Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Democrats support Green New Deal while Thomas Piketty finds it problematic
Democrats support Green New Deal while Thomas Piketty finds it problematic
Jul 16, 2025 5:13 AM

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey’s proposed Green New Deal is getting a lot of attention these days. Democratic Presidential hopefuls Cory Booker,Kirsten Gillibrand,Kamala Harris, andElizabeth Warren are all supporters, as is Senator Bernie Sanders. Former Greek Minister of Finance and Economist Yanis Varoufakis has been aggressively promoting his own vision of a Green New Deal for Europe. Many of the policy proposals and programs are similar and so are the proposed methods of funding:

The great advantage of our Green New Deal is that we are taking a leaf out of US PresidentFranklin Roosevelt’s original New Dealin the 1930s: our idea is to create €500bn every year in the green transition across Europe, without a euro in new taxes.

Here’s how it would work: the European Investment Bank (EIB) issues bonds of that value with the European Central Bank standing by, ready to purchase as many of them as necessary in the secondary markets. The EIB bonds will undoubtedly sell like hot cakes in a market desperate for a safe asset. Thus, the excess liquidity that keeps interest rates negative, crushing German pension funds, is soaked up and the Green New Deal is fully funded.

Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s office offered a similar rational for debt financing:

How will you pay for it?

The same way we paid for the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailout and extended quantitative easing programs. The same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars. The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit. There is also space for the government to take an equity stake in projects to get a return on investment. At the end of the day, this is an investment in our economy that should grow our wealth as a nation, so the question isn’t how will we pay for it, but what will we do with our new shared prosperity.

If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. There is a long and well established literature on the sort of negative economic effects such an inflationary policy entails but there is an important moral dimension as well. Long ago the German economist Wilhelm Röpke argued that the market economy can only be sustained within a moral social order:

Its place is in a society where certain elementary things are respected and are coloring the whole life of munity: individual responsibility; respect of certain indisputable norms; the individual’s honest and serious struggle to get ahead and develop his faculties; independence anchored in property; responsible planning of one’s own life and that of one’s family; thriftiness; enterprise; assuming well-calculated risks; the sense of workmanship; the right relation to nature and munity; the sense of continuity and tradition; the courage to brave the uncertainties of life on one’s own account; the sense of the natural order of things.

The cavalier attitude toward debt, exhibited by both Green New Deals, helps to erode the moral order necessary for a market economy. French Economist Thomas Piketty, who shares many of the policy preferences of the Green New Dealers, in a recent critique of the Green New Deal put it this way,

[O]ur proposals are based on taxes because a major part of the expenditure which we propose is public expenditure: financing research in new technologies by universities and sharing the cost of migration among member countries are beyond the sphere of private firms. This is one of the fundamental differences between our proposals: we propose to give Europe the means toprovide public goodsto its citizens—including the campaign against global warming, but not uniquely.

Even Piketty, no fan of free markets, believes one should pay for what one gets. Paying for things is always politically unpopular, but as Röpke tells us, “Muddling through from day to day and from one expedient to another, to boast that “money does not matter”–that is, indeed, the opposite of an honest, disciplined, and orderly concept and plan of life.” Our social policy should strive to be what we are at our best, not our worst.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
2019 G20 Summit: Tariffs and forbearance
As world leaders from a select group of the largest national economies meet in Osaka at the end of this week, they face increasing volatility and uncertainty around some of the basic principles and institutions that bring together their various peoples in the global marketplace. The World Trade Organization may undergo serious reform in the face of hints from President Trump that the United States might withdraw amid broader dissatisfactions. The ongoing tariff battles between China and the United States...
NHS forces mentally challenged Catholic woman to have an abortion
If it were possible to localize all the pathologies undermining the West into a single incident, a court ruling handed down on Friday might serve as the one. A British judge has ordered a young Catholic woman with “moderately severe” learning disabilities to have a second-trimester abortion against her will, in a case filed by the publicly funded National Health Service. The circumstances are horrific. The mother, who cannot be named, is in her twenties with a mental parable to...
Daily Caller reviews Samuel Gregg’s new book
Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, released a new book titled, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization. In his book, Gregg discusses the dangers that an unbalanced relationship between faith and reason imposes on a society. The Daily Caller, a widely read news and opinion outlet, reviewed Gregg’s new book in an article titled, “New Book Emphasizes the Importance of Faith and Reason for Western Civilization.” The article provides a brief synopsis of the book...
The limits of fiscal policy
Note: This is post #126 in a weekly video series on basic economics. The best case for fiscal policy happens during a recession caused by an aggregate demand shock, says economist Alex Tabarrok. Even so, it’s hard to get it right because the U.S. economy is massive plex. In this video by Marginal Revolution University, Tabarrok highlights the three factors for an ideal stimulus—Timely, Targeted, and Temporary—and notes that all of these characteristics present some problems for enacting fiscal policy....
Acton Line podcast: Hong Kong’s freedom coming to an end? SCOTUS takes on regulatory state
Update (Aug. 6): Writing at The National Interest, Gordon C. Chang says “it’s now a revolution.” In an especially tone-deaf press conference Monday, Lam, standing next to eight grim-faced ministers, made no further concessions, either symbolic or substantive, as she struck all the wrong notes if she was trying to calm the situation in her embattled city. Her stern and sometimes ominous words—Lam warned the territory was on the “path of no return”—seemed aimed at an audience of one: Communist...
Common grace, community, and culture
Earlier this year I had the honor of moderating a panel discussion, “Common Grace, Community, and Culture,” at the Kuyper Conference at Calvin College and Seminary. The discussion featured J. Daryl Charles, with whom I have the pleasure of coediting the Common Grace volumes in the Kuyper series, Vincent Bacote of Wheaton College, and Jessica Joustra of Redeemer University College and TU Kampen. It was a wide-ranging and substantive discussion. The video is now available and mend it to you:...
State Department releases latest report on international religious freedom
A wide range of U.S. government agencies and offices use the reports for such efforts as shaping policy and conducting diplomacy. The Secretary of State also uses the reports to help determine which countries have engaged in or tolerated “particularly severe violations” of religious freedom in order to designate “countries of particular concern.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback discussed the report at a special briefing. “This mission is not just...
3 Ways to explain religious freedom to an American
This week is “Religious Freedom Week,” a time set aside by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to “pray, reflect, and take action on religious liberty, both here in this country and abroad.” In honor of the Religious Freedom Week, here are three explanations about what religious freedom means in America. 1. Basic Explanation Religious freedom is a right, given by God and guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, that allows individual people or groups to...
The Laffer Curve vindicated…in Canada
On September 14, 1974, economist Arthur Laffer and three friends had the most productive cocktail discussion in U.S. history. On that day, Laffer famously sketched his U-shaped theory of taxation on a cocktail napkin. It came at the height of the Keynesian ascendancy, just three years after President Richard Nixon proclaimed, “I am now a Keynesian in economics” and as his successor proposed a tax increase. Laffer argued that higher tax rates produce higher tax revenues, but only up to...
Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization is . . . . AVAILABLE!
After a long gestation, I’m happy to report that my book, Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization, published by Regnery Gateway, has just been released and is available for purchase at Amazon. Over the past two weeks, it’s been listed as #1 New Release on Amazon in 5 categories – History of Civilization and Culture; Science and Religion; Ancient Early Civilization History; Church and State; and History of Christianity. The book has already been reviewed in The Stream...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved