Looking Backward

"The thing is I can't afford to pay the heat and I had to send my kids to live with relatives. They keep cutting shifts down at the dock. You just don't get picked every day. I sold everything I got to anybody who would buy. I went on public assistance at the relief office. They gave me thirteen dollars. I need another eighteen dollars and thirty eight cents so I can pay the heating bill and get the kids back."
--Jim Braddock (Cinderella Man)

Prof DiLorenzo discusses the absurdity of the recently proposed 'Green New Deal' in the context of both an 19th century novel about a socialist utopia and the original New Deal. In 1888 Edward Bellamy wrote Looking Backward, a novel about a character who falls asleep for 113 years and wakes up in the year 2000 to find America turned into a socialist utopia.

Similar to proposals littering the Green New Deal, the utopia guaranteed jobs for everyone, free education, and equal pay for all. All of these programs were funded by the single U.S. employer, the federal government. Everyone retired at the age of 45 with comfortable pensions.

The message, of course, was that the evils of society could be eradicated by the mandates, controls, and regulation of totalitarian government--like the Green New Deal.

Propelled by Marx and Engels work, socialism was in its heyday in the late 1800s. As such, Looking Backward found a receptive audience. Numerous Edward Bellamy societies sprung to life. Socialist communes designed with the book's utopian blueprint were also established. All of them failed, which would serve as forewarning for the string of country-level socialist experiments that would implode in the years ahead.

The Green New Deal is named after the original New Deal, a constellation of government programs promoted by FDR to combat the Great Depression during the 1930s. Leftists still attempt to hawk the story line that the New Deal pulled America out of the Depression. Several popular books, including the work of Shlaes (2007) help put this conjecture to rest. DiLorenzo prefers to cite the academic work of Cole and Ohanian (2002, 2004) who published articles in top economic journals concluding that New Deal programs did not cure the Depression. Instead, these programs extended the economic malaise and made things worse.

The policies of the Green New Deal pack far more destructive power than its original predecessor in a quest to achieve Bellamy's socialist utopia. As all socialist designs do, it presumes that a small group of planners in a room can plan a complex economy better than the millions of individual actors that produce and trade each day. The New Green Deal once again demonstrates socialism's fatal conceit.

References

Cole, H.L. & Ohanian, L.E. (2002). The U.S. and U.K. Great Depressions though the lens of Neoclassical Growth Theory. American Economic Review, 92(2): 28-32.

Cole, H.L. & Ohanian, L.E. (2004). New Deal policies and the persistence of the Great Depression: A general equilibrium analysis. Journal of Political Economy, 112(4): 779-816.

Shlaes, A. (2007). The forgotten man: A new history of the Great Depression. New York: HarperCollins.