I’ve avoided writing about the Green New Deal for the same reason that you stick your head under the covers when the boogeyman comes out at night — you hope, with any luck, it will just go away.

Unfortunately, it didn’t go away; it has replaced “health care for all” as the most dangerous arrow in the quiver of the progressive agenda, and it is aimed straight at the heart of American society.

Although Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is most closely associated with the Green New Deal, she is little more than a paid advertising spokeswoman for the revolutionary legislation, which aims to completely overthrow the American economic order within 10 years.

The most offensive element of the initial rollout of the plan was the guarantee of “Economic security to all who are unable or unwilling to work” (emphasis mine). Since shelling out trillions of dollars to lazy people is an idea offensive to millions of hard-working Americans, that proposal was rapidly “disappeared” from Ocasio-Cortez’s website, but even without that insulting nonsense, the entire package is a socialist nightmare waiting to happen.

Just look at the components of the plan that are acknowledged. The Green New Deal is not just a climate-change proposal; it is a forced re-invention of society — no less damaging than the forced relocation of the Cherokee Nation in the 19th century or the forced re-education of the Chinese nation during the Cultural Revolution in the 20th.

The resolution before Congress declares that it is the duty of the federal government “to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States.” This one tiny component by itself demonstrates the socialist agenda underlying the GND. How exactly does the federal government “create” millions of jobs? How do federal bureaucrats ensure that they are high-wage jobs? How do they guarantee prosperity? Have Democrats never heard of a recession? Do they think that economic downturns can be legislated out of existence? It should be the duty of the federal government to stay out of the way and let the engine of capitalism work, as it always has, to create wealth, but instead this proposal wants the federal government to compete with private industry, to regulate it into submission, and to engineer the economy into something Stalin would be proud of.

In the “10-year national mobilization” envisioned by Green New Deal, the federal government would become the biggest Big Brother in history, dictating “improvements” in virtually every aspect of life. Oh, yes — “health care for all” is now just an unassuming asterisk among all the freebies and mandates being handed out. Among other things, this modest proposal would require the government to:

— Guarantee “universal access to clean water.”

— Meet “100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

— Upgrade “all existing buildings in the United States and [construct] new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”

— Build “a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food.” [“Soylent Green,” anyone?]

— Provide “resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.” [Note: not citizens.]

— Provide “all people of the United States” with high-quality health-care, “affordable, safe and adequate [Let the courts decide!] housing,” “economic security” [Oops! Does that actually include those unwilling to work?], and “clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.”

— Guarantee “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”

That last provision is one of the many landmines in the Green New Deal that its authors either never thought through or, worse, included intentionally to subvert the national economy. We can start by noting that Social Security will now be paid out based not on how much you contributed, but on how much you need to feel “secure.” But there’s an even worse explosion waiting to happen:

If everyone is guaranteed a job with a “family-sustaining wage,” then workers in the future will be paid not based on the quality of their work or the value of their job, but on the size of their family. Obviously, a family of 10 needs more money to be sustained than a family of two. Plus, how do we guarantee “family-sustaining wages” to both parents in a working family? Is the intention to return families to the one-breadwinner model since each worker by definition will be able to provide for their family with a single income? Or will the two workers in a couple have to accept half wages because they are sharing responsibility for sustaining the family?

This is madness, but predictable madness. The best evidence of the chaos that ensues when a government orders massive social change in order to bring “justice” to the economy is Mao's Great Leap Forward in China, where 60 million people perished to prove one man’s ideas wrong. The Ukrainian famine ordered by Stalin is a close second for sheer insanity, but doesn’t come anywhere near the human cost of Mao’s.

Earlier, I said that Ocasio-Cortez was the front person for the Green New Deal, not its author. That is obvious, but it doesn’t absolve her of responsibility for the horrors that would be unleashed should it come to pass. She has called the plan a “Green Dream,” but this is not the first time in history that a dream has turned into a nightmare. As Uncle Joe Stalin liked to say, “You gotta have a (five-year) plan.”

Okay, that’s slight poetic license. But Soviet Russia’s “five-year plans” were no joke. They wrecked Russia’s economy. The Green New Deal, on a 10-year time frame, would do the same.

Charismatic leaders with dangerous ideas can never be dismissed as just nuisances; they must be taken seriously — and stopped while they still can be. The Green New Deal has been assigned a price tag of $93 trillion by the former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — and that’s just fiscal cost. Were its socialist agenda actually put in place, we have been warned that our forests would be denuded, the economy would be destroyed, and millions would perish of starvation. A small price to pay for a true believer like Ocasio-Cortez, but she isn’t the one who would be paying the price.

So now that the boogeyman is out of the closet — exposed as a socialist monster — we have no choice but to face our fears and kill it quickly and decisively. The alternative is unthinkable.