"Providing an informed, reasoned and dispassionate
voice to the global public debate..."
A positive paradigm of sustainable development does not lose sight of first principles. "We've gone astray from first principles. We've lost sight of the rule that individual freedom and ingenuity are at the very core of everything that we've accomplished. Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives." ~ Ronald Reagan
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WTO Catalogued
Our mission is to explain, promote and help implement a positive global paradigm of sustainable development that affords future generations from all sovereign nations greater opportunities for a higher quality of life. To achieve this positive paradigm we emphasize the importance of free & fair (rules-based) trade, economic growth, free markets, the rule of law, strong tangible and intangible private property rights, scientific discovery, and technological innovation. We also emphasize the need to ensure governments' open and transparent establishment, maintenance and oversight of balanced, risk-based empirical science, and economic cost-benefit analysis-driven national regulatory and standards schemes, and the quality and integrity of scientific & technical data/information that government entities rely upon, adopt as their own and disseminate to the public as a basis for agency actions, including rulemakings.
What is a Positive Paradigm of Sustainable Development?
Welcome to ITSSD.org
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development is defined by the quality, transparency, and objectivity of laws, regulations and standards, rather than merely by the quantity thereof. "If you make ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law." ~ Winston Churchill
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development is a bottom-up, decentralized representative democratic approach to economic, political and social governance emphasizing free markets, the rule of law and institutional checks and balances. "Government of the People, by the People, and for the People." ~ Abraham Lincoln
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development calls for limited rather than expansive government. "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government." ~ John Sharp Williams
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development calls for strong protection of exclusive private property rights, tangible as well as intangible. "The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government." "In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may equally be said to have a property in his rights." ~ James Madison
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development envisions the 'enabling' of the People via institutions, at the local, regional and national levels (rather than at the supranational and/or global levels).
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development ensures that individuals are provided with unlimited opportunities to improve their own well-being through self-creation, self-innovation, self-entrepreneurship and self-development (self realization) while, at the same time, not harming the well-being of others, either now or in the forseeable future.
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development can be achieved only if public institutions remain accountable to the People and if individuals responsibly exercise their constitutional rights commensurate with their constitutional responsibilities. "[T]he consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected, will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former by inculcating the practice of the latter." "I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is the best policy." ~ George Washington
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development is ultimately grounded in the founding principles underlying the United States Constitution. "Our particular security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution." ~ Thomas Jefferson
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A positive paradigm of sustainable development is cognizant of the rule of law. "To be governed by legislated text rather than legislators' intentions is what it means to be a 'Government of laws, not of men.'" ~ U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (dissenting in Zuni Public School Dist. No. 89 v. Department of Education, 550 U.S. 81, 119 (2007)). "Unlike the Legislative and Executive Branches, each of which possesses several political checks on the other, the Judiciary has one primary check on the excesses of political branches. That check is the enforcement of the rule of law through the exercise of judicial power." ~ U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (concurring in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Assn., SCOTUS, Docket No. 13-1041, Slip. Op. at 2 (March 9, 2015)).
- A positive paradigm of sustainable development can be achieved without requiring the absolute preservation of specific natural resources inherited from the past. To the extent economic activities deplete essential natural resources, such resources should be renewed, supplemented and/or replaced with comparable long-term capital value, such as scientific knowledge, new technologies and equipment, or some environmental investment. "In making policy decisions we can take advantage of the principle of substitutability, remembering that what we are obligated to leave behind is a generalized capacity to create well-being, not any particular thing or any particular natural resource." ~ Robert Solow