Resiliency Guru Richard Norton: LIAA, LIAA

[XLFD]

In the middle of last year, our Community Development Director Heather Tykoski was arranging a deal with the Land Information Access Association (LIAA), inviting up to 25 community individuals to a September meeting, leading to a contract being drawn out by LIAA in November.  Little is known of the participants or the discussions of that September meeting, but without ever seeing the light of an open meeting, our City Clerk and Manager signed an agreement with LIAA that supposedly had a $180,000 price tag, of which Ludington's contribution was $8000.

 

At the core of LIAA's generous deal with the City of Ludington, Hamlin and Pere Marquette Townships, and Mason County, were the concepts of sustainable development, the concepts of resiliency, and the crises that will develop from climate change.  This was somewhat developed from the First LIAA public meeting.  A notable speaker at that meeting was Dr. Richard Norton from the University of Michigan; a moderated speaker who represented the technical aspects of sustainable development, resiliency and other perspectives of the project. 

 

His experience as a lecture professor at U of M is somewhat evident as he goes through his presentations.  His points are logically interconnected with each other, he develops his bases reasonably, his arguments are put out as fairly incontrovertible by his delivery.  His delivery at the meeting was fairly standard, he has given similar lectures before just like this one below at a meeting of Resilient Monroe, a community that has a similar deal with LIAA as we have signed.  But they are already further along the road than us, so this is not just an introductory speech:

 

 

 

Let's take a look at some excerpts from this speech:

8:00 in:  "So the Constitution doesn't create private property rights.  What it says is-- and can the government take your life, liberty, or property?  Yes it can-- when you go out and steal something from somebody and they throw you in the pokey-- technical legal term-- they've taken your liberty.  The government cannot go out and take someone's liberty irrationally, or without justification, it has to justify what it is doing.  It can take your liberty.  So the Constitutional protections don't actually create these rights."

 

This guy is not uneducated, he is not dumb, so what he does here is create a convenient myth which he defends without relying on the truth.  The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says:  "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."  If you look even harder, the Constitution guarantees these property rights.  These rights are inherent, and protected by many sections of the Constitution and the common law of the day.

Also in our state Constitution Article 1, sec. 11  says:  "The person, houses, papers and possessions of every person shall be secure from unreasonable searches and seizures.", and more recently in Article X, section 2 it says:  "Private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation therefore being first made or secured in a manner prescribed by law."   It then prescribes that law and also protects property owners against the state taking property for other private interests for 'economic development'. 

In the last video, Dr. Norton says he lives in Ann Arbor, and even has three chickens in a backyard coop, though no roosters because the zoning laws do not allow them.  Do you think he would mind if his township, city, or county decided to take his house, and the vehicle he drove up here with, justifying the action by saying that since he does not believe in private property rights, and they have found a better public use for it?  No compensation needed, because remember, no property rights protected by the Constitution.  I am sure he would be happy then-- his community has more public property, without any cost to them, and they justified it because now they have three extra chickens in their crockpot.

 

 

 

 

11:20 in:  "The more you (Planners, governing boards) can show what your government is doing is a reasonable thing to do, the better ground you are on legally." 

 

While this is true for just about anything, it shows the professor's bias towards government control over land use.  Individuals and non-government groups were in the audience, parties that likely believe the way their land is used is 'reasonable' and sustainable (whatever that vague word means), without having to worry about the government taking over stewardship of it.  The government has a proper role in seeing to it that the way you use your property does not infringe the rights of your neighbors or community to enjoy theirs. 

If a small group of appointed people (which Planning Commission members are) can exercise an unreasonable amount of power over what property in their area is used for, a corrupted appointer can lead to tyrannical land-use policy, such as what happened in Kelo v. New London, where a private developer used eminent domain to transfer land from one private owner to another private owner to further "economic development", a concept that reasonable people (such as the four Supreme Court Justices that dissented) can say is patently illegal under the above mentioned property rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

 

 

12:20 in:  "If you are concerned about the kinds of global climate change impacts that we have been talking about this morning , it's probably not going to work to sit back and wait for the state to come in and save the day."

 

Another professor had come forth earlier in the conference to set the table for Mr. Norton talking of the crises that global warming have coming to us.  Being that over 97% of short term global warming forecasts have proven to be i... and overestimated, one may think that such a presentation should gather as much snickers and guffaws as a presentation by the Flat-Earth Society. 

But global warming (aka climate change) is a convenient boogeyman whose presence only needs to be mentioned, and whose existence needs never to be proved to promote the concepts of sustainable development and resiliency from the fear of what may happen.  Planning for crises that are written about in works of science fiction may be great for a convention of Trekkies, but it seems out of place in a meeting of community planners and leaders.

Here Professor Norton calls for a proactive intervention to combat the impacts of what may happen because of specious climatology truisms he fosters his well-educated belief behind.  Let's remember that if Chicken Little was Dr. Chicken Little, she still would have been just as wrong about the sky falling. 

 

21:30 in:  "Climate change may have benefits for our community in some ways, it may be problematic; but what's really troubling about it is it is going to destabilize the economic and social systems that we have come to rely on.  If you are not worried about climate change, and you don't really care that much about the environment, that's fine.  Worry about the economic and social systems that we are utterly dependent on that depends on a stable system, because those are the things that are really at threat now-- because of this rapid change."

 

Professor Norton makes a definitive statement here:  "it (global warming) is going to destabilize the economic and social systems that we have come to rely on."  and further elaborates that it will happen rapidly, making it catastrophic if we do not prepare a resiliency plan now to deal with it. 

Frankly, if the overall global temperature goes up a degree or down a degree over the next few years, it will not have that big of an impact on anyone. 

All this talk of global warming and climate change has come out during a period when temperatures have remained fairly steady.  With all the industrialization going on in China and in the rest of the world, our temperatures have been trending towards cooling.  The global warming alarmists who cherry-pick their statistics can find something among the data that supports their hypothesis, even when it seemingly flies in the face of being reasonable.  You may look at people with this much faith and devotion to the tenets of global warming as being more fervent than most religious orders. 

 

Norton Security Guarantee:  Sustainable Development, Private Property Rights, and Agenda 21 

 

 

 

In this video, Dr. Norton goes over a few issues, finishing off (after the four minute mark) by talking about Agenda 21, trying to alleviate fears by saying it is a red herring and says the real issue is:  "How do we recognize private property rights at the same time we're dealing with sustainability crises?" 

 

Richard Norton gave the preview above just before a nearly two hour presentation about private property rights, sustainable development, and Agenda 21.  This took place in Leelanau County

 

 

 

A lot of the information has already been condensed in his preview.  For those interested in Agenda 21, skip ahead to 1:13:00 into the video, where little is said beyond him saying that Agenda 21 has no legal authority and sustainable development was around before it.  There is a question and answer towards the end.  At the 1:32:00 mark he uses once again the analogy of the government taking away a criminal's rights and property when he commits a crime, and the opinion that government needs proper justification to take that away. 

We never learn why he feels that property owners should be equivocated with criminals in the two videos to 'justify' his hypothesis of government's "reasonable justification".  But in sustainable development, sometimes the private landowner can be said as a criminal who wants to keep people off his land, even though he benefits from using the community's public territory. 

Advancing common ownership of property leads not only to the dilution of private property rights, but all other rights too.  It leads us down the path to socialism and hence to communism, which are not the Utopias we read about in Marx and Engels' works, but dystopias--- which history has shown over and over again is not only abhorrent to the people that live under these systems, but also unsustainable. 

 

[Willy]

Just how dumb does he think we are. On one hand he's trying to promote sustainable development while on the other he's trying to convince use we really have no private property rights under the Constitution. Then he throws in Agenda 21. If he was a good socialist he would be advised to make no mention of Agenda 21 because anyone who has taken the time to discover what it's all about knows he's blowing Communist smoke up our rears. Great job X.

[XLFD]

I am growing more convinced that the majority of official planners eat this stuff up without any problem.  It confers them the right to use more power, and therefore feel more powerful themselves, while at the same time thinking they are making positive advancements.  Planning Commission candidates who have a conservative or libertarian bend are more likely to be passed over in favor of those who want to control land use and get as many grant dollars as they can.  Thanks for your thumbs up, and your cogent analysis.