Why is LEARN Needed?

An Emerging Governance

Since the 1970s, America is increasingly following a system of governance that usurps power from the people and local government and transfers it to the state and federal government. This form of governance destroys the very principle that has made America the greatest nation in the history of the world. A principle based on certain God-given unalienable rights. Among these are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as penned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

This emerging governance ignores individual liberty as envisioned by our founders and enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. Instead, it rests on so-called public good or common good. In this model of governance, the enlightened state determines the public good through the force of law, including the use of property.

The Constitution of the United States also seeks the public good, but from a different perspective. The Constitution is predicated on the belief that if every citizen seeks what is best for him or her, as long as no harm is done to someone else, the sum total yields the public good. In turn, individual liberty depends on the free ability to use private property in the “pursuit of happiness.” Because of this, James Madison emphasized that the proper role of government was to protect private property rights: “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well as that which lies in the various rights of individuals.... this being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures, to every man, whatever is his own.”

The emerging model of forced compliance has formed the basis of social and environmental laws in America since the 1970s. While these laws have helped to protect the environment, they are also causing a hemorrhage in individual liberties once taken for granted by all Americans, including property rights. Private property rights have been demonized by many in our society as the source of all our environmental problems. Yet, private property rights are the key to both the creation of wealth and the protection of the environment. To learn more, click on the button:

Without private property, individuals are powerless to oppose any infringement on their rights due to government control over the fruits of their labor. Without formal property rights, capital is not available for starting a new business or expanding an existing one. Hernando de Soto explains in his compelling book The Mystery of Capital the results of a massive global study on global poverty. He found that besides government corruption, the lack of guaranteed formal property rights is the single greatest reason for poverty in the world today.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the old Soviet Union, where all property belonged to the state. No one could speak out against the government for fear they would lose their job or their family’s eviction by the local communist commissar because the government, not private individuals, owned all the factories and apartment complexes. Since there was no privately owned property, there was no equity and the Soviet infrastructure collapsed because essential capital did not exist to modernize. Finally, because there was no property rights, no one had any incentive to create new products, or even do a better job. They had to steal new technology from the West, especially the United States.

Environmentalists claim that private property rights and greed are the root problem of pollution and environmental degradation. Yet, the worst pollution and environmental degradation occurs on public land, water, or air – not private land. Since no one “owns” the land, water or air, pride of ownership or sense of responsibility to care for these entities is lost. It is called the Tragedy of the Commons. Again, the worst examples of this phenomenon were the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where there was no private property, yet they had the worst environmental record in the history of mankind.

There is a way to protect the environment and the rights of private citizens. The U.S. constitutional model recognizes and uses the human trait of self-interest to better oneself. Unencumbered private property provides the catalyst to stimulate individuals to be creative and take risk in finding a better way, product, or service to meet a human need – including protecting the environment. While laws and regulations are needed, they are applied much differently than has typified the past four decades.

In the Constitutional approach, only laws and regulations that keep them from activities that clearly cause harm to their neighbors or their property would restrict property owners. If property is taken for the public good, the public pays just compensation. In this way, the local community can prosper by self-defining how to administer laws in their community.

Conversely, the emerging top-down form of governance places control in the hands of unaccountable unelected government bureaucrats. This, one-size, command and control model is especially true of federal laws implemented by federal agencies at the local level. Increasingly, it is also true at state and county levels as well

The stifling effect of federal control of property is enormous. While many things affect the wealth of a nation, a simple contrast between the western and the communist worlds is striking. The Western world has formal private property rights. The communist and former communist nations do not, or have only recently begun to obtain them. All property belongs to the government. Yet in the United States, a host of federal laws is systematically shifting the control of property rights from the private individual to the federal government.

The Endangered Species Act, wetlands regulations, the Clean Water Initiative and many other environmental laws have one thing in common: federal control of property rights. Federal control strips the value of property from local landowners. It is harming, even destroying the economic foundation of rural communities and counties. Tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars of property value has already been transferred from local citizens to the federal government via unnecessary “one-size fits all” regulation.

We need to protect the environment. However, anti-property rights activists use the “public good” to attack the basis for constitutional property rights. Since the 1970s, activist courts have been systematically ruling that the use of private property and “the rights of the individual” endanger the rights of all the people. Yet, why should the last owners of wetlands, endangered species habitat, beautiful scenery or many other environmental and social benefits, have to shoulder the entire cost of protection or provision when the problem was created by the activities of thousands of other people? Most Americans would say that they should not. Yet, that is exactly what is happening to tens of thousands of Americans.

Government intrusion into the right to own and use property under the Trojan horse of the “public good” is beginning to cause great harm to American citizens, and is undermining the very foundation that has made America the greatest nation in human history. LEARN (Local Environment And Resource Network) provides a way to return to the Constitutional model where private property is protected by government through law.

It is clear from a myriad of examples that the federal command and control model leads to abuse and sometimes corruption in government and a decline in the human condition while the Constitutional model yields freedom, prosperity and environmental protection. LEARN provides a way for local government to achieve the latter within existing federal, and state law.

Last Updated 05/30/2007