Republican Presidential Debate: Where Was Gary Johnson?

I was underwhelmed with the candidates on tonight's GOP presidential debate. The candidates have a high degree of professionalism.  The only legitimate limited government candidate is Ron Paul.  The format of the debate prohibited intelligent discussion about issues, which worked against Paul.

I was disappointed that Gary Johnson was not invited; Paul was the best candidate there. I don't agree with him about Iran and the Middle East,  although a broad reduction in military intervention around the world, say 50%,  is an excellent idea.  I dislike the federal marriage amendment to which only Paul objected.  The Republicans thereby revealed themselves as equal to the Democrats in favoring extension of federal power.  Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are big government guys, and Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann are hardly better than they are.   Gingrich's claim that Reagan fostered sound money is a nonsensical lie. None of the candidates other than Paul will address the country's underlying problems.

I like Herman Cain, but he lacks experience. He should serve in Congress for a few years.   Mitt Romney is also a big government guy, and I don't like him, but he may be the only one capable of defeating Obama. I'm not sure that a Romney presidency would be great, but perhaps his credentials in establishing a health care plan in Massachusetts would enable him to repeal Obamacare and Sarbanes Oxley.  I think I heard him say that he would. I'm still not sure I can vote for him. If the polls are predicting a Republican Congress, I think I will vote for the Libertarian Party rather than Romney.

Several of the candidates claimed that states' rights would lead to polygamy. I don't think it would, but if it did, so what?  Heck, I'll move to Utah and give Freda some competition.  Nothing like a ménage à trois (better make sure Freda doesn't read this).  This pompous junk makes me ill. Polygamy is in the Bible. Who says it requires a constitutional amendment? And why are these big government Republicans looking for ever new ways to bug people who have tastes that are different from theirs?   

I am going to vote for Ron Paul.  Absent his victory I will probably vote for Romney in the election if it's not clear that the GOP is winning Congress.  If it is, I will vote for the Libertarian Party presidential candidate.  If Santorum, Gingrich or Huntsman gain the nomination I will not vote for them.  If Gary Johnson, Ron Paul or another libertarian ran on a third party ticket, they would have my vote regardless of what the GOP is doing at the congressional level.

Ron Paul needs a better platform to discuss the Fed. It's great he's raising the issue on national TV, but most of the knuckleheads watching probably don't know what he's talking about.

Evolving Debate Concerning Agenda 21-Driven Olive Town Plan

My bald spot is evident, lower right hand corner. Looks like over 100 attended.

I wrote a piece for The Lincoln Eagle and wrote a letter to the editor of The Woodstock Times concerning coverage of the Town of Olive meetings on Monday and Tuesday nights concerning the Agenda 21-driven proposed Town plan.

Green Olive Plan Generates Large Turnout—But Is It the Pits?

Town of Olive-- Special to the Lincoln Eagle. By Mitchell Langbert. Monday, August 8.  An overflow crowd came to an Olive Town meeting to discuss a controversial planning document.  Town of Olive Supervisor Berndt Leifeld and the Olive Town Board used part of a $50,000 grant to hire the Matthew D. Rudikoff consulting firm to develop a town vision plan.  The plan is peppered with jargon that comes out of the globalist 1992 Agenda 21, the UN’s environmental vision that would wrest control of communities from voters, replacing them with national building codes, regulations and UN bureaucrats.  Supervisor Leifeld, seeking additional grant money, has published Rudikoff's plan, but he is unfamiliar with Agenda 21, which is available on the UN's Website.  Assuring the meeting that the plan is merely a means to obtain grants and is not binding, Supervisor Leifeld seems to have seen green in one sense but to have been duped by greens in another sense.  Approximately 100 concerned Town of Olive residents swamped the meeting, and cars overflowed from the Justice Hall parking lot onto Bostock Road.  Discussion was civil. 

Charles Blumstein of Olivebridge asked why the vision plan was not better publicized.  Supervisor Leifeld, the Town Board, and their supporters claimed that it was.  Retired West Shokan fireman Steve Cadette suggested a vote, and about 15% in the room had known about the plan six months ago while 75% had heard about the meeting only in the past week due to local activists’ handbills and e-mails.   Although “progressives” in the audience expressed the mistaken belief that an Agenda 21-driven town plan is necessary for intelligent development, New York City’s near-bankruptcy in the 1970s followed decades of Robert Moses’s intensive urban planning and pursuit of grants.  Supervisor Leifeld and the Town Board now pursue a Moses-like planning-and-grants strategy seasoned with possibly precedent-setting rhetoric from George H. Bush’s globalist agenda.

xxxx

PO Box 130

203 Watson Hollow Road

West Shokan, NY 12494

August 10, 2011

Brian Hollander

Editor, Woodstock Times

Dear Editor:

I appreciate Paul Smart’s attention to my blog and to the brewing controversy concerning the Town of Olive plan in his recent article (“Tea Pot Tempest,” August 4).  The meeting on August 8 was well attended, but, contrary to Mr. Smart’s concerns, it was peaceful.  Those who are concerned about the Town of Olive vision plan are not Tea Party members or right wingers--if anything they are left wingers. Recall that the terms right and left refer to the seating plan of the French Estates General, where liberals, believers in freedom of speech, occupied the left and monarchists, who favored strong central authority, and political correctness, sat on the right.  As I recently blogged, Ulster County’s leftists are misnamed. They are rightest. We who oppose speech suppression, such as recently occurred to me at the LEED event in the Town of Ulster, and enviro-fascism emanating from Washington, are on the left

As Town of Olive residents digest the Town of Olive plan, its incompetent conceptualization and execution become evident.  Any plan needs to link budgets and costs to its vision. Costs and benefits are always trade-offs, and any competently designed plan will clarify them.  This plan does not discuss costs, taxes, or budgets, or compare the Town of Olive’s current cost structure to other towns’.  The proposal that Olive ought to build sidewalks is an example of an irresponsible vision that does not consider costs, budgets, and taxes.  Currently, the Town of Olive has among the highest paid Town Supervisors in Ulster County and among the highest cost structures and per capita staffing levels in Ulster County.  The plan does not address over-spending, political cronyism and government bloat that harm retired and working residents.  The  $47,000 paid to the consulting firm that drafted the plan is part of an ongoing  problem of runaway government spending that causes exodus from New York State and from the Town of Olive.

At the meeting Supervisor Leifeld stated that the plan need not be taken seriously because its purpose is to pursue grants.  I can think of several instances, such as Polytechnic University, where grants and gifts have led to financial collapse.  Moreover, representation to a grant giver of a false plan could amount to fraud and conceivably to a cession of local control, potentially becoming a threat to local democracy.  One thing Olive does not need is Woodstock’s right wing approach to zoning, which reflects the needs of the local aristocracy and squashes local residents under weekenders’ fashionable Gucci heels. Mr. Leifeld’s supporters ought to  sit on the right hand side of the next planning meeting. The debate may become more intense because the issues are becoming clearer to us left wingers.  

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

WEUS and Woodstock Times Spotlight Mitchell Langbert's Blog

This morning Dennis K. Thomas of Altamont Springs/Orlando's WEUS radio (the Internet Boomer Radio station is here --  the WEUS air station is here) interviewed me on his morning Boomer Show.   We discussed the importance of gold and silver ownership in retirement planning, especially in light of the Obama credit debacle.  I had been saying that 50 Bush messes fit into the Obama mess. The number will ultimately be greater.  

Dennis is a great guy.  He was quite complimentary of my resume.  He awarded me the coveted "Boomer of the Week" title, which was a thrill, and he asked me to be on his Social Security board of observers. I'm hoping for return visits.

As well, my friend Paul Smart, Ulster County New York's best left-wing journalist, published an (August 4, 2011, p. 8) article about the upcoming Olive Town meeting in The Woodstock Times. Calling me a right wing gadfly Smart writes about the budding resistance to the authoritarian Agenda 21 with mild sarcasm.  

I like the appellation gadfly, but right wing is inaccurate.  The term right wing comes from the seating on the right in the French Estates General in the 1780s to early 1800s of monarchists whose views are repugnant to me. I am sympathetic to de Jouvenal's concerns about centralization of power (who isn't?), but I believe in Hamiltonian republicanism limited by a Jeffersonian concern for states' rights, including secession.  Wikipedia describes right wing as follows:

In politics, Right, right-wing and rightist are generally used to describe support for preservation or promotion of social order and the legitimacy of social hierarchy in society that is often advocated in the name of tradition.  It involves in varying degrees the rejection of egalitarian objectives ... The terms Right and Left were coined during the French Revolution, referring to seating arrangements in parliament; those who sat on the right supported preserving the institutions of the Ancien Régime (the monarchy, the aristocracy and the established church).Use of the term "Right" became more prominent after the second restoration of the French monarchy in 1815 with the Ultra-royalists.

Right wing doesn't apply to libertarians, and opposition to UN Agenda 21 is an anti-authoritarian hence left-wing position.  This might not be palatable to right wing Progressives, like Smart and The Woodstock Times's readership. Nor does right wing properly apply to most conservatives, although the very appellation conservative is also a throwback. There is no such thing as a real conservative in America because the views called conservative are of more recent, Jacksonian origin than the Hamiltonian, Federalist and Whig views called progressive.  American progressivism is a throwback to mercantilism of the 17th century; American conservatism builds on the late 19th century views of Alfred Marshall and the 20th century views of President William Howard Taft. 

In the meaning of lifestyle and religion, libertarians may or may not be traditionalists. Whether they are or not, libertarians do not believe in the use of state violence or authority to enforce traditional or any other lifestyle.

Libertarians do not reject egalitarianism, which the left almost always voices and almost always ignores.  I have never seen more hierarchical, authoritarian institutions than the left-and-progressive dominated universities in which I work.   An old trick of the left is to claim that they favor democracy and egalitarianism and then create institutions which exclude the majority,  who lack the resources to manipulate institutional levers. Smart's article is even handed for a leftist publication like The Woodstock Times, but one can guess that the pro-freedom reaction to the corrupt, Agenda 21-driven Town plan irritates the authoritarian Woodstock and Olive progressives in Smart's readership. 

To understand how leftist hierarchy and oppression are part and parcel of the left's claim  to "social justice" (a vacuous term that meant murdering millions to Hitler and Stalin) one need only observe the long standing strategy of Progressivism to staunch small operators and individuals through escalation of regulatory costs.  Kip Viscusi of Harvard and my professor at Columbia, Ann Bartel, documented this pattern with respect to OSHA, and I documented it with respect to ERISA.  Complex regulation makes it difficult for small operators to do business. The cost of regulation falls less heavily on large organizations that can spread costs across a wider range of units of output.  

Wealthier home owners are in an analogous position to larger firms.  They can more easily absorb costs that drive away lower-income homeowners whose houses wealthy left-wingers can purchase at a discount.  Agenda 21's costly environmental regulation can be borne by people making over $100,000 but not by people earning less. Median homeowners are ground under progressives' regulatory Gucci heels to the rich progressives' direct benefit, both environmental and economic. The only thing more right wing than someone who opposes equality is someone who says that they favor equality and uses government violence in the name of equality to enforce an inequality that benefits themselves. That is PROGRESSIVISM.

Less intelligent Progressives may actually believe that oppressive regulation that sends lower-wage homeowners into concentrated urban developments serves humanity, but smart Democratic operators like George Soros and Warren Buffett are well aware that the costly regulation that they advocate drives out smaller competitors, creating an open playing field for them.  Thus, billionaire Democrats like the Town of Olive's Bruce Ratner can sit back and snap up properties that have been forcibly vacated by progressive regulation like Agenda 21.  Though incapable of intelligent thinking about her actions, Linda Burkhardt well serves the opportunism of the rich.  Progressivism is a passive-aggressive ideology that Agenda 21 reflects. It claims to be helping humanity as it sends low-income homeowners to concentration camps like the LEED project Birchez, from which I was ejected by City of Kingston police acting as the Democratic Party's muscle men and out of their jurisdiction while claiming to be Town of Ulster police. 

Agenda 21, Rio Declaration Mandate Use of Junk Science

In 1992 the first Bush Administration signed Agenda 21. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development was one of the outcomes of the Rio conference. It is posted on the UN's website.   According to the Declaration, junk science must be used as a basis for national policy (see principle 15).  The principles seem to use ordinary language, but a lawyer could easily subvert or invert their meaning. The Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill already has done this.  "Cap and Trade" originally referred to a mechanism whereby manufacturers could sell pollution rights. The Cap and Trade bill proposed in 2009 would have established punitive regulations on homes and required retrofitting of home insulation at large financial cost to occupants.  The first Bush administration should not have been a party to the Rio Declaration because it is a totalitarian Pandora's box. Another example is the highly elastic term "sustainability." The vacuous term could be used to say that anyone who uses any resource is failing to be "sustainable."  The US needs to revoke its agreement to the Rio Declaration. As well, the Declaration states that women, youth and "indigenous peoples" play a special role in the implementing the provisions.  Some of the provisions are:

 ...

Principle 3

    The right to development must be fulfilled 

so as to equitably meet developmental and 

environmental needs of present and future 

generations.

Principle 8

    To achieve sustainable development and a 

higher quality of life for all people, 

States should reduce and eliminate unsustainable 

patterns of production and consumption and 

promote appropriate demographic policies.

Principle 11

    States shall enact effective environmental 

legislation. Environmental standards, management 

objectives and priorities should reflect the 

environmental and developmental context to which 

they apply.  Standards applied by some countries 

may be inappropriate and of unwarranted economic 

and social cost to other countries, in particular 

developing countries.
 

Principle 13

    States shall develop national law regarding 

liability and compensation for the victims of 

pollution and other environmental damage.  States 

shall also cooperate in an expeditious and more 

determined manner to develop further international 

law regarding liability and compensation for adverse 

effects of environmental damage caused by activities 

within their jurisdiction or control
to areas beyond their jurisdiction.

Principle 15

    In order to protect the environment, the 

precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States 

according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of 

serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific 

certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-

effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.