In praise of the rich 307
Communism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. A central authority with a monopoly of force – which is to say the state – must gather and distribute resources. Condition of the nation: serfdom and poverty.
Capitalism: “From each according to his need, to each according to his ability”. You decide what you need and work for it by providing others with what they’ll buy. The amount you get will be the measure of your ability. Condition of the nation: freedom and prosperity.
Collectivism: Economic equality achieved at the cost of liberty.
Individualism: The only desirable equality is an equality of liberty. My liberty should be limited by nothing except everyone else’s.
Walter Williams writes at Front Page:
Thomas Edison invented the incandescent bulb, the phonograph, the DC motor and other items in everyday use and became wealthy by doing so. Thomas Watson founded IBM and became rich through his company’s contribution to the computation revolution. Lloyd Conover, while in the employ of Pfizer, created the antibiotic tetracycline. Though Edison, Watson, Conover and Pfizer became wealthy, whatever wealth they received pales in comparison with the extraordinary benefits received by ordinary people. Billions of people benefited from safe and efficient lighting. Billions more were the ultimate beneficiaries of the computer, and untold billions benefited from healthier lives gained from access to tetracycline.
President Barack Obama, in stoking up class warfare, said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.” This is lunacy. Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire produced the raw materials that built the physical infrastructure of the United States. Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft and produced software products that aided the computer revolution. But Carnegie had amassed quite a fortune long before he built Carnegie Steel Co., and Gates had quite a fortune by 1990. Had they the mind of our president, we would have lost much of their contributions, because they had already “made enough money.”
Class warfare thrives on ignorance about the sources of income. Listening to some of the talk about income differences, one would think that there’s a pile of money meant to be shared equally among Americans. Rich people got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. Justice requires that they “give back.” Or, some people talk about unequal income distribution as if there were a dealer of dollars. The reason some people have millions or billions of dollars while others have very few is the dollar dealer is a racist, sexist, a multinationalist or just plain mean. Economic justice requires a re-dealing of the dollars, income redistribution or spreading the wealth, where the ill-gotten gains of the few are returned to their rightful owners.
In a free society, for the most part, people with high incomes have demonstrated extraordinary ability to produce valuable services for — and therefore please — their fellow man.
People voluntarily took money out of their pockets to purchase the products of Gates, Pfizer or IBM. High incomes reflect the democracy of the marketplace. The reason Gates is very wealthy is millions upon millions of people voluntarily reached into their pockets and handed over $300 or $400 for a Microsoft product. Those who think he has too much money are really registering disagreement with decisions made by millions of their fellow men.
In a free society, in a significant way income inequality reflects differences in productive capacity, namely one’s ability to please his fellow man. …
Stubborn ignorance sees capitalism as benefiting only the rich, but the evidence refutes that. The rich have always been able to afford entertainment; it was the development and marketing of radio and television that made entertainment accessible to the common man. The rich have never had the drudgery of washing and ironing clothing, beating out carpets or waxing floors. The mass production of washing machines, wash-and-wear clothing, vacuum cleaners and no-wax floors spared the common man this drudgery. At one time, only the rich could afford automobiles, telephones and computers. Now all but a small percentage of Americans enjoy these goods.
In a free country, the rich are not rich because the poor are poor; nor are the poor poor because the rich are rich.
Those are richest who serve others best. (In general, that is. There are of course exceptions, like George Soros.)
They create wealth.
So that, among free countries, where the rich are richest the poor are least poor.
As in the United States of America.
Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy 75
Newt Gingrich warns against Agenda 21. (See our posts Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011, and The once and new religion of earth-worship, October 27, 2011.)
“Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions which are intended to be implemented by every person on Earth…it calls for specific changes in the activities of all people… Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced… ” – Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet (Earthpress, 1993)
– and quoted as the introduction to an article by Chris Carter at Canada Free Press, in which he goes on to say:
Agenda 21 seeks to control populations through zoning and seizure of private property, strip national sovereignty, reduce the world population, even control our consumption of meat and air conditioning … all in the name of the environment. And who can be against the environment, right? …
From the report produced by the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements [!], which was the predecessor to Agenda 21: “Land … cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market [!]. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice … Public control of land use is therefore indispensable …”
A speech that could have come from the mouth of a villain politician in Atlas Shrugged.
Our Constitution explicitly protects our private property rights. No wonder President Clinton signed it into law without consent from Congress. In fact, those who drafted the plan considered it to be so toxic that they warned proponents not to use the term Agenda 21.
“Participating in a UN advocated planning process would very likely bring out many of the conspiracy-fixated [!] groups and individuals in our society,” said J. Gary Lawrence, adviser to President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development. “This segment of our society who fear ‘one-world government’ and a UN invasion of the United States through which our individual freedom would be stripped away would actively work to defeat any elected official who joined ‘the conspiracy’ by undertaking Agenda 21. So we call our process something else, such as comprehensive planning, growth management or smart growth.”
Rather than defend against the disinformation campaign used to prop up Agenda 21, we must read the document and instead demand why the UN thinks it has any business subjugating the world under its authority …
The UN must be destroyed.
A war of words 162
The following is a slightly revised version of a reply Jillian Becker made to a British (and fatuously anti-American) commenter on the post Islam and “Islamism”, November 14, 2011.
*
From time to time it’s necessary for us to state what we’re all about.
We are atheists. That is self-explanatory. We are conservatives in that our principles are those at the core of American conservatism: limited government, low taxes, strong defense, a free market economy, individual liberty.
Liberty is our highest value. We oppose collectivism, which is serfdom.
Collectivist ideologies are of two kinds: egalitarian and inegalitarian. Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism are examples of the egalitarian. Nazism, Islam, the Catholicism of the Middle Ages are examples of the inegalitarian.
Our chosen task is the critical examination of ideas, mainly political and religious. Our pages are are full of criticism of Catholicism, Calvinism, Judaism, Islam, and many more such systems of belief. They are sets of ideas, and as such need to be examined and criticized. Their histories and the crimes committed in their name need to be repeatedly exposed.
We fix our assessing eye on Islam more than on any other religion because it is waging war on the West. Our view of Islam is not prejudice, it is judgment. We have taken the trouble to inform ourselves. To be against subjugators, oppressors and mass murderers is not “bigotry”. We quote Muslims who are regarded as authorities, sometimes showing them in videos expressing themselves directly. Islam’s defenders have the hospitality of our comment pages to explain why they like it.
We have never advocated, and never would, the harming of any person except criminals or those who declare an intention to commit a crime. In such cases we expect the law – not a mob – to deal with them. Or if they are terrorists held, say, at Guantanamo Bay, we want them to be brought before a military tribunal and if found guilty, executed.
Islam should become as abominated as Nazism and Maoism generally are at least in the West. It deserves nothing better. That it calls itself a religion in no way exonerates or excuses it. In any case, we respect no religion, no belief in the supernatural, no orthodoxy, no dogma.
To discredit Islam, constant public criticism of it is absolutely necessary. That is why no laws or resolutions protecting it from criticism must be passed by nation states or by the UN, which is currently trying to do just that (with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s help).
Islam declared war on the non-Muslim world 1400 years ago. That war has become very hot of late. Since 9/11 there have been some 18,000 deadly terror attacks carried out in the name of Islam (see our margin). Most of us can only fight the battle with words. Let’s not spare them.
The war on tchotchkes 390
If you like to laugh out loud, or even just chortle, read the whole article we quote from here. It is by the best-informed, most clear-sighted, and by far the funniest writer alive – Mark Steyn.
Have you been following this so-called supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of superfriends from the super-Congress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multitrillion-dollar abyss.
There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry) and many other warriors for truth, justice and the American way of debt. The supercommittee is supposed to report back by the day before Thanksgiving on how to carve out $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction and thereby save the republic.
I had cynically assumed that the superfriends would address America’s imminent debt catastrophe with some radical reform — such as, say, slowing the increase in spending by raising the age for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility from 47 to 49 by the year 2137, after which triumph we could all go back to sleep until total societal collapse.
But I underestimated the genius of the superfriends’ supercommittee. It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is instead going to increase it. As the Hill reported:
“Democrats on the supercommittee have proposed that the savings from the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan be used to pay for a new stimulus package.” …
Do you follow that? Let the Congressional Budget Office explain it to you: “The budget savings from ending the wars are estimated to total around $1 trillion over a decade, according to an estimate in July from the Congressional Budget Office.” …
Why stop there? Why not estimate around $2 trillion in savings by 2031? After all, that would free up even more money for a bigger stimulus package, wouldn’t it? And it wouldn’t cost us anything because it would all be “savings.”
Come to think of it, didn’t the Second World War end in 1945? Could we have the CBO score the estimated two-thirds of a century of “budget savings” we’ve enjoyed since ending that war? … The Spanish-American War ended 103 years ago, so imagine how much cash has already piled up! …
The president is asking for your votes for the 2011 SAVE Award. To demonstrate his commitment to fiscal discipline, he set up a competition whereby federal employees can propose ways to cut government waste. A panel of experts (John Kerry, Paula Abdul, etc.) then weigh the merits, and the four finalists go up on the White House website to be voted on by members of the public: It’s like “Dancing With the Czars.” …
This year’s SAVE Award nominees include Faith Stanfield of Toledo, Ohio, a “general technical expert” with the Social Security Administration. As someone who’s technically expert in a very general sense, she sees the big picture. It’s on the front of the SSA’s glossy magazine.
Did you know Social Security has its own glossy magazine? It’s called Oasis and it’s sent out to 88,000 SSA employees plus about a thousand government retirees. …
It’s the magazine that says you’re cool, you’re now, you’re living the SSA bureaucrat lifestyle. But Stanfield thinks they should scrap the glossy pages and only publish it online.
Ooh, I dunno. Sounds a bit extreme to me. Could result in hundreds of Social Security lifestyle editors being laid off and reduced to living on Social Security. …
What with the proposal to use the nearly two centuries of budget savings from the end of the War of 1812 to fund the construction of high-speed monorails and the plan to turn the Social Security Administration’s in-house glossy into an in-house virtual-glossy, it’s no surprise that the president himself has got the deficit-reduction fever.
On Wednesday, he signed an executive order “Promoting Efficient Spending” — and ending government waste. Just like that! According to Section Seven: “Agencies should limit the purchase of promotional items (e.g., plaques, clothing and commemorative items), in particular where they are not cost-effective.” …
Fresh from launching the war on tchotchkes, the administration then proposed a 15-cent tax on Christmas trees in order to fund a federal promotional campaign to promote the sale of Christmas trees. … He was forced to rescind the proposal, presumably after an ACLU chum pointed out that settling the Bureau of Christmas Tree Promotion lawsuit would wipe out all the budget savings from the French and Indian Wars.
Meanwhile, as these ruthless austerity measures start to bite, the government of the United States continues to spend one fifth of a billion dollars it doesn’t have every hour, every day, every week …
Click on the link. Don’t miss a line of it.
Frankly, Barney 266
From PowerLine:
If there is a single face of the financial crisis, it is probably Barney Frank, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac’s chief Congressional patron, who shouted down all warnings and resisted all efforts to bring those agencies under control. It is probably too much to hope that Frank will be evicted from Congress any time soon, but in the meantime we can enjoy this song by Kathleen Stewart, “Frankly Barney:”
The axis of evil: a list of members 22
Zombie lists the “Occupy Wall Street” protest supporters, sponsors and sympathizers:
Communist Party USA. Sources: Communist Party USA, OWS speech, The Daily Caller
American Nazi Party. Sources: Media Matters, American Nazi Party, White Honor, Sunshine State News
Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. Sources: The Guardian, Tehran Times, CBS News
Barack Obama. Sources: ABC News, CBS News, ForexTV, NBC New York
The government of North Korea. Sources: Korean Central News Agency (North Korean state-controlled news outlet), The Marxist-Leninist, Wall Street Journal, Times of India
Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam. Sources: video statement (starting at 8:28), Black in America, Weasel Zippers, Philadelphia Weekly
Revolutionary Communist Party. Sources: Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolution newspaper, in-person appearance
David Duke. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, davidduke.com
Joe Biden. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, Mother Jones
Hugo Chavez. Sources: Mother Jones, Reuters, Examiner.com
Revolutionary Guards of Iran. Sources: Associated Press, FARS News Agency, UPI
Black Panthers (original). Sources: in-person appearance, Occupy Oakland, Oakland Tribune
Socialist Party USA. Sources: Socialist Party USA, IndyMedia, The Daily Caller
US Border Guard. Sources: White Reference, www.usborderguard.com, Gateway Pundit, Just Another Day blog
Industrial Workers of the World. Sources: IWW web site, iww.org, in-person appearances
CAIR [the terrorism-supporting Council on American-Islamic Relations]. Sources: in-person appearance, Washington Post, CAIR, CAIR New York
Nancy Pelosi. Sources: Talking Points Memo, video statement, ABC News, The Weekly Standard
Communist Party of China. Sources: People’s Daily (Communist Party organ), Reuters, chinataiwan.org, The Telegraph
Hezbollah. Sources: almoqawama.org, almoqawama.org (2), almoqawama.org (3), wikipedia
9/11Truth.org. Sources: 911truth.org (1), 911truth.org (2), 911truth.org (3)
International Bolshevik Tendency. Sources: bolshevik.org, Wire Magazine
Anonymous. Sources: Adbusters, The Guardian, video statement
White Revolution. Source: whiterevolution.com
International Socialist Organization. Sources: Socialist Worker, socialistworker.org, in-person appearance
PressTV (Iranian government outlet). Sources: PressTV, wikipedia
Marxist Student Union. Sources: Marxist Student Union, Big Government, marxiststudentunion.blogspot.com
Freedom Road Socialist Organization. Sources: FightBack News, fightbacknews.org
ANSWER [Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, an anti-war umbrella protest group]. Sources: ANSWER press release, ANSWER web site, Xinhua
Party for Socialism and Liberation. Sources: Liberation News (1), pslweb.org, The Daily Free Press, Liberation News (2)
The list is far from complete. It doesn’t include George Soros or his front organizations, for instance.
But Zombie is not finished –
UPDATE: Thanks to the hundreds of readers who have made suggestions for additional entries on this list. I now have a large pile of potential new OWS supporters to investigate, and will work on updating this list over the upcoming weeks. When I’ve made it more thorough, I will re-launch an updated list that will be much more “official” in its comprehensiveness, sometime later this month.
We’ll be watching for it.
Radical leftism, a nasty ideology of nasty people 145
We like this article by Andrew Klavan, both what he says and how he says it:
The true test of a philosophy is not what it promises to make of the world but what it makes, in fact, of its adherents. Human nature is remarkably recalcitrant, but ideas do affect people over time, for good or ill, and the societies people make will ultimately bear the image of those effects and thus of the ideas. … Our beliefs arise from who we are and we become what we believe …
Leftism is bad for people. It makes them awful. The unwashed, ill-mannered, anti-Semitic, entitled, and now violent mobs littering various parts of the nation under the banner “Occupy” believe their ideas will lead to a better society — but they actually are the society their ideas lead to. Their behavior when compared to the polite, law-abiding, non-racist demonstrations of so-called tea partiers tells you everything you need to know about the end results of statism on the one hand and constitutional liberty on the other.
This is not, of course, to say that every left-winger is a miscreant but rather that the natural, indeed inevitable, result of statism is to produce nations of miscreants. When the state is permitted to make the individual’s moral choices, the individual is forced to become either a slave or a criminal; when the state is permitted to redistribute wealth, it chains the citizen into a rigid, two-tiered hierarchy of power rather than freedom’s fluid, multi-layered rankings of merit and chance; when the people are taught to be dependent on entitlements, they are reduced to violence when, inevitably, the entitlement well runs dry; when belief in the state usurps every higher creed, the people become apathetic, hedonistic, and uncreative and their culture slouches into oblivion. I need hardly expend the energy required to lift my finger and point to Europe where cities burn because the unemployable are unemployed or because the hard-working won’t fund the debts of the indolent; where violent and despicable Islamism eats away portions of municipalities like a cancer while the authorities do nothing; where nations that once produced history’s greatest achievements in science and the arts can now no longer produce even enough human beings to sustain themselves.
Why wait to see such results come home? Leftism is an ignoble creed on the surface of it. Its followers display their awareness of its shamefulness by projecting its evils onto their opposition. Leftists accuse conservatives of avarice, but which is greedier in a person: to seek to hold on to what is his own, or to seek, as the leftists do, to plunder what belongs to others? Leftists call conservatives racist and sexist, but who is it who wants race and gender enshrined in law? Who penalizes white or male babies for sins they never committed on the long-exploded theory that evil can undo evil? Leftists call conservatives hateful… I would answer “Read the papers!” but the papers lie because our journalists are leftists and they know down deep what they’re like, who they are. Compare instead the rhetoric and honesty — not of those selected by the media, or those quotes they’ve selected — but of those in equivalent positions at equivalent times. The gracious and open-hearted George W. Bush versus the divisive, self-serving, and dishonest Barack Obama, just to take one example.
Every one who sympathizes with the Occupy movement should take a good look at them — not as they will be in the paradise of their aspirations but as they truly are this minute. Look at them, and understand that that’s what tomorrow will look like if they have their way today.
As a perfect illustration of what Andrew Klavan is talking about, here’s Roseanne Barr:
Progressive rape in Norway 122
Back in May [2011] it was reported that every rape assault in the city of Oslo in the last five years had been committed by a person with a “non-Western” background – a Norwegian euphemism for Muslim. Now it turns out that there have already been twice as many rape assaults in Oslo so far this year as there were in all of 2010. At least one member of Parliament, André Oktay Dahl of the Conservative Party, calls the situation “critical” and is brave enough to acknowledge that many of the perpetrators come from cultures “with a reprehensible attitude toward women.”
So writes Bruce Bawer, the conservative columnist who lives in Norway, in an article at Front Page. He goes on:
The scandalous fact is that Norway, for all its wealth, has chosen not to invest overmuch in law and order. The very idea is simply too reactionary-sounding for the ’68-ers and their heirs in the political and bureaucratic corridors of power. As I wrote elsewhere a few months ago, “Norway wastes millions of kroner ever year on ‘development aid’ that ends up largely in the pockets of corrupt African dictators; it pours millions more into the pockets of non-Western immigrants who have become masters at exploiting the welfare system; for heaven’s sake, the Norwegian government even funds anarchists. It’s not entirely misguided for a Norwegian citizen to feel that his tax money is going less to fight the crime that threatens his home, his self, and his business than to support criminals.” …
[But] beefing up the police force wouldn’t even begin to address the problem that’s at the root of the country’s growing rape crisis: the presence in Norway, and especially in Oslo, of ever-growing numbers of people who have nothing but contempt for Western culture, who have absolutely no concept of respect for members of religions other than their own, and who have been brought up on the idea that women who dare to walk the street alone and without veils covering their faces deserve to be violated.
Which is to say again, Muslims.
Not so very many years ago, Oslo was virtually a rape-free city, inhabited by people who had been brought up on civilized notions of mutual respect and tolerance. No longer. Over the years, the incidence of rape has risen steadily. A wildly disproportionate number of the perpetrators are “rejected asylum seekers” – which may sound puzzling unless you are aware of the perverse state of affairs whereby even persons officially rejected for asylum in Norway are still allowed to stay. … The rapists … know very well that they will probably not be caught, and, if caught, will not be severely punished …
The incidence of rapes in Oslo has now eclipsed that in the other two Scandinavian capitals, Stockholm and Copenhagen. This is quite an achievement, given that Oslo has traditionally been the smallest and sleepiest of these three cities – the least cosmopolitan, the one that feels more like a safe small town than a European capital. In fact, it turns out that the incidence of rape in Copenhagen has been on the decline. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Denmark, for the last decade, has also been the country with the most sensible immigration and integration policies in Western Europe. (Nor is it coincidental that the other Scandinavian capitals have twice as many police per inhabitant as Oslo does.)
A glimpse of the official mentality that makes this steady rise in rape statistics possible was provided in an article that appeared in the Norwegian daily Dagbladet on October 25. It appears that in the summer of last year, the same paper ran a story about Abdi, a Somali immigrant, then 24 years old, who since coming to Norway as an asylum seeker had committed 14 robberies, been incarcerated, become a narcotic [addict], and lived on welfare. On June 3, 2010, Dagbladet reported, an Oslo court had ruled that Abdi, who is not a Norwegian citizen, should be returned to Somalia. Now, however, that ruling has been overturned by an appeals court. Abdi’s lawyer was jubilant, saying that this decision “is important for many Somalis in this country.” (Of all immigrant groups in Norway, Somalis are among those with the lowest employment and highest crime rates.) The lawyer chided Norway for having shown “an ugly face in this case” by planning to return her client to Somalia, but she expressed hope that given the new decision Norway would “change its practice” – presumably meaning that no amount of unsavory activity would make it possible to kick an immigrant out.
When did they? Was the last time within living memory?
The appeals court’s basis for its decision to let Abdi stay in Norway was that it might be dangerous for him to live in Somalia. Whether letting him stay in Norway might make life dangerous for Norwegians didn’t seem to enter into the court’s calculus. It’s not only the courts, to be sure, that are at fault in this sort of situation. In such cases, the media almost invariably step in and bombard the public with shameless propaganda designed to stir up sympathy for the miscreant in question. So it was with the Dagbladet article the other day, which sought to present Abdi as repentant, reformed, and reflective – indeed, almost sagacious and saintly. He was represented as having claimed that he has turned over a new leaf and that he now wants to help wayward immigrant kids to straighten out. He also supposedly said that he wants to study to be a sociologist (which, the more one thinks about it, sounds potentially even more dangerous than if he decided to persevere in his life of crime).
We say: Go for it, Abdi! It’s a real good career move for you. Your college fees will be paid by the tax payers, and research in the field will provide you with heaps of opportunities to hone your skills as a robber and rapist.
The once and new religion of earth-worship 269
Make no mistake about it – environmentalism is a new nature-worshiping religion.
It’s vatican is the United Nations. Its inquisitors are walking up and down and to and fro on the earth furtively trying to enforce a ukase titled “Agenda 21”.
We have warned about “Agenda 21” (see our post Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011).
We said that it is one of the biggest steps the UN has taken towards world socialist government, and we quoted Dr Ileana Johnson Paugh, an expert on the subject.
Because we cannot iterate too often or too strongly that Agenda 21 is a serious menace, we’re returning to the subject and quoting her again. She wrote on October 18 at Canada Free Press.:
Senator Robert Menendez [introduced] SB 1621 on September 22, [which may become] the Livable Communities Act. The bill has 17 Democrat cosponsors and, when passed, would create an Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), more bureaucracy to control our private land and housing by government fiat. …
All elements in this bill … are further implementation of United Nation’s Agenda 21 goals …
The UN’s congregation for the doctrine of the faith has set up the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives [ICLEI], name-adjusted in 2003 to ICLEI — Local Governments for Sustainability. In its turn it has formed sub-bureaus, one of which is named Smart Growth America.
The words “sustainability” and “smart growth” are euphemisms respectively for a “green” agenda and growth of government power.
Smart Growth America is another NGO (non-government organization) that pushes ICLEI’s goals …
As their site states, “Smart Growth is a better way to build our urban, suburban, and rural communities.” They are concerned with our transportation, our communities, and reducing carbon emissions. They are using “steering committees” and “visioning” to change our lives in accordance with the United Nation’s vision of a one world government controlled by a few. Under the guise of saving the planet from the destructive humans, private property must be abolished; everybody must live in mixed-use zones, five-minute walk from work and school, moving about on public buses or light rail. Land must be given back to its intended wilderness. …
These progressives are marching on, trying to reshape, restructure, control, and fundamentally change the way we live, according to their dictates and twisted vision of the world. …
Smart Growth America is offering free technical assistance to communities “interested in smart growth strategies.” Americans must wake up fast to this “green” invasion in our way of life: smart green growth, green transportation, saving the green planet, sustainable development, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable green jobs. Everything now is sustainable and all jobs and activities are green.
[But] there is no green industry. We have windmills and we build solar panels expensively. Wind and solar power cannot provide enough electricity for our huge economy. Nobody has built a nuclear power plant since the seventies. There are no green jobs. …
Beware of the Green Monster coming to your community, the excuse for United Nations to take over our economy, take over private property, and set the country back a few decades to the level of third world countries in the name of “social justice.” Watch for these signs and language of UN Agenda 21 activities underway in your communities:
- Installation of Smart Meters in your area, an illegal surveillance device without a warrant in the name of reducing electricity consumption and costs by cutting your power at peak usage and causing all sorts of health ailments because of radiation from the meter itself
- Your area is a member of ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) or ICMA (International City/County Management Association)
- Your area has a Vision, Master, or Comprehensive Plan that has been adopted in the last 5-10 years, promoting the “Triple Bottom Line,” or the three Es of Sustainable Development (Environment, Economy, and Social Equity)
- Your community supports Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and Resilient Communities with emphasis on using light rail, bike paths, walking, public transportation, discouraging the use of cars.
- Some communities narrow the roads to make them less accessible or install thousands of speed bumps; parking is at a premium and no parking garages are planned.
- Sustainable agriculture and community gardens are emphasized, encouraging a shift away from traditional free market driven food system, providing food just for the local community
- Your city established an Urban Growth Boundary [and] anything beyond it is considered “sprawl” and “blight” .. discouraged through incentives and regulations.
- Your town has joined Public-Private Partnerships, local regional councils, state, or federal government to promote Sustainable Communities Planning or Initiatives.
- Measurement of wealth through GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is discouraged while “happiness” and “well-being” become measures of wealth.
- A “New American Dream” is advertised as “living simply.”
- Green energy is most important, wind and solar, fossil fuels are evil.
- More and more restrictions and regulations are placed on land use, farm, residential, and commercial, in order to preserve the wilderness, small creatures, and natural resources at the expense of humans.
- The community is buying more and more “green space” and returning it to wilderness.
- You find a chart in your local government’s documents with three concentric circles with the words, Environment, Economy, Equity written in the middle of each circle.
- Community leaders subscribe to global warming as a manmade fact. They take action to lower the community’s carbon footprint by adopting “green” LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, “an internationally recognized green building certification system”] building and energy code standards for construction and development, including incentives, benchmarks, and retrofitting.
- Your town belongs to Earth Charter, the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities Initiative, the Audubon Society’s Sustainable Community Initiative, or your mayor has signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement.
- Officials refer to your town as a “transition town,” a “resilient city,” or a “livable community” and begin teaching “globalism,” “interdependence with nature,” and “interconnectedness”.
- Social Equity vocabulary is being used in your community such as “food justice,” “economic and environmental justice,” “fairness,” “direct democracy,” “diversity,” “food deserts,” “social justice,” and “wealth redistribution.”
- NGOs (non-governmental organizations) become involved in your city’s planning through other “stakeholders” in the “collaborative, consensus-building,” “visioning” process that takes about 18 months to complete and details your community’s future without input from the voters.
- Your school system starts teaching children how to be good “global citizens” and stewards of the environment via International Baccalaureate and other UN sponsored education agendas.
- Your local government authorities start to exceed their constitutionally granted powers by working with private international and national organizations through Public-Private Partnerships.
- You notice a significant push toward “social justice,” interfaith initiatives that promote “one world” along with community diversity, multiculturalism, sameness of faiths, social inclusion, and environmental stewardship.
There is some good news in that here and there people are becoming aware of the threat and are beginning to resist. In another article, October 26, the same author wrote:
As the battles against the green sustainability monster pushed by ICLEI and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) rage across the nation, ten communities have officially rejected membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).
Rep. Matt Shay reported the creation of an anti-UN Agenda 21 Caucus in the Washington State Legislature … [and] following the latest rejections of ICLEI by James City County, VA and Lexington, VA, several more communities across the nation are making similar decisions.
The Wisconsin Legislature has introduced two bills (Assembly Bill 303 and Senate Bill 225) to “allow local governments to repeal comprehensive development plans that were forced under smart growth legislation.” …
But the hooded monks of the UN, and their local collaborators – many disguised as “educators and entertainers” – pursue their mission relentlessly:
Meanwhile, the Office of Sustainability Institute at George Mason University invited the “sustainability community” of Fairfax, Virginia, to the Sustainable Living Roadshow on October 19, 2011. If you have no clue about the nature of this road show, it is safe to guess, it is environmental propaganda. I am still trying to understand the need for a sustainability institute at GMU, but then every government entity now has such an office or at least a sustainability plan.
When I saw the invitation, I began to understand the depth and length of brainwashing that the environmental minority is assaulting this country with in order to pass and promote their anti-American agenda.
“The Sustainable Living Roadshow is a caravan of educators and entertainers who tour the country in a fleet of renewable fuel vehicles setting up off-the-grid eco-carnivals with interactive learning villages at K-12 schools, universities, festivals and community events. These villages are designed to empower communities to utilize sustainable living strategies for a healthier planet.”
The sponsors of the Sustainable Living Roadshow are an interesting mixture of corporations, stores, and environmental groups: Birkenstock, Nature’s Gate, Petzl, Hemp Oil Canada, Organic India, The Living Seed Company, Hemp Industries Association, Elemental Herbs, Natracare, and Synchro.
The Sustainable Living Roadshow website displayed pictures of energetic young people holding signs that read, “Toss out fossil fuels,” “We’re Ready, Green Jobs Now,” emphasizing a global culture, another element of UN Agenda 21, a powerful assault on impressionable minds to erase any trace of our culture, our nationality, our borders, our sovereignty.
It does not matter that there is no viable, full replacement for fossil fuels yet to run the largest economy on the planet. Let us toss them out because teachers and environmentalists say so. There is no green industry and there are no green jobs. Students, impressionable children, and ignorant adults have overlooked these tiny details. The media never reports the truth. People do not know that there are are no green jobs and no green industry, just windmills and solar panels.
GMU asked attendees to arrive preferably by bike or public transportation, keeping in line with their walkability and mass-transit goals, which happen to coincide with UN Agenda 21. …
I wondered if parents knew what kind of brain washing their expensive tuition bought for their children and what kind of generation was going to lead our country into the future.
A future of –
Crowding humans off their lands and off their suburban homes into high-density, high-rise mixed-use tenements.
And as the environmentalists complain that there are too many people in the world, reduction of populations would come next by means of abortion, infanticide, refusal of medical treatment to the old, and – we guess – punitive executions for (eg) endangering a species of owl or smelt.
Not to mention suicide, which would be fully understandable in such circumstances.
“Agenda 21”, Dr Paugh points out, is not a treaty, and no member state is as yet bound to implement it. But although its recommendations, “covering every facet of human life”, are not legally binding, they are being implemented administratively in the US “without Congress ever approving or debating them”. If Senator Menendez’s Livable Communities bill is passed, they will become the law of the land.
Plainly, the religion of environmentalism would put total political power in the hands of a self-elected priestly caste.
Primitive earth-worshipers believed that human blood had to be spilt to ensure fertility. We don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the priests and inquisitors of the new earth-worshiping religion plan to carry out mass human sacrifice, and the enslavement of those they’ll permit to live.
Someone in charge 373
We are libertarian conservatives, “minarchists”, emphatically not anarchists.
Having a libertarian bent, we like much of what John Stossel writes in an article at Townhall:
Here’s my fantasy: Libertarians are elected to the presidency and to majorities in Congress. What would happen next? Well, if libertarians were “in charge,” you’d have more freedom and prosperity.
Freedom frightens some people. They say if no one is in charge there would be chaos. That is intuitive, but think about a skating rink. Before rinks were invented, if you proposed an amusement in which people strap blades to their feet and skate around on ice at whatever speeds they wish, you’d have been called crazy. There’s got to be speed limits, stoplights, turn signals. But we know that people navigate rinks safely on their own. They create their own order, with only minimal rules.
Society would work the same way — and does to a large extent even today. “Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government,” Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, wrote. “It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. … Common interest (has) a greater influence than the laws of government.”
Yes. Common interest is the wellspring of morality.
If libertarians were “in charge,” there would be laws to protect us from foreign enemies and those who would steal from us or injure us. Today, by contrast, under the rule of Democans and Republicrats, we’re drowning in rules — 160,000 pages’ worth. Micromanagement kills opportunity and freedom.
Maybe if there were a way to have more competition among governments, things would be better. Competition forces people to become more efficient and to get rid of stupid rules. What if we let people take over some unused land in America to create areas with fewer rules, simpler legal systems, smaller government?
Stossel quotes Michael Strong , who with his wife Magatte Wade founded the Free Cities Project.
Strong said, “We want to encourage thousands of people to create new governments that have different rules, each competing for customers with the best education and best health care, the most peace and prosperity you could imagine.”
We expect that where government interfered least with the economic life of the people there would be the greatest prosperity. Where it had nothing at all to do with education or health, the people would stand the best chance of being well educated and effectively cured. Where it most strongly protected liberty, they would probably endure the least crime. Where it armed the people most formidably they might least expect to be invaded.
Are there any free cities along the lines Strong and Wade envision?
“Hong Kong and Singapore are the best examples,” Strong said. “Now they are among the wealthiest places on earth.”
True – and proof that small government, doing little more than enforcing the rule of law, works well.
And there is a free city in Dubai because the emirate wanted to create a financial sector …
And did, though the emir had to abandon sharia law in the free city to achieve what he wanted:
“Dubai was brilliant,” Strong said. “They looked around the world. They saw that Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Sydney, London all ran British common law. British common law is much better for commerce than is French common law or sharia law. So they took 110 acres of Dubai soil, put British common law with a British judge in charge, and they went from an empty piece of soil to the 16th most powerful financial center in world in eight years.”
It’s what libertarians have said: Freedom works, and government, when it grows beyond the barest minimum, keeps people poor.
As liberty is most likely to bring prosperity, why are libertarians a political minority?
Is it because many people fear it, and if so why?
Some want governments to be parental and care for them “from the cradle to the grave”. They think such welfare governments can guarantee that they’ll be fed, housed, educated, medically treated all through their lives.
They could not be more wrong. The welfare states of Europe are rapidly going bankrupt.
And besides, what a government provides a government can withhold. To put yourself wholly in the power of a government is to put yourself not into safety but into danger. You are most safe when you control your own life, and the government does no more than guard your liberty. (And as everything governments do they do badly, it is wise to own a gun.)
Some need to feel that there is “someone in charge” – a king, a chief, a Secretary-General of the Communist Party, a powerful president, a Father in Heaven.
We don’t want someone in charge. Neither on earth nor “in heaven”. Throughout our earthly lives we want the rule of law, that wholly abstract authority, emotionless, fixed. (As Lord Denning, the British judge, said: “Be you ever so high, the law is above you”.)
And we delight in a universe that does not have and does not need “someone” to make, maintain, rule, watch over, manipulate, or give a damn about it.