“Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” -C.S. Lewis
Obama uses federal agencies as weapons of mass destruction. We’ve seen Homeland Security create a Christian/Conservative/Veteran terrorist handbook to silence opposition and allow illegal aliens and terrorists to cross America’s borders unfettered. We seen the IRS use illegal means to intimidate Christian/Conservative organizations. We’ve seen Health and Human Services used to push anti-Christian regulations. We’ve seen the Department of Treasury used to devalue our currency. The worst of the worst, however, is the EPA, one of the most abusive, unaccountable and out-of-control agencies under Obama’s reign. No government agency posses the power to make law and yet that is exactly what the EPA has done, following in the footsteps of their fearless leader.
EPA abuses to date have included leaked personal data on livestock farms to far-left environmental groups, data that included GPS coordinates; private, secret email accounts usurping laws relating to official communication to hide the fact that the EPA was engaged in human testing of toxic levels of environmental pollutants on seniors and children, even going so far as to argue in federal court that the judges had no power to stop them; mandating the use of a nonexistent cellulosic ethanol in gasoline and then fining companies who didn’t use it; and the designation of carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant along with issuing draconian regulations on the energy industry, all to faciliate the destruction of our coal, gas, and oil industries.
FOIA requests found emails between top EPA agency officials with far-left environmental groups to coordinate messaging and pressure on the fossil fuel industry along with meetings to kill the Keystone XL pipeline. Former EPA official John Beale testified before Congress that he and Gina McCarthy of the agency’s air and radiation division had discussed ways the government could “modify the DNA of the capitalist system” to make its regulations reach even deeper into taxpayer’s pockets.
Now, in order to advance United Nations Agenda 21 policies, the EPA and the Army Corp of Engineers, are attacking private property rights through regulating storm run-off as a pollutant under the Clean Water Act, even though that law never defines water as a pollutant. When any area of private property has been declared a “wetland” owners can no longer use or sell the land.
Under these new powers, the EPA says it has the right to take private property along with the power to regulate intermittent streams, culverts, and other such temporary bodies of water, and the power to dictate farmer’s planting schedules, the amount of fertilizer that can be used and even how often a farmer can run his tractor.
In the guise of looking for violations of the Clean Water Act, EPA storm troopers have sneaked onto private land arresting property owners for something as simple as filling in a ditch, and fined others when no proven violations were found. Most recently, residents of Riverton, Wyoming woke up to discover that the EPA, without legal authority, had literally given their town to an Indian reservation.
There are currently two bills in Congress to halt the EPA’s attack on private property. The first is the S 890, the Defense of the Environment and Property Act 2013, which not only defines navigable waterways, it makes it mandatory for federal agents to get written permission from land owners to enter the property. In addition, the government would have to pay homeowners double the market value for land taken since the declaration of “wetland” automatically devalues the property.
H.R. 3377, the Defense of Environment and Property Act 2014 would restrict navigable waters designation to the historical “permanent body of water” definition, while , excluding temporary streams that form from storm run-off; restrain the EPA from future regulations or interpretations that change the definition of navigable without Congressional action; protect state’s rights of primary authority over land and water within their border; prohibit federal agents from entering private property without expressed consent of the landowner; and require the government to pay double the market value of the land diminished by a “wetlands” designation.
The Founding Fathers guiding principle was that people come together to form governments in order to SECURE their rights to property – not to create an entity which wilt, itself, “take from the mouths of labor the bread it has earned.” What was wrong for individual citizens to do to one another, they believed, was equally wrong for government to do to them. The right to own property and to keep the rewards of individual labor opened the floodgates of progress for the benefit of the entire human race.
John Adams wrote that “the moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God. . .anarchy and tryanny commence. Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.” James Madison wrote that “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort …. This being the end of government, that is NOT a just government,… nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has … is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest.”
“In the United States, where we have always benefited from private property and free enterprise, our biggest threat to continued prosperity lies in the slow erosion of the respect for private property by government through taxation and regulation. Thus, one of the most important roles that economists can play as scholars and teachers is to articulate clearly the significance of private property for economic development and social cooperation. If we don’t, we will have failed in our scientific responsibility to convey the basic teachings of our discipline and the lessons learned from human history.” Peter Boettke, Ph.D., Virginia Institute
