The Left’s War on, well, Everything! Science, the economy and humans
by Sterling Burnett NCPA January 29, 2013
I don’t know if it is serendipity or what, but during the last week several articles have popped up on my computer with similar theme: How liberals are increasingly shedding their humanist pretentions and showing (their true) misanthropic nature.
The Scientific American brings us a story, “The Left’s War on Science,” in which Michael Shermer details a few of the ways in which he thinks the left has abandoned science – especially on environmental issues. Mr. Shermer and I disagree on the question of climate change and whether it is still reasonable to be a skeptic; however, we agree that for liberal environmentalists, questions of science and science policy have come to take on the tone of religious zealotry. On issues, of climate change (in my view), genetically modified foods and energy (views we share), environmentalists have cast aside science, and adopted an “everything natural is good,” “everything unnatural is bad,” religion.
A second story is, by contrast, rather mundane by today’s standards. Just another tale of the government, which claims it wants to create jobs (“creating jobs is job one!”), killing high paying jobs in the energy industry by enacting a variety of unnecessary rules – rules which will do nothing to protect human health or the environment. For example, environmental regulations have raised the cost of building a new power plant in Texas, which economists had estimated would create 3,900 jobs.
Finally, two stories from widely different locations across the globe, but with the same theme. It seems that politicians and wooly headed academics/media personalities are finally being honest about their feelings concerning the human race.
In one story, Sir David Attenborough stated that: “Humans are a plague on the Earth that need to be controlled by limiting population growth.” The racist, eugenicists from the late 19th through the mid-20th century who routinely sterilized and/or exterminated “undesirables,” would be proud, as would the communist dictators in China. To the very enlightened Mr. Attenborough – may I suggest that you and others like you take the first step by volunteering for sterilization?
In the second story, the Japan’s finance minister suggested that 25 – 40% of the Japan’s population, elderly retirees and those soon to be so, “. . .should just hurry up and die.” Logan’s Run anyone? It seems the minister objects to older Japanese actually using the socialized health care and social welfare system they’ve paid into all their lives. He complains that elderly Japanese citizens’ health care is being paid for by the government and it’s just costing too much. Ignoring the fact that the money used to pay the bills is not the government’s but the taxpayers' in the first place and that the government has forced them into the social welfare system he is complaining about. It may be a Ponzi scheme, but it is the government’s Ponzi scheme and it is responsible for the payouts.
So let’s sum up, the left routinely attacks sound science and replaces it with a pseudo-green religion that undermines progress. It enacts regulations that kill jobs which make people poorer and worse off. Finally, it attacks people themselves stating that their rights to procreate and even continue to live be limited by government. Back to the Pleistocene, indeed!
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