Green fear of desert farms

By Douglas Arthur "Art" Tuma

Though Greens have learned anti-farm-subsidy rhetoric, they still haven't learned to speak well of other people's property rights. Perhaps the reason why is because journalists in the past century have learned to profit from writing stories of moral outrage over allegedly unjust poverty. I ask everybody to consider Kesterson stories in the context of a journalist-biologist coalition to advance socialism and expect fraud.

Green fear of desert farms

John Krist, senior reporter and opinion page columnist for the Ventura County Star argued recently that the Endangered Species Act should do more than just save endangered species. He thinks it should also save endangered life-styles of species, like the wild life-style of Oregon's coho salmon. See: Battle is not just about fish

Apparently, saving endangered wild life-styles for salmon is a common idea among advocates for the Green political agenda. I mention Krist's opinion piece, published January 31, because his argument seemed more informative to me than a more opinionated version of the same argument published yesterday in the New York Times. See: Fish Wars

For example, I recognize the following opinion on desert farms as pure Green dogma.

"The Klamath water crisis has been in the making for more than 100 years, ever since the federal government decided to subsidize a farming economy in an arid area where none belonged."

Socialists, including most Greens, seldom find fault for any federal government subsidy, especially subsidized wildlife refuges. So Green bashing of subsidized farms validates Greens as wild opportunists, using any argument they can find to their advantage, even libertarian arguments against government subsidies.

Though Greens have learned anti-farm-subsidy rhetoric, they still haven't learned to speak well of other people's property rights. Perhaps the reason why is because journalists in the past century have learned to profit from writing stories of moral outrage over allegedly unjust poverty.

The unhappy state of poverty is invariably directly proportional to the envy of the perceived prosperity of others.

Prosperity can be enjoyed in many ways, including freedom of choice in the use of mind and labor, including labor to build labor-saving structures and devices, including labor-saving agreements with others, including clear and secure agreements on who uses what property, also known as private property rights. Prosperity can be measured by the price people are willing to pay to acquire a right to privately use specified property.

Many journalists seem to overlook the effort of those who labor to acquire freedom of choice in private property ownership and instead focus on inequities of accumulated assets as an indicator of some hidden injustice. But inequity of assets also results from greater honors granted to some more than others. I presume honors freely given are also free from injustice.

Journalists should be lauded for digging into asset inequities to expose dishonorable deals. But in many newspapers I've seen blanket loathing for inequities in personal wealth measured by market value of private property rights, as if wealth in other sources of happiness does not matter.

I've seen an alarming number of opinions that poverty should be cured by stopping wealth inequity. In other words, government should redistribute wealth, effectively robbing the rich to give to the poor. Robbing the rich effectively takes private property rights away, leaving people unable to keep the earnings of their own labor and investments, leaving people without incentive to try to improve their own lives and the lives of those they wish to help, leaving people to waste their lives as serfs working for communist politicians.

I see such journalist loathing of private property rights fostering a socialist culture as a cure for envy, as if the envy afflicted can only be helped by letting them use what had been the exclusive right of others to use.

I see Greens fall for the journalist's campaign against private property rights. Instead of buying rights to use environmental assets, Greens acted as if their poverty of environmental assets could only be helped by letting them use other peoples's private property, like farmer's water rights. Helpful politicians facilitated the Green raid on private property rights by passing new environmental laws to authorize government agents to enforce government management authority over property formerly managed by private owners.

Greens abused government power to raid the wealth of others for their own pleasure. They did it because journalists persuaded them to dishonor private property rights. The Green raid on private property rights depreciated the value of private property ownership, deflating the cumulative capital wealth of the nation, the basis for loans to those willing to repay what they borrow.

In other words, honest borrowers suffered from loss of lending capital robbed by greedy Greens. Apparently unable to keep from projecting the greed in their own envy, many Greens ludicrously accuse property owners of greed for objecting to government robbery of property rights.

So because of the Green-journalist coalition to destroy property rights, the rights to divert water claimed by farmers ever since the first settlers built the first irrigation and drainage systems in the Klamath Basin remains consistently unmentioned in major news media.

Of course, if people recognized that any issues of water use could be peacefully resolved by voluntary exchange of water rights among willing buyers and sellers, the press would have to search elsewhere to find more stories that sell newspapers.

Sensational stories of human conflict are good for newspaper sales. Socialist government fosters human conflict over the use of government power, so socialist newspapers and socialist government go hand in hand as partners in criminal deception by omission of peaceful free-market solutions and profit at the expense of misinformed news consumers and voters.

Given the Green's high priority for protection of wildlife habitat, the New York Times opinion that farming does not belong in an arid area conceals a much more threatening intention. Arid areas sustain much less natural biological productivity than humid areas. Therefore, if human development is to be allowed anywhere, the most likely areas would be arid to save the humid areas for wildlife habitat.

So Green loathing of human development in arid areas indicates Greens actually loath human development anywhere. And from what I've seen of Green literature, Greens really mean no human development anywhere, including human development beyond earth.

Green doctrine against human development essentially revives a Nazi attitude against Judaism's Diaspora: we unworthy humans shouldn't have been here in the first place.

Greens tell us we should loath the most reliable and efficient production of human food, irrigated desert farms. But Greens laud desert wetlands, even where the land is wet only because people built the infrastructure to supply the water.

Green mythology implies that we voting, tax-paying, property-rights deprived serfs of America developed water supplies in arid Western states to breed ducks. Greens pointed to a drainage sump in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, constructed by scraping dirt into six foot high levees on land so salty it could only grow saltbush, and called it a "National Wildlife Refuge."

Then when the sump was used for the purpose for which the site was purchased, to hold salty ground water collected from subsurface drains buried below irrigated desert farms, Greens cried for mitigation of an "environmental disaster" because the sump was not as biologically productive as a freshwater wetlands.

Green mythology implies that a drainage sump, an integral and critical part of irrigation infrastructure to keep desert farm crops from drowning in saturated salty soil, was expected to provide breeding habitat for waterfowl.

Naming a drainage sump "Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge" has to be the greatest Green hoax of all time, retold by faithful Greens as a favorite fable for nearly two decades. Yesterday John Krist proved his Green credentials by faithfully spinning the Kesterson yarn again: Kesterson's costly legacy

"In 1983, biologists and refuge workers noticed that ducks, coots, grebes and stilts born at Kesterson were emerging from their eggs with deformed beaks, missing wings, twisted legs and misshapen skulls."

Apparently, biologists and refuge workers didn't notice a 1977 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report that argued for federal acquisition of more private land for wildlife refuge use based on the premise that Kesterson's drain water impoundment would have no habitat value. In other words, the Kesterson sump was expected to support no life of any value. And no life of any value was exactly what biologists and refuge workers noticed in 1983. They found what they expected.

We should ask why biologists and refuge workers looked for what they expected.

Libertarians recognize that many people have initiated force, including fraud, to advance social and political agendas. Libertarians find such initiation of force a serious political problem that warrants greater understanding by everybody. Everybody should be alert to fraud in political activity.

I ask everybody to consider Kesterson stories in the context of a journalist-biologist coalition to advance socialism and expect fraud.

I believe any impartial investigation of the Kesterson "environmental disaster" would expose it as a hoax. We can find fraud in deformed facts, missed context, twisted logic, and misshapen confidence in a scam to take land, water supply and drainage rights away from the owners of irrigated desert farms.

We should expect Green hoaxers would use images of ugly hatchlings to horrify and frighten voters to fear drainage water from desert farms and loath the Western water development that irrigates desert farms. But we should tremble in fear when we realize how easy it has been for government employed Greens to fool us.

We can protect ourselves from being easily fooled again by Greens or any other group that abuses government power by releasing government control of property management authority. Those who want the privilege to manage property can pay for the privilege instead of fooling voters into letting them take it by government force.

We can resolve disputes about how resources should be managed by honoring the management authority of private property owners.

Libertarians will release resource management authority from government control.

Libertarians in government offices will let property owners decide how to protect or use their own property.

People in a Libertarian America will be able to earn property rights and not fear losing their rights to politicians.

Property rights in a Libertarian America will appreciate like never before.

People in a Libertarian America will be rich like never before.

Let's all be rich and happy property owners.

Let's all vote Libertarian.