If what they say is true about each good laugh adding 15 minutes to one's life, then I am among those who are apt to check out at any time because my bumper sticker hasn't caused me to chuckle in over a year.
This story has to begin with mention of the woman I love.
Liberty. Sweet Liberty.
This woman whose existence is the meaning of my life. This ideal whose proud example has inspired self-respect in millions who come to America to walk beside her.
My father's forebears came from Germany to walk with her. My mother's from England. They each left the lands which Liberty had left.
They left the lands where there was no reality to the rights written in a dead 'constitutional' document. The Politburo micro-managed the existence of every citizen-slave from the womb to the tomb.
They left the lands where the Monarch was Sovereign and all use of property was by privilege only. Only the Friends-of-Monarch prospered.
They left the lands where men ruled, rather than law. Things were put up for vote that never should have been. The democratic majority ruled as a mobocracy.
They left the lands where plunder had been made legal. They left the Italian fascist state. They left the Cuban dictator. They left the Iranian thugs. They left the socialist Australian egalitarians.
They left the lands where "need, greed, and compassion" had been redefined. as Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., has said,"Need was my wanting something that you had. 'Greed' was your strange belief that it was your property. 'Compassion' was the politician and the lawyer who arranged the transfer."
They left the lands where public interests were misconstrued to be public rights.
They came to Liberty's land where, as described by Frederick Bastiat, they established "a rational, simple, economical government, understood by all, loved by all, useful to all, supported by all, entrusted with a perfectly definite and very limited responsibility, and endowed with an unshakable solidity" because the law safe-guarded the property rights of all citizens.
In America they were not treated as rabble, but rather they were treated as what men are -- the fountainhead of constitutional liberty.
Across the land the new Americans discovered the harsh reality and sweet opportunity of wealth creation. They observed that some men made no more of a few head than a few meals or a few quick trades, while others applied such intelligence to their actions that their small beginnings grew into operations which created wealth not only for themselves and their families, but for whole communities.
Only intelligence creates wealth, but intelligence cannot be forced to do so. If coerced, intelligence will barely produce more than the simple ropes with which the enslaved bodies are bound.
Only when free to think, to produce, and to keep what is produced, does intelligence create prosperity as it so created in the first 150 years of this nation of Sweet Liberty's. This nation that has been the only nation on earth to achieve the greatness that is possible to man and the happiness which is possible in life.
The American cowboy has symbolized that enterprising spirit. The American cowboy is independent, ruggedly individualistic, looking out for himself and his family. He is exactly the wrong kind of person for the society desired by bureaucrats, statist politicians and the cultural elite.
Is it because he is the wrong kind of person that he is being so harassed, hog-tied and gunned down by the very government whose prime constitutional function is to protect him from violence and his property from theft?
This is government plunder of property rights.
A company in Odessa was in violation of an odor regulation. Neighbors didn't like the way it smelled. The fine was $1.4 million. The fix would cost $12 million. Our Attorney General proudly announced that in keeping with our New Texas environmental policy, if the fine forced the company to close its doors, the company would have to pay the community $1 million as it was exiled.
That is plunder of property rights.
In Northern Travis County, Margaret Rector applied savings to a piece of land, anticipating that its development would be a future store of value for supplying her retirement age needs. Until about two years ago Margaret's land was valued at close to $1 million.
Then, the warbler was spotted. Fish and Wildlife claimed that Margaret's land could be the warbler's home, but not hers. Margaret's life savings are now valued at barely $30,000.
This is a plunder of private property rights.
John Shuler awoke one early Montana morning to the distinct crunching sound of a grizzly chomping down on the head of a sheep. Rifle in hand, John discovered not one, but four grizzlies snacking on his herd. Firing shots in the air, he scared three away. The fourth rose up to full menacing height. Shuler shot. Fish fined him $4,000 saying that the grizzly's action was merely a greeting.
This is a plunder of property rights.
Dayton Hyde came by a barren several hundred acres in Oregon. Nothing fruitful existed. A skilled environmentalist, Dayton dredged out the dry riverbed until the spring flowed again. He planted proper riparian plants and stocked the new stream with fish. He coaxed a wetland into fulfillment.
Dayton built and they came. Perhaps not by two, but they came. Soon Dayton's acreage abounded with wildlife. Fish, turkey, deer and hundreds more. And a bald eagle.
Fish & Wildlife said Dayton's presence was a threat to the bald eagle. Dayton could not go on his own land.
This is a plunder of property rights.
Cindy and Andy were fifth generation Californians whose 3,200 acres contained only 800 which could be tilled. Fish & Wildlife ordered Cindy and Andy to stop cultivating the 800 acres because doing so was harassment to the kangaroo rat. Having lost their livelihood, an income stream of at least $400,000 since 1989's order to them, Cindy and Andy experienced the irony of last year's fire destroying the rats along with their habitat. The rats fried. Don't you think they would have preferred some sanctuary to the flames?
Fish reappeared to "grant permission" to Cindy and Andy to till their 800 acres once again. But, Cindy and Andy had noticed a peculiar thing. The rats had departed years before. Without Cindy and Andy tilling the land, the underbrush was too thick for the rats to penetrate and too thick to provide the food the rats ate.
This is a plunder of property rights.
The current Endangered Species Act is being interpreted to mean that with no consideration to cost, we must prevent all populations of plants and animals from mutating, migrating, adapting, or dying.
So, we humans are going to repeal evolution?
Mother Nature doesn't preserve. She replaces.
How well has the ESA "preserved", even if that were a proper goal? In over 25 years and millions of dollars the Act has 'saved' a single obscure plant a milk vetch.
That is a plunder of property rights.
Surely, the ESA saved the Bald Eagle? No. That process came about under the Bald Eagle Act and Migratory Bird Act. Some say it has come about too well.
Last June, Clem Tillion who heads Alaska's Fisheries, showed me Gull Island off the Kenai Peninsula. Clem said there would not be a bird left on Gull Island within 24 more months. He said the environmentalists would try to lay the blame on the old oil spill in Prince William Sound., but he knew the true reason. The true culprit was 'that vulture with an attitude.'
Yes, Clem meant our beloved Bald Eagle. Seems the eagle views the hatchery as an all-he-can-eat buffet. He gorges on poultry until the running of the King salmon directs his attention to the fish course.
That story makes it easier for me to believe that it was not long ago that the government was paying bounties for these 'vultures with an attitude.' Bounties were paid on some 96,000 eagles in a 20-year period.
Why do we expect that same government to know best about matters today?
When the endangered species is a human, government action gets even loonier.
David Lucas purchased two beach-front lots for about $1 million, intending to build a fine residence. Other fine residences were to the north and the south of him on this coastal land.
South Carolina's Coastal Commission denied David a permit to build. They said that their denial to build was not a 'taking' of David's property because he was still 'permitted' to picnic on it.
That was plunder of David's property rights. This time the United States Supreme Court agreed and in 1992 declared that this plunder was, indeed, a regulatory taking for which David constitutionally deserved just compensation.
Mark Pollot, author and attorney, points to the Lucas case and other recent court rulings as a case for hope for Liberty. Documenting the Constitutional scheme for the protection of all property rights, Pollot strongly defends this forgotten civil right in his book, Grand Theft and Petit Larceny: Property Rights in America.
Pollot does not confuse a public interest with a public right. Pollot knows that "no matter how legitimate those (government) ends may be, an honest appraisal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the circumstances surrounding the information will demonstrate that they were intended to establish a boundary over which the government cannot step."
Ron Arnold says, "No. It is killing jobs and trashing the economy." Arnold documents the facts in his book, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America.
Why is this happening?
It's not about critters. It's not about clean. It's about control.
We've gone from fighting communists to fighting dirt. If we are not always at war with something, as a free and prosperous people, we would not stand still for this peicemeal plunder of our personal, intellectual and real private property rights.
But, certainly a crisis exists. Nothing short of saving the whole planet, right?
Wrong. An unconstitutional oligarchy has established its firm control over us during the past 80 years and is using 'bad science' and big government to enrich itself.
It now claims the lion's share of our society's wealth for itself. Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine and author of The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay, documents this shift in wealth and power. Lapham says that "as late as the first decade of the 20th century roughly 90 percent of the American people were still self-employed. For the most part they lived on small family farms and paid taxes that in the aggregate amounted to less than 5 percent of their annual income. By 1992 only 4 percent of the American people were self-employed, and they paid taxes that in the aggregate (federal, state, city, excise, etc.) amounted to more than 50 percent of their income."
Political freedom is conditional upon economic freedom. We are being robbed of the one by being plundered of the other.
How true is a quote by H.L. Mencken that "the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
Washington, D.C. I grew up there. I wish some others would. In this work-free drug place the White House is now referred to as the student union. It is in need of adult supervision.
If the Framers thought taxation without representation was bad, they ought to see it with it.
In pursuit of absolute 'safety' and absolute sovereignty, Versailles-on-the-Potomac has unleashed the Four Horsemen of Politically Correct Plunder. Sterile Food, Purified Air, Distilled Water, and Edible Dirt. With utter absence of any scientific integrity, public policy in these four areas has been shaped solely by advocates of bigger government and the ever more intrusive state.
EPA calls Triumph, Idaho, the number one Superfund site in America. This small community in Sun Valley is considered more hazardous than any area ever. But the townsfolk are happy on their tainted lands. They reject the EPA's findings of fatal lead and arsenic in their drinking water wells.
Responding in unthinkable fashion, the townspeople actually hired their own independent chemist to test the wells. No toxic levels were in evidence.
The EPA remained unimpressed with a thousand-page report that the town submitted. The EPA further rejected offerings of the residents' baby teeth. The EPA doesn't do teeth.
The town was told that there was no delisting process. Clean-up must proceed. Costs are estimated at between $5 million and $600 million for the 46 residents.
This is a plunder of property rights.
The culprit? Chasing the near-zero water standards for Atrazine and radon. The unachievable Atrazine water standard throws over $92 trillion at prevention of a single premature death.
This is a plunder of property on behalf of de minimus risk.
The USEPA standard for radon is a mere four picocuries per liter. The USEPA again assumes that correlation equals casualty. They point to a strong correlation between radon and lung cancer.
Well, a correlation exists all right, but it is inverse! The higher the radon, the lower the lung cancer incidence is revealed through the research of Dr. Cohen and Dr. Luckey.
Let's call it Vitamin R. If the EPA persists in enforcing a radon standard which is as low as 4 picocuries, by their own assumptions of correlations being casualties, they would find themselves responsible for 76,000 additional lung cancer deaths annually in the U.S.
That is a plunder of life and property.
About today's very big fears over very small risks from agricultural pesticide use, Bruce Ames, who is the father of the test for mutagens, has painstakingly concluded that "human intake of nature's toxins is 10,000 times higher than intake of man-made pesticide residues."
If consumers want to see accurate labeling of toxins, then organically grown potatoes should boast placards which read, among other things, "analyase inhibitors, arsenic, chaconine, isoflavones, nitrate, oxalic acid, and solanine" which bioaccumulates in fatty tissue.
99.99% of all the pesticides we eat every day are natural. To avoid 'pesticides' we humans would have to ingest entirely synthetic food substitutes.
Amazingly, there are 1,000 chemicals to be detected in your cup of coffee. More carcinogens exist in that one cup of coffee than from your exposure over the next 12 months to man's applied pesticides.
Pesticides lower cancer rates by producing affordable fruits and vegetables.
Dr. Ames said the EPA will ruin the economy and , thereby, produce cancer. EPA's numbers put the per year cost of their regulations at $125 billion. All that regulation lowers wealth and lowers health. Dr. Aaron Wildavsky in one his last papers, June of 1993, found "no health benefit to the current criteria used to regulate chemical exposures in the U.S. today."
But, primarily because of that bankrupt criteria for chemical exposure, Bismarck, like other cities, has no fewer than 419 'essential' unfunded EPA mandates with which it must comply.
Comply.
To be free is to be responsible for one's own actions, and to be responsible, one must be free to make choices.
Choice without consequence is called slavery.
An overly regulated world of compliance is a slave's world of consequence without choice.
We have been told that, although the evidence does not support the theory, we had better be safe than sorry about frying the planet with our catastrophic carbon dioxide emissions.
The emotional plea for the largest tax in history, $300 billion, was made upon the basis of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Remember that the $300 billion tax was first called a carbon dioxide tax? Then, it was called a BTU tax. Now we have a plain-wrapper generic largest tax in history.
The main premise behind why we had to permit this plunder is that we had to curtail the use of energy in most forms in order to save the planet.
We have been told to stop burning fossil fuels to save the planet.
Repeal the Industrial Revolution to save the planet.
Walk, don't drive, to save the planet.
Give up our hair dryers to save the planet.
Breathe in, but don't breathe out, to save the planet.
If I could magically remove every molecule of carbon dioxide (C02) and methane (CH4) from our earth's atmosphere, our world would still be left with 95 percent of the Greenhouse effect.
Why? Because the effect is mainly produced by water and water vapor.
We're not going to be able to make any difference, but we'll have made ourselves impoverished.
We will be sorry; we will not be safe.
The other appeal to our feeling noble about this theft is made on the strange idea that we can reduce the deficit by increasing taxes. Our federal debt certainly does need reducing, but the economic argument that it can be accomplished by increasing taxes would only be made by someone who would also seek to cure my arthritis by shooting me.
If we are not to be wealthier, can we still be healthier?
Don't tell Hillary this, but health is not highly correlated to medical care.
Health is highly correlated to wealth.
Does this diagram of the Clinton socialized healthcare plan look like it will leave any of us wealthier? If not, none of us will be healthier. The Clinton plan is massive plunder.
Make two change in the tax law and establish Medical Savings Accounts to lower costs and achieve higher quality in our medical care. We will be wealthier and healthier. Senator Gramm's plan would accomplish this.
There is nothing less healthy than poverty. There is nothing more polluting than poverty.
Pretensions of omniscience, driven by fatal conceit, leads the oligarchy in its egalitarian superiority to attempt from the beltway to micro-manage our lives from the womb to the tomb.
Omitting progress, swearing that they are here to help us, they coerce us to comply, no try, then die. But life demands choice, resilience, risk, responsiveness, coping, adaptation and thought. All that is necessary is that free men think.
The true causes of health and well-being, reflected in Leonard Sagan's Health of Nations, are production, not plunder, choices, not coercion, and liberty, not tyranny. Sustainable freedoms deliver a peoples' health and a planet's clean environment. Choice, not coercion. Wealth, not poverty. Production, not plunder.
Abraham Lincoln's views on plunder can be deduced from a few of his quotes. Our Chair of Free Enterprise inscribes them on our bookmarks. They are:
Five Thousand Years Ago Moses Said:
"Pack Up Your Camel,
Pick Up Your Shovel,
Move Your Ass And
I Will Lead You To The Promised Land."
Five Thousand Years, Later Franklin D. Roosevelt Said:
"Lay Down Your Shovel,
Sit On Your Ass,
Light Up A Camel,
This Is The Promised Land."
This Year, The Government Will:
Take Your Shovel,
Sell Your Camel,
Kick Your Ass And
Give Away The Promised Land.
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