ECONOMIST VERONIQUE DE RUGY AT REASON TV: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal: A Bizarre Grab-Bag of Terrible Ideas.

As Jonah Goldberg noted in response to AOC’s GND, the original New Deal was itself a bizarre grab-bag of terrible ideas:

The New Deal wasn’t a program, it was the by-product of ad hoc experimentation by people who thought their own power was self-justifying. And to look back on it as somehow more coherent than the would-be Green New Deal is to give it too much credit.

“To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” wrote Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man during much of his rule, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.” When Alvin Hansen, an influential economic adviser to the president, was asked — in 1940 — whether “the basic principle of the New Deal” was “economically sound,” he responded, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”

It was control. And wish lists. And it was ever thus.

And corporatism.

The same could be said about former President Obama’s own environmentally-themed crony corporatism, which Time magazine described five minutes after Obama won the election thusly:

Likely, they had no idea what their cover was a warning, not hagiography.