Developing a Sustainable Tyranny: The Subtle Agenda

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are best served through the sanctity of individual rights and private property.  Societies are made up of individuals, and empowering individuals has the direct result of best serving the community as a whole.  The collectivist will say that big government is required to serve the needs of a population the best, but history shows that it is quite the opposite.

Whenever I hear someone talking about things being done for the "common good", I brace myself, as there really is no such thing when a populace is comprised of distinct individuals.  Individuals know what is in their best interests, not government bureaucrats.  I always advise people to watch their property and hold onto their wallet when you hear some political sycophant talking about the "common good", as far more often than not it means that you are about to see rights reduced and the fruits of your labor siphoned off.

All countries and societies have flaws, and I won't be sidetracked by the mistakes America has made during its history. The founders of the country left mechanisms in place to deal with significant flaws, and a number of wrongs have been corrected through the years through things like constitutional amendments (though in some cases this has given rise to other evils, but that is the topic for another discussion).  None of these things should diminish or obfuscate the irrefutable truth that the majority of those in a low economic bracket do have a much higher standard of living than their counterparts in other nations.

A person in America can be deemed to be poor and still have a house or apartment, air conditioning, television, a car, and other things that are not possessed by the poor of most other countries.  Further, at least in the America that was for over two hundred years, that poor individual could climb into the middle class, and perhaps even rise to the upper class in economic terms.

My own family history on my father's side testifies to this, starting with a dirt-poor, uneducated German immigrant to the USA who left his homeland with nothing. He set roots in place, using the blessings of freedom to forge a better life than he could have had in Germany and provide for his family, beginning a line that led to someone like my father, who was a cutting-edge, world-respected cancer researcher in the middle class. 

That is a wonderful story and testament to what freedom empowers, and the history of America is filled with countless such individuals exhibiting upward mobility.  The trend between generations was that sons and daughters were able to attain a better situation than their parents before them. Life in America for individuals and between generations was anything but stagnant, something that is now occurring as things go badly awry and the nation increasingly embraces collectivist ideologies.

One of the bedrocks involved in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is private property, and anything that seeks to undermine or corrupt the sanctity of private property needs to be resisted and overcome.  This brings me to the very cleverly termed "sustainable development", which sounds much nicer than its earlier incarnation, Agenda 21 at the UN, all of which is a sugary sweet cover for that noxious monstrosity known as collectivism.

What really is taking place where you hear these terms bandied about is the development of a sustainable tyranny.  It is engineered by individuals who think they know what is best for you, at the nicest level.  Many of them, especially the far-left environmentalists who are at the core of this movement, are virulently anti-human.  This latter group include the types who would like to see the population reduced swiftly, and some have openly wished for things like pandemics to make this happen (you can look up unapologetic miscreants like "Dr." Eric Pianka, who wished for 90% of the world's population to be killed off for the sake of the environment, even preferring an ebola-like virus to be the method.  Not surprisingly, he didn't volunteer to lead that idea by example).

Living in Kentucky, I have seen the real environmentalists who engage in real sustainable development, in the true sense of the terms.  They are the country folk, those men and women who love camping, hunting, and fishing, and who own small farms all across the state.  It is they who achieve harmony between humankind and the environment, embracing American individualism while supporting a responsible use of the environment so that the activities their fathers and grandfathers enjoyed and introduced them to can be passed onward to their children and grandchildren.

People that live in the rural areas of the state know far more about what threatens the environment, and what should be done than does some bureaucrat in a UN office.  They honor the environment, respect it, preserve it, and better it, all the while upholding the ideals of individual freedom and natural rights.  They have demonstrated, without question, that environmental responsibility and private property/individual rights are not mutually exclusive.

It is these very people that the cockroaches behind things like Agenda 21 would like to see uprooted and moved into dense-population zones, using tools ranging from zoning, to property taxes, to conservation easement to pressure individuals to go along with their agenda.  The plan has been hidden in plain sight for quite some time, put forth in publications such as the Global Biodiversity Assessment and the Agenda 21 publication that you can order in softcover from the UN itself.

There is a long history in the process of moving the UN agenda to the local level here in America.  Several administrations, both Democrat and Republican, are guilty in facilitating it.  George Bush Sr. signed a soft treaty while both Clinton and Obama issued executive orders that greatly empowered this agenda, doing an effective end-around elected representatives to be carried out by regulatory agencies like the EPA.  Growing numbers of property owners have had rude awakenings and experienced the ugly reality, from seeing their property reclassified, to losing it outright, to finding that they can't do anything with the land they own.  It is a terrible transgression of Constitutional Rights, and I know in my heart the Founders would be outraged by tragedies like this.

Yet, there are encouraging signs, as increasingly I see resistance forming.  Non-Governmental Organizations like ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives), who are instrumental in carrying out this agenda, are being resisted and even driven out from many local communities.  Unfortunately, entities like ICLEI have their tentacles in many more.

If you should discover something like ICLEI in place within your own community you should do everything that you possibly can to get them removed.  Educate your officials, raise awareness, and strengthen opposition to them.  They are antithetical to freedom, and they have no place in a free society with the authoritarian system they work to see implemented.

This is not a situation of co-existence.  It is a situation of whether you want to live the one life you have a free society, or one that is collectivist in nature.  If you want to honor those who fought for freedom across history, then this is a great way to do that.  

History is very clear about which of the two models benefits a given population.  The more free a society, the better it tends to be for all, while the more collectivist a society is, the more draconian and tyrannical it becomes.

We are most certainly at a dangerous crossroads, and those who understand what freedom means and what blessings it brings to a country must keep their eyes open and minds vigilant.  It is time to roll up our sleeves, and roll back collectivism, and stamp it out wherever it shows its hideous face.