One of the strange truths of history is that most of the miseries of our world are created by people who believe they are doing good. The nagging parent. The rigorous teacher. The disapproving minister. The desire to improve the lives of those around us tends to be expressed in a manner that irritates the ones whose lives are being improved, but sometimes it is true that a little tough love is the best love of all

The small scale efforts that we all make out of love or concern for others have the potential for much greater good—or disastrous harm—when amplified by the enormous power of government. Public safety, national defense, and public health are all typically enhanced by centralizing these functions in the hands of government and government officials, although we all understand that the keenest citizen oversight is necessary to avoid waste, mismanagement, or unwarranted intrusions into our lives. Government that works locally as often as is feasible, stays lean, and is responsive to the natural desire of Americans for the greatest possible personal freedom is government we can all support and celebrate.

However, government overreach combined with an all-too-human hubris regarding the excellence of both our high ideals and best intentions can cause catastrophes that reverberate from person to person, community to community, and generation to generation. It is perhaps fitting that so many of these high-minded efforts of various sorts are described as “wars” because they leave so many innocent victims in their wakes. We have fought a war on poverty since the 1960’s that has both failed to eliminate poverty and facilitated the creation of a permanent economic underclass. Over this same period of over 50 years, we have also fought a war on drugs that failed to eliminate drug abuse and has devastated cities and towns from coast to coast. We now are fighting a thousand other wars among ourselves and against our own government on many fronts, and the anger and frustration many now feel over constant and problematic “wars” on the ills of humanity has reached a boiling point—which has resulted in record low faith in government and trust in government officials.

A pure heart does not guarantee a pure outcome, but our desire to do good sometimes leads us to forget this. In addition, humility is often in short supply after an election because the first taste of power over the lives of others can be a frighteningly intoxicating brew. Those who aspire to the highest offices often, quite naturally, have the highest levels of personal and professional ambition; their private visions for how we all should live must, therefore, be considered with healthy doses of both caution and skepticism.

The “Green New Deal”, which aspires to evoke resonances of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation during the depths of the Great Depression in the 1930’s—but which some have already dourly dubbed the “Green Deal Forward”, a sly reference to Mao Tse-Tung’s disastrous and deadly Great Leap Forward during the late 1950’s, both because of the scope of its soaring ambitions and the breadth of its mind boggling impracticality—has become a centerpiece of Democratic policy proposals looking forward to the 2020 elections.

This Green New Deal, which is a basket of ideas that is short on details but long on rhetoric, is a blueprint for a truly revolutionary reordering of the American economy that seeks to somehow transition our nation to a 100% use of renewable sources of energy, which would require ending the use of all fossil fuels altogether in order to reach a goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. Income and job guarantees tied to the magical creation of millions of “high wage jobs” by—or at least through the beneficent auspices of—the federal government are tied to a radical reordering of our manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and real estate sectors that would touch every aspect of our daily work and personal lives. While all of this was occurring, government and government officials would also be given new and unprecedented powers meant “to promote justice and equity” for everyone that will result in “economic security for all people” and the counteracting of “systemic injustices.” All of these will, by the way, happen during a window of only ten short years.

Attention, America! Ten years from now—if we agree to allow government to have total and complete power over every facet of our existences—heaven on earth is guaranteed.

As with our government’s previous wars on poverty and drugs, which were surpassingly modest efforts compared to the incredible dreams of the proposed Green New Deal, the powers of legislators, regulators, and law enforcement to monitor and control our nation would be greatly enhanced at the cost of our personal liberty. The huge bureaucracies (maybe that is where all those promised new “high wage jobs” would come from?) necessary to manage this earth-shaking endeavor would dwarf any growth we have previously seen in government employment—as well as the new taxes and fees that will obviously need to be enacted in order to pay for the costs of our new overseers.

Although the thought behind the Green New Deal—which is most closely identified with the Democrat’s new socialist superstar, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—is predicated on the belief that a massive effort by government to eliminate fossil fuel usage is justified by evidence of global warming that has been caused by the fossil fuels themselves, the proposed legislation also sees this as an opportunity to enact a sweeping Social Justice agenda designed to right historical wrongs. Whether this is reasonable or practicable is a topic for ongoing discussion and debate, but the key environmental component is based on the idea that a very small window of opportunity exists to save the earth from global warming effects that would catastrophically impact life on our planet. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez stated just last month that “The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change…” This doomsday pronouncement of our imminent demise would seem to justify the kind of extraordinary action that she is advocating, but many scientists are not endorsing this apocalyptic vision. However, creating a sense of blood-curdling fear and immediate crisis is useful when attempting to justify an extraordinary economic upheaval—by way of the Green New Deal—that might, in fact, be unjustifiable.

We already know that the track record of doomsday prophecies leaves much to be desired, but any good cult leader knows that fear both motivates your followers and binds them to you. Looking back along the course of my own lifetime, I remember many sage pronouncements that the end of the world was at hand, but I’m still sitting here today typing this—and trying to keep warm on a bitterly cold winter’s day. Given how little we truly understand about our planet and our ecosystems—much of what occurs in our deep oceans and beneath the earth’s crust is, for example, still a mystery to us—perhaps the merest touch of humility about the range of our knowledge is warranted. Moreover, our ability to manage the consequences of government mandates—much less an enterprise of the unbelievably vast scale of the Green New Deal—should perhaps require some humble reflection before we proceed.

Sometimes even the most heartfelt belief in our own knowledge and skills needs a bit of a brake. The aforementioned Great Leap Forward, which was meant to improve the lives of its people by quickly catapulting China to greatness through an extraordinary economic intervention by the communist government and its central planners, should perhaps serve as a clear warning. The program both failed to meet its economic goals and—because its authors could not foresee every possible consequence of this radical reorganization—led to the deaths by starvation of approximately 20 million Chinese. The most dangerous person in the world, when you review the history of our world’s miseries, is perhaps a government official who is convinced that there is no possibility whatsoever they… could… be… wrong.

Government-imposed solutions, as we know all too well, many times lead to government-created catastrophes because they fail to recognize that the many benefits of individual love and concern—which are sometimes expressed as nagging—do not necessarily scale up to the many misguided mandates managed by bureaucrats. Handing over control our future health and happiness to government officials who believe our freedoms must be subjugated to their own ideas about how we must live and work is certainly a step we must not take.