Americans, like most folks, like nice things: houses with running water and flush toilets. And heat and air conditioning. And the freedom to travel by auto and plane – and even train and bus. We like meat and veggies and fruit year round. We like not having to raise our own chickens and veggies and such. And many of us are willing to work to earn moola to pay for these things.

But there are a lot of people who don’t like most of us to have nice things. Who either don’t think we should because we are not the elite like them. Or because they envy us. Both of these groups have political clout and use various ways to deny as many people as possible the nice things we once took for granted. Political power comes out against many things.

Particularly when it comes to what we need to have to build and use nice things. We call that infrastructure and the powers-that-be and the wanna-be types go after that viciously. Regarding that side of things, we read this. Front Page Magazine decries the environists who have created and support a racket involving environmental impact statements, environmental assessments, and millions of pages and billions of dollars of paperwork consuming years of effort in which nothing is built.

The more environists can prevent infrastructure from being built, the less ability we have to produce nice things. So we suffer for their religious beliefs.

(We call these people “environists” because these so-called “environmentalists” have replaced reason and rationality and mental exercise with lies, emotionalism, and screaming. (If not violence.) Their mental facilities may still be present somewhere in their head, but they are disused – possibly atrophied.)

As a result, FPM’s article explains, projects are never built all too often, despite billions of dollars spent on studies. There is always something that is “discovered” or “suspected” that environists and their instigating and money-grubbing, unscrupulous attorney and political friends can use to delay, deny, and in some cases actually destroy the project. Their tactics vary but are all too predictable: wildlife habitat, water quality and/or quantity, dust, smoke, noise, traffic, or a dozen other reasons.

We here at TPOL know and live with this daily. We are involved in the design and permitting of projects that the environists hate. Producing essential things like lumber from forests, sand, and gravel from deposits near rivers and on mesas, repairing or replacing worn-out railroad bridges, and the production of concrete and asphalt for paving and building things.

The modern environist believes that milk comes in cartons or jugs from the refrigerator in a supermarket. That sand and gravel come from haul trucks, and that concrete comes out of ready-mix trucks. (The ones with big drums on the back. And that lumber comes from Home Depot and Menards. Just as they believe that electricity is somehow mysteriously generated in all those electric power lines that connect their houses and businesses. And cars. Oh, they will admit that some sand and gravel comes from recycling construction debris. That some lumber comes from dismantling old houses and cutting down dead trees in towns and cities. And that electric power might come from both windmills (turbines) and solar farms.

Unless, of course, you want to put one of those turbines or solar farms – or heaven forbid, a pig farm or packing plant, near their house? Or a gravel pit on the road that they drive to work on, or drive past in their $200,000 RV to their “pristine mountain retreat?

You, sire and madame, are evil incarnate. You are greedy. You must be forcing people to buy your product, including poor little innocent environists – green loves and worshippers of Mother Gaea (Earth).

So, as a result, as the article points out, we can’t have nice things.

Sometimes, it is not a matter of price. That is often a factor, however. Consider Teton County, Jackson, and Jackson Hole in NW Wyoming. (As red a State as any of the Fifty.) Decades ago they chosed down and drove out of their county the gravel and sand pits, the ready-mix plants, and the asphalt facilities. The nearest source of these materials is now way off in Idaho, perhaps 100 miles away. The ultra-rich A-listers don’t mind paying an extra $100 a cubic yard for transportation. It is the people trying to make a living in a small buiness or service job that suffer and do without.

Because the governments are firmly on the side (and in the pockets) of the environists and the groups that feed of the disadvantaged and poor. (And want to keep them that way.)