Rights, Hustlers and Unsustainable Ideas

Sustainable Long Island’s (SLI) Sixth Annual Sustainability Conference was held this past Friday at the Carlyle on the Green in Bethpage.  Attending were “dozens of political, labor, academic and other leaders and activists from around Long Island” whose mission was to promote “social equity” and “food justice.” 

I find it ironic that despite over 50 years of zoning and government planning on Long Island, SLI feels “our communities were built and have matured without adequate planning, leaving an aftermath  of suburban sprawl, fragmented transportation systems, depleting natural resources, segregated neighborhoods and schools, and deteriorating downtowns.” 

I never realized that Long Island was in such bad shape.  Apparently, all that government planning and ‘visioning’ really screwed things up.  I guess the keynote speaker at this event, Suffolk County Supervisor Steve Bellone, doesn’t realize how bad he screwed up Babylon.  Did the other guests realize what SLI thinks of Long Island and Long Islanders?  Regardless, SLI doesn’t stop with just trying to play Sim City with Nassau and Suffolk counties.

SLI also feels that every citizen has the right to a “thriving economy, a racially and ethnically diverse population, a range of housing options and employment opportunities”.

This propaganda can be considered ‘left wing’ when it comes to so-called economic rights and social equality.  I can’t find any section in the U.S. Constitution that refers to “food justice” or the right to someone else’s perception of “social equity”.   If you’re new to Long Island politics, these are ‘command’ phrases that are usually followed by some heavy handed government intervention in an effort to get people to go along with the central planners’ utopian vision.  It is a plan that always fails and always drags us deeper into debt.  But, they keep trying because there is always a fresh crop of believers coming online every year who seem to forget how bad the last plan screwed things up.

Likewise, central planning has been around in earnest for a long time, so there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to a political pressure group trying to the government to do the heavy lifting.  What’s different here is that there is very little opposition on the government level, with most elected officials deciding to roll over to the well connected who lunch at the Carlyle.  After all, why rock the boat?  As for the rest of us, I am getting pretty tired of all the rights being handed out at my expense.  

Sustainable Long Island needs to be opposed.  Their agenda is collective, left wing, socialist and technically communist.  Their plan and vision can only be implemented through coercion and compulsion.  We don’t know how they’re going to achieve ‘social equity’ and ‘food justice’, but those phrases alone sound like my rights as an individual are about to be violated.

Peter Nichols is co-founder of www.savehuntington.com