Duggan Flanakin
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. A former senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas.
“Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Lord Acton
Modern governments are infected with the idea that they are anointed to squelch the desires of ordinary humans. To hold onto power, they force compliance – in even insignificant ways – with their whims. They try to crush anyone who speaks or acts against their power.
Here’s an unspoken truth. While it is true that governments have subsidized the rich who buy electric vehicles, heat pumps, solar panels, wind turbines, and other products, their motives are far from the altruistic myth they spread across even kindergarten classrooms. They are rubbing our faces in the mud, saying, ‘Gimme your lunch money, or you will be sorry!’
And they are not ashamed, even when their pet policies create great harm to their ‘subjects.’
In the United Kingdom, the very birthplace of the Magna Carta and the modern theory of the “rights of man,” the government has decided to ban tobacco products, phasing it in over time. This comes on top of a myriad of other diktats – electric vehicles, heat pumps, and multi-front assaults on traditional culture.
Elsewhere in Europe, governments are just as smugly arrogant. As part of a putsch to force 40 million Europeans to buy electric vehicles (up from eight million today), governments offer bribes to auto buyers to force-feed a future EV monopoly. Even in tiny Malta, 50 million euros have been allocated to ‘help’ 5,000 Maltese into total dependency on the electric grid.
In the United States, government has decided to ban the export of natural gas, impose electric vehicle mandates, ignore laws protecting endangered species in the name of ‘saving the planet,’ attack the very foundations of liberty inscribed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and lock up those who resist and ignored their right to a speedy trial. Another mandate requires all new vehicles to have a government-controlled ‘kill switch.’
New York is now monitoring social media writings, collecting data, and using law enforcement to stifle expression it dubs as “hate speech.” As nearly everything from mathematics to Taylor Swift lyrics is now deemed by somebody as ‘racist,’ it becomes clear that New York intends to suppress any opinion the monarchy does not like.
In Canada, the Prime Minister debanked truckers who fought for their jobs. Now, a new “Online Harms Act” would empower the government to put people in prison for life for “hate speech” (defined by them, of course). Talk about squelching freedom!
It’s not just the monarchy that wants to crush free people. In pre-pandemic 2019, the Atlantic “warned” that “Overtourism is destroying the planet.” Last year, the New Yorker made a new case against travel, asserting that “travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.”
That is, of course, unless you were an Antifa rioter traveling from city to city to burn down buildings and assault the police. Or John Kerry and his merrie men out ‘saving the planet’ on private jets.
Funny how this viewpoint dovetails with globalist demands for “15-minute cities,” which the BBC glowingly describes as a glorious model that “requires minimal travel among housing, offices, restaurants, parks, hospitals, and cultural venues.” Then there’s the push for per-mile highway taxes to further suppress private travel.
More people now see that would-be monarchs and their courtiers are hell-bent on forcing society to bend to their oft-misguided will. No wonder that anyone who challenges government power is tarred as a “right-wing extremist.”
American colonists rebelled against a four percent tea tax because the revenues were being sent to the monarchy. Today, much higher taxes are being extracted for earmarks, foreign ‘aid’ that never helps ordinary people, and subsidies to the rich and powerful that harm average taxpayers.
The 2024 US elections could be a referendum on the abuses of government power against the people – a vote up or down on the elitist control. Rest assured that the powerful will do all in their power to distract, obfuscate, and even encourage street violence to prevent any serious challenge to their rule. Consider how quickly House Speaker Mike Johnson became a mouse.
There is a budding revolt, even in once-free Britain. Evidence includes the fact that £173 million of a £300 million subsidy program for heat pumps to replace gas boilers remains unused after two years of the bribery scheme (only the rich took the money). Even new electric vehicle sales to private individuals fell by 14 per cent last year despite government bribes and threats.
Eschewing Biden’s mandates, consumers cite marathon charging times, higher insurance rates, and benefits to China among their objections to being forced to abandon their 300 million cars and trucks just so their ‘leaders’ can earn brownie points in Davos.
In what might be deemed a shocking development (a betrayal of her class), Rebecca Grynspan, secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, admitted that “rich countries are using the green transition as an excuse to boost their own economies at the expense of developing ones, exploiting outdated WTO rules.”
Grynspan said developing countries see Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” and its European Union counterparts that subsidize domestic production of silicon chips, critical minerals, and green technology as “protectionist.”
She may as well have said ‘racist.’ Developing nations are pressed to comply with EU- and UN-imposed “net zero” mandates via restrictions to trade, duties, and new taxes – all of which work against development of indigenous economies.
The massive wealth transfers to largely unregulated tech giants, the Big Three hedge funds (Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard), and well-protected Big Pharma reveal just how much influence government has today over who wins and loses — and how the rich skew the game to their own advantage.
At the same time, leaders have brought the entire world to the brink of nuclear war.
A reckoning is coming.
Freedom that comes via oppression is only for the few.
The world today is crying out for freedom despite all the efforts of the monarchies and their courts to suppress and control the freedoms earned over centuries by those we once revered.
The battle is just now heating up.
As Coriolanus Snow might say, “Let the games begin.”
