Business-Managed Democracy

• Introduction

• Green Consumerism

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• Front Groups

• Wise Use Movement
• Conception
• Beliefs and Goals
  • Agenda
  • Philosophy
  • Myths
• Strategies/Tactics
  • Anti-Environmentalist
  • Enrolling the Alienated
  • Tactics and Methods
• Corporate Support
• Wise Use Groups
  • People for the West!
  • Property Rights
• References

• Think Tanks
• Global Warming

• SLAPPs

• Media

• Environmentalists


 

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Business-Managed Democracy »Environment » Wise Use Movement » Beliefs and Goals » Philosophy

Business-Managed Environment

Wise Use Philosophy

There is wide diversity within the Wise Use Movement but members share a dislike of environmental regulations which affect parts of the movement in various ways; by constraining what they can do on private property and how they can use public land and water.  Rural people in the US often identify with an individualist and pioneering spirit of self-determination that upholds free enterprise and property rights as sacrosanct and opposes government intervention, even if that intervention is in the public interest:

They proclaim values associated with John Locke, values that impelled the founding fathers. In this tradition, that government is best which governs least. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness includes the individual’s right  to appropriate wealth from nature. If no one  has claimed it, it’s yours. In this view, government’s role is to help convert natural resources into private property, and then to protect that property.

Ralph Maughan and Douglas Nilson, academics from Idaho State University, suggest that the Wise Use agenda stems from an ideology that combines laissez-faire capitalism with “cultural characteristics of an imagined Old West.” The resulting beliefs include:

1. Human worth should be measured in terms productivity and wealth. Status and power are a reward for hard work.
   
2. Nature is there for the use of humans.
   
3. Real wealth derives from extracting and adding value to primary material resources.
   
4. “Productive lands and waters should be owned (or at least controlled) and tamed by producers. Regulations should be kept to an absolute minimum.”
   
5. Free markets benefit both producers and consumers and constraints on these free markets should be eliminated.
   
6. Depletion of energy and mineral resources is not the problem that environmentalists make it out to be.
   
7. Government’s role is to protect property and property rights.
   
8. The quintessential Western person is self reliant, male,  and tough.

These beliefs blend well with libertarian philosophies and those of other free market proponents, including corporate executives. However the truth is that much economic activity in the West is heavily subsidised by government and doesn’t fit the laissez-faire ideal at all. Nevertheless the articulation of these beliefs helps groups, which are fighting for self-interested reasons, appeal to a wider constituency. For example, the Blue Ribbon Coalition represents those who want to be free to enjoy the recreational use of off-road vehicles—four wheel drive vehicles and motorbikes etc—in national parks. It campaigns against the Endangered Species Act, which has been used to limit their access to these areas. It’s rhetoric draws heavily on the above laissez-faire/Old West ideology:

The Endangered Species Act has failed in large part because it has engendered a regulatory regime that has:

• violated the rights of individuals, particularly property rights;
  
• destroyed jobs, devalued property, and depressed human enterprise on private and public lands;
  
• hidden the full cost of conserving endangered species by foisting those costs on private individuals; and
  
• imposed significant burdens on State, county and local governments.

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