Biden's Climate Five Year Plan

just like the others

I don’t know if you youngsters ever heard of Joey Stalin’s first Five Year Plan. It went' from 1928-1932. It probably caused the Soviet famine of 1930-333 that ended with the Ukraine famine of 1932-33, that we now call the Holodomor. Experts agree that

Major contributing factors to the famine include: the forced collectivization of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan, and forced grain procurement, combined with rapid industrialization and a decreasing agricultural workforce.

Did you ever hear of Mao TheThing’s second Five Year Plan — also known as the Great Leap Forward? It went from 1958-62. This heroic effort bookended the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-61 in which 15-55 million people died.

The purpose of Stalin’s Five Year Plan and of Mao’s Great Leap Forward was simple: to transform an agricultural economy into an industrial economy in one giant step.

Naturally all the best experts and political activists were on board, so success was assured.

What went wrong? In the case of Stalin’s Five Year Plan I’ve heard that grain was diverted from the Ukraine and other food-growing areas to pay for the import of industrial equipment. In the case of Mao’s Great Leap Forward I’ve heard that the diversion of rural peasants into building and running backyard steel furnaces meant that nobody was growing food.

But that sort of analysis is beside the point. The basic problem is, politicians and activists, that you can’t “plan” the economy with experts and political activists. The world, the economy — life, the universe, everything — just doesn’t work that way.

How does the economy work? People have been trying to figure it out since at least the ancient Greeks. But to the Greeks the economy was basically about a “household,” with its landowner, family, and slaves. Really, nobody had a clue until Adam Smith and his Wealth of Nations. And that’s not surprising when you consider that in Smith’s day the economy was people making stuff that other people would buy and use, whereas the agricultural household economy of ancient Greece was about production and use within a single household.

How does the economy work when you are producing for other people? It works through the signaling of the price system. And the price system tells you whether your widget or idea is worth it. Politicians and activists and experts don’t have a clue.

Where Stalin had his Five Year Plan and Mao had his Great Leap Forward, in our time we have Klaus Schwab and his Great Reset. All the experts and the political activists agree that we have to fundamentally transform our economy from fossil fuels like coal and oil and natural gas to renewable energy resources like wind and solar. Otherwise the Earth will overheat and the oceans will rise.

To which I say: to the experts and the political activists: No! You don’t have a clue! Stay in your lane! Your job, as political types, is to fight the enemy and gift your supporters. And that is all. You have no idea how the economy works; you have no idea how the climate works. Stay in your lane! Go away!

You’d think, after the disaster of Stalin and Mao, that our educated class of experts and political activists would have learned their lesson. But they haven’t, and the chances are that we will only stop the mad rush to NetZero when the mountain of skulls becomes too large to ignore.

But they don’t. Everyone in the political world secretly imagines themselves as Henry V before the walls of Harfleur.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…

But the economy is not an assault upon a French fortress. It is ordinary people making and buying and selling, and trying to make a living. And every product, every purchase, every sale, sends a price signal to the rest of the economic universe that is way beyond the ken of experts and political activists.

As our climate enthusiasts for the Great Reset, or the Climate Five Year Plan, or NetZero, or Clean Energy, will find out, sooner rather than later.