I see there is no arguing with a true believer.

I feel the same way. I generally avoid arguing with leftist zealots, because they always avoid the very factual observation that their own politicians are far, far, FAR from altruists.

And if you don’t have altruists running left-leaning governmental policy, it invariably leads to a loss of personal freedom. Such is the lesson of history. :-)

That is, if you truly believe that infinite expansion of production and consumption is possible and desirable on a finite planet, and that a corporation’s only obligation is to maximize shareholder profits, regardless of whether that occurs in a socially adaptive way (i.e. innovative products and services that benefit consumers and outcompete their competitors) or a socially maladaptive way (i.e. passing on the costs of doing business to the public, by polluting their air, land, and water, or engaging in exploitive labor practices, or buying out politicians in order to prevent any regulation in the public interest of their destructive practices, or engaging in predatory speculation to inflate stock prices while exploiting first-time homeowners) — then I have nothing further to say to you.

I believe in none of that. But, you wouldn’t want to actually have a conversation about what economic conservatives actually believe, because that would cause you to have to change the cartoonish version of conservativism that you have built up in your own mind that your virtue-signalling requires.

However, our national charter, the Declaration of Independence, clearly states otherwise — that is, that the sole purpose of government is to secure the rights of the public — of all citizens, that is — to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, through consent of the governed. Putting it a simpler way, government exists solely to serve the PUBLIC interest.

Bingo. And history shows that in the majority of the cases (not all, but the majority) the public interest is best served by the politicians getting the hell out of the way. In other words, regulate and tax as a last resort after all other options are exhausted.

For any given policy choice, we all may argue over whether it serves the public interest or not, but when there is undisputed evidence from highly trained scientists that a policy has harmful consequences for the public at large (or any subset thereof), that policy should be changed accordingly.

I have no quarrel with any of that as a generic statement of direction. It’s when you insist that a specific POLICY is necessary to change (or be implemented) to advance that statement of direction that the debate starts.

Put another way — — if you think the only way the “planet can be saved” is by large scale government edicts, then you’re having a rather dangerous failure of imagination.