How soon before the second hand stores, the used car dealerships, and the higher-priced food markets have shortages caused by the redistribution of the powers of the free market into the powers of social engineers?
The Environmental Protection Agency published this: "Sustainability means 'meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.'"
On the surface there seems nothing wrong and everything right about this definition. To discover what is wrong you simply need to click on the live link above, provided by the EPA, to read this: "...economic development must be ecologically viable now and in the long run."
No one denies the environment must be kept clean. I remember when Lake Superior was considered a "dead" lake, and the naysayers said nothing would fix it. The algae had taken over, and what fish were left in it were inedible and toxic. Science and the law went to work on it.
Now, "The average underwater visibility of Lake Superior is 27 feet, making it easily the cleanest and clearest of the Great Lakes. Underwater visibility in places reaches 100 feet. Lake Superior has been described as "the most oligotrophic lake in the world." from Lake Superior Facts
Conservatives attempt to limit such "ecological viability" by pointing out the insanity of protecting--for example--a species of frog, when that protection prevents the ability of current generations to meet their own needs, or when it actually costs a land owner the rights associated with his own lost capital when he is told to set aside the land declared protected.
The government has been guilty for decades of both environmental and social engineering that is based on political ends. The government has political ends that may not reflect the needs or protect the rights of its citizens to control their own resources--a political end that is precisely defined as "socialism"--a system that "relies on control of the means of production by the state, either through state ownership or regulation." Wikipedia
The Sustainability Institute is a private enterprise who's "staff includes biologists, writers, social scientists, system dynamics modelers, and facilitators." The "means of production" is the system designed by the owner of the capital and the resources to produce. The Sustainability Institute may employ social scientists and others who share the government's political, social, and scientific policies, but not their methods. You would never hear the government say, "We conduct stakeholder-based systems analysis..." [all emphases added]
That "stakeholder" is the capitalist and/or the owner of the means of production. Metaphysical naturalism (MN) comprehends that have a stake in one's own means of sustaining one's own philosophy, not to mention one's own life and health, means capitalism. MN specifically accepts capitalism as the only moral means of conducting the affairs of one's property. Even giving it away in philanthropy or in inheritance is according to the rights of capital; having the methods of distributing and using one's capital defined and altered by anyone but the owner can only be done at the point of a gun. Only the government has that gun.
Friends of the Earth International is typical of the sort of organization that helps shape government policies by lobbying toward environmental "sustainability," with mission statements such as, "...people’s environmental rights include access to the unspoiled natural resources that enable survival such as land, shelter, food, water and air."
Again, this doesn't sound bad on the surface. But ask these questions: which people have these rights; who defines what "unspoiled" means; "rightful access" is to who's land; whose shelter, whose food, water, and air? That "rightful access to land" must necessarily be to someone else's land, because the Friends of the Earth are certainly not the land owners to who's property they want "access."
How do unspoiled natural resources enable survival access to shelter and food? Does it mean forcing people to return to a time when we were nomads picking our food from the trees we did not nurture? If it does not mean this, you wouldn't know it, because the only other alternative is the one the Friends don't state: "survival" to them means the redistribution of the wealth of resources, from the owners, into the hand of the "looters." The Friends are "looters."
"If some men attempt to survive by means of brute force or fraud, by looting, robbing, cheating or enslaving the men who produce, it still remains true that their survival is made possible only by their victims, only by the men who choose to think and to produce the goods which they, the looters, are seizing. Such looters are parasites incapable of survival, who exist by destroying those who are capable, those who are pursuing a course of action proper to man." “What Is Capitalism?” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal Ayn Rand
"In our vision," writes Friends of the Earth, "environmental rights also include rights for indigenous peoples and other collectivities [looters], the right to information and participation in decision-making, freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to resist unwanted developments.
"We also believe in the right to claim reparations for violated rights, including rights for climate refugees and others displaced due to environmental destruction, the right to claim ecological debt, and the right to environmental justice." [all emphases added]
Again, ask yourself questions: why do collectives have priority over the individual sovereignty of those who own the capital and the resources; how is one's right to speak freely about unwanted developments affected so that it must be demanded; why do the demands about developments unwanted by collectives take precedence over the owner of the capital, the resources, and the means of production; does the right to participation in decision-making mean decisions over privately owned resources, or only over publicly-held resources; how does the First Amendment not apply in such a way that it needs to be demanded as applicable; what are "ecological debts" and "environmental justice," and against whom are they levied?
To be sure, not all government-engineered "sustainability" and "viability" has to do with the environment. It has taken a strange swing lately, in the direction of the automobile and energy industries. President-elect Obama, Congressmen, Senators, and even auto and energy executives have talked about the need for sustainability in those industries.
But it is one thing for private industry to speak in terms of saving their own livelihoods and those of their employees; it is quite another when they go begging for government handouts and promise to allow a "car czar" and an "energy czar" to carry out the virtually-socialistic duty of determining whether their industries are meeting government standards, or solving the economic problems themselves by letting the consumers and the markets determine what is "sustainable."
It is obvious that those two industries, as only two of many examples, believed the sky would never fall on them. But a quicker way to economic viability for the entire nation--and in a domino effect the rest of the world--is to let the economy fix itself.
Modern liberals see the Constitution as a "living document" instead of the concretized ideas of forward-thinking Renaissance liberals. They see the earth itself as "living" even as they know that what they paint as living is really only the processes of nature.
Of course frogs and pandas and salmon and flowers and trees are alive; but rivers, glaciers, the ozone layer, and methane from farting cows come from processes of nature, and they do not have rights. The rights of living things that are not homo sapien do not take precedence over the rights of living homo sapiens unless, as Keanu Reeves insanely made clear they did in his version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still", someone with political power (the power of the gun) holds a gun to the heads of people who believe in unalienable sovereignty and force them to act in a manner consistent with progressive liberalism, i.e., some form of collectivism.
The 2009 version of "Stood Still" could have been scripted by an apologist for the Friends of the Earth.
"Government-engineered sustainability" was what the Soviet Union attempted for nearly 80 years. Millions of people starved to death, or froze to death.
Food prices in the U.S. have skyrocketed because sustainability in the auto energy industry was thought by the Bush Administration to be in bio-fuels. This has pushed up the costs of everything that has corn in it--including automobiles themselves--and everything that has wheat in it, because wheat was forsaken by farmers for the subsidies paid them by government to grow corn.
Here in Michigan jobs were created by the construction of at least four bio-fuel plants and the labor to operate them, and corn farmers made profits. But it came at the expense of the cost of groceries and prepared foods and thus from the budgets of those who could no longer afford to purchase "luxury" items and go out to eat once in a while, let alone afford brand new clothes and shoes for their children. Sales at second-hand stores has skyrocketed, while sales at nearly every other store except WalMart has gone down considerably, and even WalMart says it did not see the gains it expected.
Now the Obama Administration wants to engineer the same sort of "sustainability" in the other energy markets. None of it will be done by the demands of the market, any more than bio-fuels were done by the demands of the market. The desires of those who control the markets as seen in market demands are thwarted by engineering government policies.
How soon will it be before the second hand stores, the used car dealerships, and the higher-priced food markets have either no more products to sell or cannot afford to sustain their own markets because of shortages caused by the redistribution of the powers of the market from those who have the capital and the means of production, to those who think they know what is best for "the ability of future generations to meet their own needs"?
As it stands now, at least the next two to three generations will be paying down the debts of the bailout schemes that do not allow the free market to be free. How can any future generation meet their own needs when they are not free even to determine their needs, a process that requires a free market, not one that is engineered for a "sustainability" that depends on market needs which the government cannot predict?
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