America Needs a News Media

It is unbelievable that a country that has been developed for as long as the United States lacks a reliable information source that people concerned with current events can use to learn about what is occurring at the international, national, regional, and state levels.  At the local level we in Ulster County are blessed with The Lincoln Eagle, Mike Marnell's people's newspaper.  What is wrong with this country that there is no day-to-day information source at the higher levels?  Entrepreneur Marnell should consider going online and taking his Lincoln Eagle idea national.

Agenda 21--No

PO Box 130

West Shokan, NY 12494

July 19, 2013

Senator Chuck Schumer

322 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, DC  20510

Dear Senator Schumer:

Agenda 21 is a mistake, and I oppose it and Andrew Cuomo's Leaner and Greener Communities program.  The concept of sustainability is vacuous.  Like freedom and equality, it can mean anything, and it can be used to institute tyranny.  The Agenda 21 document is based on a fallacy:  rich countries are rich because they make poor countries poor.   I don't know what they taught you at Harvard, but if that belief is consistent with what you know, then Harvard made you ignorant.

People become rich for four reasons:   (1) the marginal value of their labor is high because they have skills that make them productive*,   (2) they work hard, (3) they save their money,  and (4) government provides a stable, limited support to their hard work and  saving and does not arbitrarily interfere, steal or redistribute their earnings.   In contrast, the UN claims that people become rich by stealing from the poor.

The US already has a sufficient level of government.  While coordination among governments is a worthy aim, there is no need for the UN to be involved, even if through a non-binding agreement, with economic regulation.  In fact, though, the implementation of the economic illiteracy in Agenda 21 has not been non-binding.  Through policies like Andrew Cuomo's Leaner and Greener Communities program, one of which is Engage Mid-Hudson, government is turning Agenda 21 into law.

Andrew Cuomo's program is based on deception.  The regional leaders have lied and claimed that there was consensus at the meetings, but there was no consensus.  I was present when the leaders of the Engage Mid-Hudson meeting suppressed those who vocally opposed the ideas that the document expresses.   Opponents were not allowed to be involved in the process.   The document is based on a ridiculous aim, 80% reduction in carbon emissions, that cannot be accomplished without major technological breakthroughs and that, if implemented, will create an unsustainable economy that will make New Yorkers poor.  Who wants to live in a country that will support the Leaner and Greener Communities program, a program that establishes regional soviets to implement ignorant, socialist economic strategies?  My ancestors came here to escape tyranny, not to recreate it.  

The UN has no place in the governance of the American economy, and the US should rescind its association with the Agenda 21 document.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

*William Lewis observed that the organization of work is a critical factor to national productivity levels.  The phrase "marginal value of labor" assumes that hardworking entrepreneurs have, over a period of time, invented work processes with escalating levels of output. Such improvement cannot be accomplished through government because it depends on the ability to fail, go bankrupt, end programs, and learn--processes that no government can implement.

Pennsylvania Town Rejects Agenda 21

Lynne Teger forwarded a February Lebanon Daily News (LDN) article about West Cornwall, Pennsylvania's rejection of Agenda 21.  West Cornwall is in southeastern Pennsylvania's Lebanon County. LDN says that the town passed a resolution opposing Agenda 21 and then withdrew from the state's regional plan.  As the article points out, Agenda 21 is a UN-based plan to globalize the world economy and redistribute wealth from more to less economically productive nations' citizens.  It aims to eliminate property rights by imposing taxes that one-percent property owners can easily afford but that those with constrained resources cannot. The United States signed it under George H. W. Bush, and the nation has funded its implementation ever since through the President's Council on Sustainability and, more recently, through a range of government agencies.

In the Empire State, Andrew Cuomo, emperor of economic destruction, has funded 10 regional councils or soviets to implement Agenda 21-based plans.  The regional soviets are Emperor Andrew's first goose-step toward attacking local democracy.  Given the abject failure of the emperor's economic policies, it stands to reason that  His Majesty Il Duce now pursues fascistic environmental policies.  

One of the tactics that proponents of Agenda 21 use is to forestall intelligent conversation by claiming that Agenda 21 does not exist or that it is a "tin foil hat" conspiracy theory.  Such proponents usually have not read the document and have not thought through the implications of global redistribution of wealth and soviet government.

Agenda 21 is no more a conspiracy theory than is the World Trade Organization, NATO, or the UN itself; you can read it here.   Under town plans like the Woodstock, Saugerties, and Olive, New York comprehensive plans, people who live in rural or suburban areas with constrained cash flows or limited means will be the first to see their lifestyles curtailed.  In exchange for escalating taxes and ever-increasing environmental regulation and control, the towns will build cramped urban housing in mixed-use areas. 

There Needs to Be a Revolution Every 240 Years

Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Stephens Smith:  "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure."   He was fond of adding that there needs to be a revolution every 20 years. 

The human mind is rarely able to forecast the future with precision.  In the case of the Federalist government instituted at the state constitutional conventions in the 1780s and the national Constitutional Convention, Jefferson overstated the  case by 220 years.

From its beginning the federal government fulfilled the anti-Federalists' fears. It always has subsidized the wealthy and well placed, and it frequently has instituted elements of tyranny that have waxed and waned with popular opinion. In the 1790s the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Act, a direct attack on the Bill of Rights upon which the anti-Federalists had insisted.  During the Civil War Lincoln closed Democratic newspapers and attempted to arrest Chief Justice Roger Taney.  After World War I anarchists and socialists were exiled.  During World War II, Japanese-Americans were confined to concentration camps.  In the post-war period the FBI harassed communists.

Those incursions on civil liberties are small compared to the federal incursions on economic liberties that have escalated since the Civil War.  Until the 1920s, America's had been a limited state, a concept little understood before the 18th century.  Popular ideological commitment to liberty and the limited state allowed democracy to coexist with economic stability.

The American laissez faire, free market approach was able to accomplish several objectives previously unknown to humankind:

(1) an explosion of innovation,
(2) a rising standard of living for all Americans, especially workers, despite erroneous public belief that living standards were falling,
(3) an opportunity for all Americans to start businesses,
(4) a greater degree of freedom than ever previously known to mankind because economic liberty begets civil liberty.

As well, (5), the American economic and constitutional system overcame the natural flaw of democratic systems, class warfare and self-aggrandizement through special interests' capture of regulatory mechanisms, because of public commitment to the limited state and liberty.  In the 19th century government was less than five percent of the economy; today it is more than 40 percent.

In Rise and Decline of Nations Mancur Olson makes clear why democracy leads to special interest lobbying that imposes high public costs.  It may be that there are periods when the public can say no to special interests' influence on the state, but mass movements are fragile and do not last.  Ultimately, the economy's innovative capacity and living standards decline as special interests extract ever greater shares of wealth through regulation, taxation, and monetary expansion.

Olson shows that the reason special interests are successful in a democracy is that the incentive to lobby favors small groups. A given benefit divided among a small number of group members is larger per capita than a given benefit divided among a large number.  With a million group members benefits need to be divided among the million members.  With a single corporation or a single union, benefits need to be divided among a small set of interest groups. This makes organization of the interests easier and cheaper.

The transactions costs of organization and the larger benefit per capita make interests that can be easily organized more effective. This can change over time. For example, the environmental movement has been able to establish special interest groups that have worked in tandem with the United Nations and federal regulatory authorities. Nevertheless, they have done so by forging corporatist alliances.  Without those alliances the current push toward state-enforced, corporatist environmentalism could not have proceeded so far.  

The wealthy have always been small in number, have had greater resources, and have been able to communicate among themselves because they have been concentrated in specific geographic areas like New York and Los Angeles.  From the beginning of American history institutions like the central bank and slavery reflected the ability of the wealthy  to divide a large benefit among a relatively small group.

In his Anti-Federalists, Jackson Turner Main shows that the anti-Federalists were poorer and less organized than the Federalists.   Although the Federalists claimed to be in favor of decentralization and federalism (thus their name), once in power they attempted to centralize the state through the First Bank of the United States, a standing army, and the Alien and Sedition Act. As well, the Constitution broadened slavery (compared to the level that would have existed without the Constitution) by making the Fugitive Slave Law possible.

What prevented special interest capture of the economy was public commitment to limited government.  The American government always reflected the interests of the wealthy, but because its scope was limited, the American economy has been the most successful in history. Progressivism, though, discarded the 19th century commitment to the limited state. Progressives like Richard T. Ely viewed expansion of the state as a good in itself; John Dewey saw democracy itself as an ultimate good.  The administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson discarded the limitations on special interest extraction.  In the Progressives' minds they were saving America from trusts, but the ultimate effect has been to allow full sway to the dynamic Mancur Olson describes, so the trusts have expanded.

The result has been that for the past 40 years the American economy has been dismal, and it is getting worse.  As well, the Obama administration has demonstrated that it is capable of worse tyranny that that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, which the American public has so far accepted with indifference.  These include use of state power to financially harass dissenting political organizations, illegal investigation of more than 100 million telephone records, and a cover-up about President Obama's self-destructive decisions with respect to Benghazi.  Hardly a day goes by without evidence of an additional tyrannical initiative at the federal level.

Americans tend to believe that they have a great political and economic system, but that is no longer true.  My ancestors wisely chose emigration from their eastern European homes, and if you are smart, you are thinking of foreign real estate investment.  Enough Americans favor freedom that a revolutionary movement is possible here. After 240 years, the liberty tree needs refreshment.