nature.

The solutions are plentiful. Finding them is mainly a matter of mindset. Instead of reflexively opposing every nature-preserving proposal by the other side, we need to recognize the overlap between conservative values and conservation values — and then make proposals of our own.

We can use environmental concerns as an excuse to further conservative agendas. Instead of complaining about a Left Wing Conspiracy, we could be The Conspiracy.

Notice that I put an s at the end of “agenda.” There are many flavors of conservative:

• Christian Conservatives
• Family Values Conservatives
• Traditionalists
• Tough on Crime Conservatives
• Small Business Conservatives
• Rugged Individualists
• Libertarian Conservatives
• Populists
• Nationalists
• Federalists
• Isolationists
• Gold Bugs
• Constitutionalists
• Tax Resisters/Reformers
• Austrian School Economists
• Public Choice Economists
• and combinations thereof

In future posts we will explore how all of these flavors of conservative can further their agendas by going green. We will also study how to reconcile some of the differences between these flavors, how to build a coherent movement.