The Real Deal?

The problem with the Green New Deal is that, fundamentally and ultimately, it gives priority to the "Green" bit rather than to the "New Deal" bit.

Still, development in the tradition of the New Deal and of the Apollo programme is a good thing in principle.

It is positively hilarious to read Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas quoting Churchill's "Gestapo" comment, which is so embarrassing that most people in Britain have never heard of it.

That was the moment at which it became clear that Churchill knew that he had lost the 1945 General Election, while the War was still going on. He lost again, in 1950. 

But he scraped back in 1951, with the support of the National Liberal and having lost the popular vote, because he promised to keep in place everything that he had denounced in such terms only six years previously.

Yet there is still no Gestapo in Britain.

Hayek first published these prophecies of doom in 1944. If he had been right, even a little bit, then the whole of Europe would have been a gulag for decades by now. But it is not.

Come to that, nor is the United States, where there is also no sign of a Gestapo, even though the New Deal began there as long ago as 1933, the same year that Hitler came to power in Germany.

Development in the tradition of the New Deal and of the Apollo programme is a good thing in principle.

But the problem with the Green New Deal is that, fundamentally and ultimately, it gives priority to the "Green" bit rather than to the "New Deal" bit.