Can We Get Our Country Back?
In my younger years as an economist the way conservatives, free market economists, and libertarians approached economic policy and whether it would make us more or less free was in terms of business vs. government. Business wore the white hats, and government wore the black hats. What wasn’t realized is that government is captured by business and used for its purposes. Business controls government, not vice versa. This is true at every level–local, state, and federal. In our own time US regulatory agencies are staffed by former executives of the industries that they regulate.
Years ago University of Chicago professor George Stigler, a Nobel Prize winner, showed that government regulation works for the benefit of the regulated industry, because the industry never fails to capture the regulatory agency.
We experienced this during the hoax “Covid pandemic.” Big Pharma had long ago captured NIH, CDC, and FDA, and people lined up for a “vaccination” that destroyed their immune systems and has resulted in an explosion of rapidly developing cancers and heart attacks in kids.
Consider what President Eisenhower warned us about–the institutionalization of a powerful domestic lobby group eager to go to war and to have enemies with whom it is necessary to be ready to go to war with an endlessly growing “defense” budget.
This was brought to mind again by the Florida Wildlife Federation’s current effort to mobilize its many members to protect the Florida panther, a version of the cougar or mountain lion, whose numbers are reduced to 250, from development of Florida’s few remaining wild lands.
As ecological economists will tell you, correctly, in the United States successful businesses and family fortunes have been based on the free use of the environment and on passing a large share of development costs–water, sewage, congestion, schools, fire and police services to taxpayers. For example, the drainage of the Everglades in order to provide the real estate industry land on which to build houses. The location of business enterprises that pollute the waterways feeding the Everglades, thus freely disposing of their waste. The practice of importing pythons, boa constrictors, and anacondas as pets that when they become too large to contain are released into the Everglades where they proceed to decimate the native wildlife.
But of course it is much worse than this. Developers destroy communities. Take, for example, Inlet Beach on the Gulf Coast in south Walton County. This old Florida community was created after WW II with grants of 1.25 acres to military veterans. Until the 2nd decade of the 21st century the modest properties had been in the same families for decades.
As I understand it, the old Florida community was destroyed in this way. First outside developers, not local people, encouraged the county commission to turn the community’s access to the beach into public access. Next protective dunes were leveled in order to provide toilets, showers, and parking places. Then the county commissioners permitted the zoning ordinance–single family residence only–to be violated by issuing permits to construct four-story “residencies” that housed 20 to 30 persons and which displayed neon signs advertising their rental availability. In other words, corrupt commissioners and planning board expanded “single family residence” to include mini-hotels that have no alternative use but rentals. How is a family going to live in a four story building with nine bathrooms designed to sleep 20 or more people?
The community was destroyed. No one lives there any more or has a holiday home. The structures that have been built are mini-hotels that sleep 20-30 people. Where there formerly was a family on 1.25 acres, there is now 5 buildings housing a total of 100 people, every one transients, there for a week.
This pleases the county commission as the owners are absent landlords with no rights to vote or affect the tax rate except via bribes to county officials.
Wakulla County, Florida, 70% National Forest, has a population of 35,000. It has been targeted by an outside national home builder, D.R. Horton, as the next community for the company to destroy. The county council, like all county councils, believes in “progress,” not preservation. Land is cheap and the county council has no impact fee, so desperate are the local businesses for growth–growth that will displace them with the national stores and franchises that growth will bring
The Wakulla County commission subsidizes Horton’s profits by having no impact fee, instead assigning the cost of “development” or more appropriately destruction, to the taxpayers. Horton doesn’t pay for the new schools and teachers that are necessary, or the expanded road system, water and sewage systems. The county commission shifts the costs to taxpayers. This is the price of growth, they say, the price of destroying local businesses and replacing them with big box stores and national franchises, and traffic congestion that increase stress levels and use up time.
The problem with county commissions being too accommodating to developers is that it arouses suspicion of corruption.
When I was born America consisted of a homogeneous Americanized population, including the blacks. No white person was in danger of being stabbed by a black on public transportation. Today the United States is a Tower of Babel. Democrats represent immigrant-invaders, criminals, and sexual perverts. Republicans represent Zionist Israel and have had America at war for the entirety of the 21st century in behalf of Greater Israel–“from the Nile to Pakistan.”
No one represents Americans.
We have lost our country to factionalism, to ideologies, to foreign interests, and to big money. How do we get our country back?