Greta Thunberg is angry, but her rage appears to have been deliberately inflamed and then directed at “climate change” by powerful adults surrounding her who know better. At the UN she exclaimed that “you have stolen my dreams and my childhood”, pointing the finger at the adult population of the world. Many of those adults have done much harm, but their crime lies in foolishly electing leaders like her who lead society to ruin, not in getting up, going to work, and peacefully making the lives of their families and themselves better.
The real crime will come when those adults attempt to legislate Thunberg’s ravings. According to her Twitter feed, she believes that carbon emissions must stop completely. No cars, no planes, no boats, no technology. How would this come about, other than by crude totalitarianism? Who would enforce it, and what would the penalty be for refusing to go along with the Grand Plan? The modern world would grind to a halt, the intricate coordinated efforts of billions of people would be severed. Far more would suffer than Greta ever imagined. How many starving and dead would be an acceptable sacrifice for an emissionless future? She’s too young to understand that it’s been tried before. Idealists take hold of the reins of power and usher in an era of totalitarianism. Individual rights are discarded first, as they provide an obstacle to their ultimate goal. These idealists are usually so enamored of their Grand Plan that it matters little that the population have any rights at all.
She abhors capitalism, but why? Far from stealing the dreams and childhood of the world’s young, it has instilled dreams and enriched their childhood far more than any totalitarian environmentalist utopia ever could.
Capitalism is a by-product of liberty. When voluntary interaction is protected, markets sprout up. Prosperity sprouts up. A wide, previously unimaginable spectrum of possible futures arise in the imaginations of the world’s children, possible futures that only exist because a free, capitalist society made it so.
According to Cato’s marvelous Simon Abundance Index, the Earth was almost 520% more abundant than it was in 1980. Resources that should be depleting at a rapid rate, simply aren’t. This is due to the miracle of capitalism. It is a miracle in every sense, and we should rightly marvel at our capacity as a species to generate this level of undesigned, explosive prosperity. It’s the Invisible Hand, the spontaneous order, the kaleidic society. It is the result of allowing and enforcing liberty.
But this miracle of a free society, its virtuous effects on the character and lives of its participants, is taken for granted in a way that nothing else is. Greta may take it as a fact of nature that a grocery store, selling fresh fruits and vegetables in the dead of winter, will always exist, no matter the political upheaval that occurs.
Many pro-vaccine advocates bemoan the fact that anti-vaxxers have never lived through a pre-vaccine era, experiencing what life was allegedly like during those disease-ridden days. Greta and her supporters don’t care to understand what life has been like for people living under a regime similar to that which she advocates. (And the great irony of the pro-vaccine argument is that it was the progress made possible by freedom that liberated us from rampant disease, not vaccines.)
Every attempt at enacting some idealistic vision for all of society ends in only one way: slavery, death, and ash. Instead of ensuring a future for the human race, her vision would wipe out any possible future.
Greta’s vision would usher in misery on a continent-wide scale. Would her thugs begin advocating a culling of the population? I bet she is a fan of Ishmael. Would that gorilla’s population bomb theories be taken to their logical conclusion?
Greta’s fury is that of a misguided, budding totalitarian. She is only 16, so there is a chance to grow. I only found the philosophy of liberty by chance at 20, via Ayn Rand’s visionary novels. What if she experienced a similar conversion, and aimed her rage at any and all interference in the undesigned processes of a free society? Now that would be something to see. And it brings me to one last point: where are liberty’s zealots? Where are the individuals inflaming the hearts and minds of the people for freedom? We have scholars, writers, academics, journalists, internet warriors, etc. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few Greta’s on our side as well.
