Free market and private property advocates and activists are bemused by the current crop of hostile measures coming out of Congress and the Obama administration. Their interests are being ignored and they’re saying so. Robert Gordon, the Heritage Foundation’s senior adviser for strategic outreach, sees the big picture:
“Washington has been ceaselessly issuing environmental regulations that target energy producers, fishermen, farmers, ranchers, foresters and miners — the people who provide our food, fiber, minerals and energy.”
I asked Gordon what our leaders should do about that. “Some have rightly recognized the negative effects these regulations have on jobs,” he said.
“What I would like to see front and center in the political discourse is that when environmental policies hurt people, they cease to be good environmental policies. Human well-being is the first measure of an environmental policy.”
Frank DuBois, former rodeo champion (he even kept on after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis) and a four-term New Mexico secretary of agriculture, takes the detailed look.
He’s puzzled by the Republican presidential candidates and their silence about problems that can mean life or death to the family ranch. He said, “To my knowledge the candidates are saying nothing about issues such as property rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, and wilderness that are important to us in the West.”
Like many, DuBois is soured on the campaign ruckus. “The candidates are more focused on attacking each other than on defending those whose lives and livelihoods are under attack by the federal behemoth.”
Myron Ebell, president of the Washington-based nonprofit Freedom Action, expands on today’s GOP presidential front-runners: “Unfortunately, neither Mitt Romney nor Newt Gingrich appears to know or care very much about what federal environmental and land use regulations are doing to destroy the livelihoods of rural Americans and particularly rural Westerners.”
Ebell was raised on an Oregon ranch and worked as a congressional staffer, which gave him acute sensitivities to the depth of a candidate’s issue knowledge.
“When Romney was governor of Massachusetts,” he said, “several of his top environmental advisers were radical environmentalists who have since been appointed by President Obama to positions where they are helping to kill jobs in rural industries.”
Ebell is particularly alert to officials who are blind to the power of Big Green. “Former Speaker of the House Gingrich has no notion that environmental pressure groups pose a major threat to freedom and prosperity.
As speaker, Gingrich single-handedly blocked reform of the disastrous Endangered Species Act, which has done more than any other law to impoverish rural America and has stolen private property through regulatory takings against thousands of American landowners.”
Chuck Cushman, outspoken leader of the American Land Rights Association based in Battle Ground, Wash. (yes, it’s a real town), is already sending out issue alerts to his membership, warning them about presidential candidates.
A recent letter said, “The candidates have failed to recognize that land rights advocates across the nation believe that the government has gone too far. They’ve gone too far with land use controls, land acquisition and extreme environmental regulations that cost jobs and hurt the economy.”
Cushman sounded his most recent alarm about Gingrich, whose 2007 book, “A Contract with the Earth,” tells you “all you need to know about his allegiances.”
Cushman’s bottom line: “It’s critical that the candidates show their support for private property rights and for the use of, and access to, federal lands.”
Republican campaign managers might want to look into the issues of these folks and their constituencies. Not only could politicos correct any errors or cultivate new supporters, but they might also learn something about the faces behind those abstract words, “jobs,” “economy” and “America’s greatness.”
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
