Dan Calabrese

Democrats’ environmental proposals are an attack on capitalism. That is a fact. But don’t take my word for it. Ask John Kerry.

As often happens when disingenuous people let slip the truth, Kerry admitted in no uncertain terms the other day that he sees economic prosperity as the enemy of the environment, and left no mystery as to which side he takes.

I was for the recession before I was against it.

Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-California) have proposed a new draft for a cap-and-trade bill with exceedingly stringent restrictions on carbon emissions. During a hearing on the bill , Kerry made the astounding statement that the recession has been the environment’s best friend, and he couldn’t be happier about it:

Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent.

What did Kerry  just unwittingly admit? He admitted that cap-and-trade advocates and like-minded global warming believers see economic prosperity as a huge source of the supposed problem. That’s why they’re proposing the perfect solution – from their perspective – in the form of a massive tax increase directly on industry.

Nothing discourages productive economic activity like confiscatory taxes on said activity. The same people who lament the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States now seek to multiply these losses many times over by making it economically impossible for manufacturers to operate.

The taxes aren’t designed to encourage manufacturers to run cleaner shops. Taxes don’t do that. Technology does that. If the technology was sufficiently mature and affordable, they would have it now. All things being equal, no one wants to pump dirty emissions into the air if given a reasonable alternative.

So when Democrats propose to pressure them into cleaning up their emissions with crippling taxes, it makes about as much sense as when they suggested the Iraqi government was sitting around eating bon-bons while the U.S. did all the heavy lifting, but would surely get serious if the U.S. threatened to leave.

People want to do things that are in their own best interests. You don’t hammer them into doing these things with taxes. Quite the contrary, you try to remove economic barriers that may be preventing them from doing these things.

But that’s not the goal of cap-and-trade supporters. Kerry has given away the game. The goal is less productive economic activity, because the fact of the matter is that productive economic activity produces carbon, and no arrogant member of Congress or anyone else can change that fact.

But the recession, hey, that’s working like a dream. Carbon emissions are down 6 percent. Damn. How many more big industrial conglomerates do we have to put out of business to get to 20 percent?

If they didn’t know full well they were going to kill jobs, they wouldn’t be peddling this “green jobs” nonsense – a notion thoroughly dismantled on Sunday by Bloomberg’s Kevin Hassett.

Cap and trade means a less productive economy, and that’s by design, because a growing private sector economy is the enemy of the Democrats’ political agenda. Their hope, of course, is that all the taxes they can collect will allow them to bestow more largesse on their constituencies with jobs either in the public sector or publicly funded.

This completely ignores, of course, the fact that you can’t keep taxing companies that you put out of business, but Sen. Kerry has never quite closed the logic loop on that one. You need to generate revenue to pay taxes, and you can only do that by running a company profitably. Where does Sen. Kerry think all these rich industrialists got their money? Does he think they either inherited it or married some rich widow?

Maybe someone needs to tell him those avenues aren’t available to everyone.

But if Sen. Kerry doesn’t have the slightest idea how economic value is created, he certainly seems to know how to destroy it, and as he has just acknowledged, he apparently can’t wait to get right to it.

Update: John Holdren, President Obama’s top advisor on science issues, agrees. Or at least he did in 1977, when he wrote a textbook with fellow traveler Paul Ehrlich titled “Ecoscience,” in which he explicitly called for zero economic growth. CNS News dug this up back in July.

People can change their minds about things in 32 years, of course. Maybe someone should ask Holdren if he’s changed his. If so, perhaps he could go have a talk with John Kerry.

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