The federal government is using the concept of “sustainable development” to usurp complete and unchallengeable control over housing in the United States. There is one group of patriots, however, that refuses to stand idly by while the fundamental right to property is abolished by the bureaucracy.
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is the federal agency leading the attack against property rights and against local, accountable self-government after the fashion favored and established by our ancestors.
John Anthony of Sustainable Freedom Lab recognizes the threat and is warning his countrymen about the scope and severity of the federal assault. “HUD uses our own money to bring communities to heel,” Anthony said in a statement released on the group’s website October 28. “By saying “no,” we can bring the agency to its knees. We do not need Congress, we do not have the time to wait for deceptive legislation and we cannot depend on political leaders drunk with inside the beltway power. We need our neighbors, political and non-political, building the same coalitions our forefathers built to survive in this new rugged land,” he added.
Anthony’s assessment of HUD’s ultimate aim is spot on. This federal agency and the programs it administers are nothing more than regulations conceived and written by desk-bound dictators who are given unjust authority by the president and whose diktats are beyond the reach of the people who are forced to obey these directives or face being subjected to the full panoply of punishments.
HUD’s particular area of unaccountable absolutism is the environment and housing. In this latest effort, the agency’s underlying policy is the promotion of “sustainability,” which is globalist newspeak for totalitarianism under one world government.
Here’s the connection, as uncovered in an article published by Property Values Defense, a grassroots organization that “unites attorneys, public officials and activists nationwide to stop federal agency overreach”:
HUD, DOT and the EPA have been instrumental in fostering regionalism since 1993. In 2009, the three agencies formed a “Partnership for Sustainable Development” for the express purpose of merging their unique authorities toward the common goal of advancing sustainable regions. In June 2016, the agency also teamed with the Department of Education to promote regional Equity Assistance Centers to advance income integration in elementary and secondary classrooms.
These agencies are working feverishly to infill suburbs by transplanting urban families into the outlying communities, which then merge with nearby counties and towns into larger regions managed by unelected councils.
Even HUD’s new Assessment of Fair Housing, the document applicants must complete to receive AFFH related grants, requires grant recipients to align their local plan with a regional plan.
Collectivism is being forced on Americans under the guise of protecting the environment and providing “affordable housing” to the less advantaged.
The true purpose, of course, is to collect all mankind into urban mega-centers in order to facilitate the imposition of top-down, strong central government rule, otherwise known as global fascism.
John Anthony rightly perceives that the problem is not one of development, but one of despotism.
“HUD [and other federal agencies] have converged into a massive administration-led autocracy, pre-planning neighborhoods, living patterns, school attendance and even the social makeup of your community,” he said.
“Communities that resist face compliance reviews, withdrawal of millions in HUD funding or even civil rights lawsuits that will break the financial backs of most towns and counties. And, of course the counterfeit charges of not caring for America’s poor and needy.”
That last charge will be the wedge the federal government will use to divide Americans and to convince the purportedly neglected to accept federal tyranny in exchange for “equal housing opportunities.”
Of course, it is one thing for a city or county to want to resist the federal regulatory restrictions, but it is not as easy to maintain this staunch sovereignty in the face of a bag of federal cash and other incentives for playing ball with the bureaucrats.
States, counties, and cities must continue, however, refusing to dance to the tune played by the federal bandleader. They must reinforce American federalism and civil liberties by emphasizing in city and county codes and state laws the sovereignty that exists in states and that exists only on loan to the federal government, no matter how much money the latter can use to bribe the former.
When it comes to caving to the central government’s offers: caveat emptor.
The familiar “carrot and stick” gambit is the coin of the realm in D.C. From police to highways, from environmental standards to labor policies, the federal government has stomped its heavy jackboot into all aspects of life — areas that were once the bailiwick of states, cities, or the people themselves.
Anthony and the Sustainable Freedom Lab offer seminars to show municipalities methods for charting a course around HUD’s haranguing and around the centrifugal spin of “sustainable development.”
The course, entitled “Ending HUD’s Tyranny,” teaches local governments to “turn the tables on the government’s argument that because you reject HUD overreach, you are a ‘racist that does not care about African Americans, women or the protected classes.'”
While such lessons are useful and urgently needed if American cities and counties are to remain independent, free to forge their own infrastructure plans and housing ordinances, there is a more permanent, constitutionally sound system for forcing the federal beast back inside its constitutional cage: the law of agency.
As I wrote in an article reporting on a Georgia county’s effort to nullify HUD’s regulatory remaking of the right to property:
Upon its ratification, the states, as principals, gave limited power to the central government to act as their agent in certain matters of common concern: defense, taxation, interstate commerce, etc.
The authority of the agent — in this case the federal government — is derived from the agreement that created the principal/agent relationship. Whether the agent is lawfully acting on behalf of the principal is a question of fact. The agent may legally bind the principal only insofar as its actions lie within the contractual boundaries of its power.
Should the agent exceed the scope of its authority, not only is the principal not held accountable for those acts, but the breaching agent is legally liable to the principal (and any affected third parties who acted in reliance on the agent’s authority) for that breach.
Under the law of agency, the principal may revoke the agent’s authority at will. It would be unreasonable to oblige the principals to honor promises of an agent acting outside the boundaries of its authority as set out in the document that created the agency in the first place.
Imagine the chaos that would be created if principals were legally bound by the acts of an agent that “went rogue” and acted prejudicially to the interests of the principals from whom he derived any power in the first place. It is a fundamental tenet of the law of agency that the agent may lawfully act only for the benefit of the principal.
Finally, despite seeming like we are constantly “fighting an uphill battle against a government that is corrupt, dishonest packed with legions of uniformed bureaucrats,” there are many avenues now open to cities and counties that lead to liberty and the protection of the right to own property and to the permanent ostracism of the globalists and their sustainability scam.
