Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act diminishes prospects for human progress

OPINION:

“Hope is contagious,” optimists are fond of reminding. So is doubt, unfortunately. The Democratic Party’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, supposedly packed with smart policy remedies for an ailing nation, is the work of doubters bent on extinguishing the material progress that has made America exceptional. It serves the aims of the “degrowth” movement, which is to reduce the imprint of human progress upon the globe.

With the House of Representatives’ final passage of the act on Friday, President Biden has been handed a miniature, $740 billion version of his “Build Back Better” plan, his failed attempt to spend trillions to slash the fossil fuels that power the modern world and refit the U.S. economy to run on exotic “green” energy. By rejiggering tax policy to subsidize solar and wind while punishing natural gas, oil and coal, the new bill allocates $375 billion over a decade to spark a rapid shift to renewables. Ominously, the move threatens to leave the nation with a dangerous energy deficiency and global-warming mitigation measurable in mere thousandths of a degree.

The Inflation Reduction Act also empowers Washington to hire an 87,000-strong army of IRS agents tasked with raking in hundreds of billions from corporations and American families. With “equity” as the Biden lodestar, funding of the nation’s social institutions is to benefit favored political constituencies rather than the common good.

Surprisingly, the Inflation Reduction Act is expected to “have a negligible effect on inflation,” according to the Congressional Budget Office. The news should further befuddle Americans, who have recently heard a confused Mr. Biden contend that July’s 8.5% increase in prices amounts to “zero percent inflation” and deny the obvious fact that the U.S. economy is already in recession.

Proposals meant to drag down economic progress dredge up painful parallels with the pessimistic outlook presented in the Club of Rome’s “The Limits to Growth,” published 50 years ago when Mr. Biden’s political career was commencing. The screed propounded the disturbing idea that simply put, a finite planet cannot — and must not attempt to — sustain continuous human growth. Whether or not such notions hold sway over the president’s thinking, they arguably flavor his policies.

The most direct form of “limits to growth,” of course, is population control. Ironically, the Biden campaign to preserve liberal abortion access — in addition to repudiating the president’s Catholic orthodoxy — undercuts the singular source of solutions to the scourges bedeviling civilization: human ingenuity, which has consistently turned dreadful deprivation into blessed abundance.

The Inflation Reduction Act fits hand-in-glove with both the Democrats’ compulsion to ride herd over freedom-loving Americans and the environmental movement’s preference for nature over human beings. It sets the nation on a perilous course toward energy poverty and subsistence existence.

Intentionally or not, Mr. Biden is moving in tandem with his party’s embrace of the view that modernity has reached its zenith and, sadly, must now make a beeline for degrowth. It is both anti-American and anti-human.