The world will celebrate Earth Day on Wednesday. It will be, as it always has been, a festival of nonsense that has more downside than it does benefits.
The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, the 100th birthday of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Probably just a coincidence, but “given that most of the modern environmentalist movement grew out of the far left student movement of the 1960s,” it is, as a Competitive Enterprise Institute scholar once said, “all too fitting.”
“Most environmental economists of the time believed that only socialist countries would ably protect the environment, because the governments there were acting for the good of all mankind, while capitalists in the West cared only about profit maximization and not a whit about the environment,” the late R.J. Smith wrote for CEI’s blog in 2015.
“Thus it was no surprise that the conventional wisdom would turn a generation of young people toward socialism as the only way to protect the Earth.”
Whatever the intentions were then, Earth Day has become far less about the environment and ecological stewardship than a vehicle to further the Democratic Party agenda, which at its base is an effort to rule citizens rather than represent them, to overtax, overregulate and overstep constitutional boundaries.
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