The Federalist today took one of the more tin-eared Twitter-Commies to task on just this point today, and it makes for compelling reading.
When the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain was finally lifted to expose the inner workings of communism to Western eyes, one of the more shocking discoveries was the nightmarish scale of environmental destruction. The statistics for East Germany alone tell a horrific tale: at the time of its reunification with West Germany an estimated 42 percent of moving water and 24 percent of still waters were so polluted that they could not be used to process drinking water, almost half of the country’s lakes were considered dead or dying and unable to sustain fish or other forms of life, and only one-third of industrial sewage along with half of domestic sewage received treatment.
The Federalist went into why, of course: but it and I have slightly different focuses on the problem that Communists have with the environment. We both agree that the flagrant hatred of property rights is a prime factor (when nobody owns anything, nobody has a vested interest in keeping the State from destroying it); but the Federalist puts more weight in Communism’s essential authoritarianism (which is a powerful tool against protests) and capitalism’s inherent superiority as an economic system and problem-solver. I don’t disagree with that, mind you: but I think that you need to also face the fact that a materialistic world-view is not inherently friendly to the idea of minimizing long-term damage.
But I suspect that the Federalist would agree with me on that, anyway. The important point: Commies are bad, and you should not treat with any kind of respect. They are neo-Nazis with better PR. And remember: Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people.
Moe Lane
In a more ideal America, Communists would be given the same respect and deference we give to neo-Nazis and child molesters.
They never understand: Capitalism is responsive></i). like any bureaucracy, it only pays attention to pain. Capitalism, being diffuse, has a pain threshold orders of magnitude lower than any version of state control.
Other than learning to close tags properly, I’m bookmarking that article for posterity and battle against watermelons, but mostly battle against watermelons.
The greens always talk globally but act irrationally when they try to force us to buy oil from some of the worst polluters ( e g Russia and Nigeria ) in the world rather than from US and Canadian sources which have had the best environmental record for the last 4 decades.