Politics & Power Quote by Steve Forbes

Forbes gives you a two-step that reads like a coalition pitch, not a creed: first, a familiar conservative alarm bell about “the overreaching hand of big government,” then a quick pivot to environmental protection, carefully padded with escape hatches. The rhetoric is designed to reassure two audiences that rarely share a bumper sticker: anti-regulation voters who hear “freedom” as low taxes and light oversight, and environmentally concerned moderates who want to believe markets can be green without being coerced.

The key move is the vagueness. “Overreaching hand” anthropomorphizes the state as a grabby intruder, turning policy disputes into a moral drama of self-defense. It’s emotionally sticky and strategically nonspecific: no agency, no statute, no tradeoff named. Then the second sentence adds a values clause - “in a manner consistent with our values” - that sounds principled while quietly preloading the conclusion. Values here functions as a constraint on action: protect the environment, yes, but not in ways that threaten growth, property rights, energy consumption, or corporate autonomy. It’s environmentalism with a governor installed.

Context matters: Forbes is a business leader and long-time Republican standard-bearer adjacent, so his “freedom” is implicitly economic freedom, and his “environment” is something to be managed without expanding the regulatory state. The subtext is a bargain: we’ll acknowledge climate and conservation as legitimate concerns, as long as the solution stays market-shaped - innovation, voluntary standards, incentives - and doesn’t hand bureaucrats new levers. This is less a call to action than a boundary-setting exercise, defining what kinds of environmentalism are acceptable before the debate even begins.