In this Issue, April/May 2005

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You'll notice right off that we've combined the April and May New Individualist into a double issue. Don't worry, we're still producing ten issues a year; instead of a July-August double issue we'll have an issue for each of those months to maximize your summer reading!

We have heard a lot of screaming in recent years about the Religious Right. Every time there has been a public outcry against some new low in indecency, sage columnists have proclaimed that the Religious Right is trying to impose its values on America as a first step toward theocracy. In this issue of The New Individualist, Roger Donway argues that it is in fact a man of the Left, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who is the person most likely to bring government-enforced morality to the United States.

Over the last four years, Spitzer has used his position to re-fashion several of the country's financial industries in accordance with his own altruist and egalitarian ethical convictions. In doing so, he has won near-universal applause from the national press. Now, Spitzer is running for the governorship of New York and he has opened up a huge lead in the polls. As a result, more than a few commentators are already speaking of him as a future president. To understand just how frightening that prospect is, don't miss Roger Donway's analysis of the philosophy that drives our country's most dangerous politician: "Eliot Spitzer: Ayatollah General."

Another serious threat to the liberty of Americans is also religious in nature, for it comes from that neo-pagan religion we call environmentalism, as adopted and promoted by the United Nations. In an article that I co-authored with Michael Shaw, founding participant in Freedom 21 Santa Cruz, a pro-liberty and property rights organization, we show how Agenda 21, a product of the U.N.'s 1992 Rio Summit, has facilitated the establishment of councils in every country and state under terms like "sustainable development" for the express purpose of limiting the use of private property in the name of their ideologies and political agendas. These councils are similar to the soviets that were the basis of the former union by that name and are not only undermining individual liberty but the democratic and constitutional checks on government.

If anyone wishes to grasp environmentalism's fundamentally religious nature, he need only read Will Thomas's review of Jared Diamond's book on apocalyptic ecology: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Diamond is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he brings great learning to his analyses and predictions. But like a Creationist ignoring biology, or a Young Earther ignoring geology, the one thing Diamond studiously avoids bringing to his work, Thomas shows, is the science most relevant to it: economics.