This explanation is quite lengthy (due to the length of Bob's tweets) and I apologise for that.
Generally speaking, this whole post serves as evidence that Bob's approach to politics is the same as a
santero's approach to Catholicism; he doesn't know what St George or the Eucharist is, but he knows that St George looks a bit like one of the
orishas he knows and that when the priest puts a host in the monstrance it looks like a talisman, so he treats them as the same. In the same way, Bob could care less about what fascism, technocracy or socialism actually are, but he treats them as the same as the cartoons he saw about space exploration in the 1980's and uses them for that purpose.
On that topic, due to Bob's belief that the phrase "The Green New Deal" serves as a magical incantation that makes his arguments leftists purely by its inclusion, I'll end up quoting heavily from the actual
Green New Deal proposals alongside Moviebob's tweets. Whether you agree with them or not is entirely up for you - I'm not trying to argue for or against them, I'm just trying to demonstrate that Moviebob is, as per usual, talking about something he knows nothing about in an attempt to suck up to progressives.
Moviebob said:
...at its peak Technocracy (founded by a guy named Howard Scott) had a huge following...
According to Wikipedia the Technocracy movement was popular for a brief period of time in 1932. To quote the article, "Technocracy's heyday lasted only from June 16, 1932, when the
New York Times became the first influential press organ to report its activities, until January 13, 1933, when Scott, attempting to silence his critics, delivered what some critics called a confusing, and uninspiring address on a well-publicized nationwide radio hookup. Following Scott's radio address, the condemnation of both him and technocracy in general reached a peak. The press and businesspeople reacted with ridicule and almost unanimous hostility."
Hardly what you'd expect from a mass movement.
Moviebob said:
The angle was basically Socialist Central Planning - but for PhD nerds. Replace the government with engineers and experts...
That isn't any different to central planning as theoretically practiced under socialism.
Dictionary.com tells us that central planning requires "an economic system in which the government controls and regulates production, distribution, prices, etc". The only difference I can see betweeen that and socialism is that socialist states tend to choose officials based on loyalty to the state - but there's nothing to show that that wouldn't happen under technocracy.
Ironically enough, the actual New Deal (through things such as the
Resettlement Administration) did actually create a centrally planned economy in Burgerland, and the Green New Deal openly states that implementing it would do the same:
Effective national action to address a national threat has to be coherent national action aimed at that threat... Businesses or industries [will not] solve our greatest challenges on their own. The federal government — our government — is the only body with the power, resources, and mandate to provide direction and support at the scale and speed required to realize the Green New Deal.
Moviebob said:
As a Depression-era movement, they were largely sceptical of capitalism
Given that "[Scott] reasoned 'that the sole scientific foundation for the monetary system was also energy', and that by using an energy metric instead of a monetary metric (energy certificates or 'energy accounting') a more efficient design of society could be made" and capitalism requires a monetary system to work, it's hard to see how technocracy contradicts capitalism. Yes, it opposes private ownership of the means of production, but so does state capitalism which is obviously still a capitalist system.
Moviebob said:
If you proposed [energy as a means of currency], you'd be on the left of the Green New Deal (or folding aspects into it)
This is where the political
santeria really starts. The Green New Deal is a set of proposals that are too long for me to quote here but basically boil down to "we must establish a socialist, centrally planned economy that will get net zero, create jobs and infrastructure, protect the environment and do a bunch of social justice bullshit." Using energy as a currency has nothing to do with it.
Moviebob said:
Think Green New Deal but think... thought up in the 30s
That already exists and it was called the New Deal. To quote the proposals themselves:
Just as the 1929 crash and the Pearl Harbor attack catalyzed the New Deal and World War II mobilizations — the U.S.’s last great economic mobilizations — the collision between the consequences of our collapsing economy and the realities of our burning planet must catalyze action now... [The Green New Deal] is a “New Deal” in the sense that it works on a scale not seen in our country since the New Deal and World War II mobilizations — carefully developed series of historic national projects, conducted on a grand scale, that put scores of millions of Americans back into productive and high-paying jobs and transformed our economy into the greatest engine of production and widely shared prosperity that the world had ever known.