New Rochelle, NY– I have been telling my colleagues online and in person to come out to vote for the County Executive election and a lot of times I will get the answer of “I don’t vote”, or “Voting doesn’t make a difference” or the apathetic shrug and a “I’ll see” or a “maybe”. I hope that everyone but especially Millenials know that this is a terrible attitude to have, and it will only lead us to ruin.
Sure I will concede that at the national level it seems that no matter how many times you “vote the bums out” and replace them with for bums with a different letter to their name, there is never a noticeable shift in policy or direction, we still fund the welfare / warfare state, the only difference being to what degree they will be funded respectively.
There is always more and more freedom and civil liberties lost with each passing election and it is easy to be tempted into thinking that our system is broken or voting is useless.
I would propose two solutions. Lets start running for elected office ourselves, and make sure to vote for and support those elected officials who uphold their oaths to the constitution and stay true to them. As soon as they violate their oaths we vote them out or run against them, that is the key to self governance.
Top-Down centralization of power is failing, that has been the dominant power structure of the last century, the only solution lies in the decentralization of power, emphasis on local control, and a society based voluntary associations in public and economic life, with a rejection of the monopoly of force of the state.
Very rarely a local election comes a long where the differences between the two candidates will have a direct and significant impact on our lives and futures, This year’s County Executive race is one of them. In fact it will probably effect your lives more directly than any election in recent memory or the near future. It will certainly be one where you could actually have the most impact.
For Millenials, most of us have student loans, the job market hasn’t been so great, and we are saddled with debt from personal, to city, state and federal. We are dealing with the decisions made by our grandparents and parents and we are the generation that will be stuck with the cleanup, but also to make sure this nation along with it’s principles of Liberty survive. If we fail in this, there will not be another generation after us that will remember how things used to be.
In this race we have two candidates whose differences could not be any clearer, Mayor Noam Bramson has increased New Rochelle’s city debt to unsustainable levels; that is a fact. He also plans on increasing that debt even further with the Echo Bay project, which will go through if he wins and you and I will be paying it off way into our 50’s. All to line the pockets of his corrupt corporate benefactors. When asked how he could morally justify burdening a generation already overburden with debt he could not give me a satisfactory answer.
Thinking about owning a Home or starting a family in the near future? If Bramson has his way forget about it, you will be confined to “walkable” and “livable” federally mandated and standardized micro apartments all in the name of “sustainability”, and you will never know the freedom our forefathers knew that comes with owning your own land, owning your own property and a piece of the American itself. All the while you will be funding funding your 21st century serfdom with the fruits of your labor in the form tax abatements for major developers.
Rob Astorino, on the other hand has been managing our county responsibly for the last 4 years, our county is in the best financial state of all the major counties in New York state. Our debt is being managed in a fiscally responsible way that avoids a downgrade of our credit rating.
The same could not be said of Mayor Bramson and New Rochelle.
Astorino has lowered our property taxes because of his fiscal management, making it more likely that we too will be able to afford a home in the great county we love and grew up in.
Rob Astorino has been standing strong against Federal Government encroachment on local property rights. The principle of the unalienable Human right to Property stems from what you need to sustain your right to Life, it originates from the ownership of your body.
If you abdicate your local zoning and planning rights to the Federal Government, it may not seem like a big deal at first but what you are really doing is abdicating your right to control your own property which will one day include the ownership your very person when this violation of principle is seen through to its end.
It means restrictions on your mobility, and every other choice you face as an individual. All those decisions will be made for you and dictated to you by central planners and bureaucrats, if you do not take the responsibility of the ownership of your own governance. They will do it for you.
This is why Voting is so important, If you do not exercise all your rights you are guaranteed to lose them. We all know we are fast losing them and our future is indeed precarious, but we have it within our power to reverse the crash course over the looming cliff.
That means we do not give up, that does not mean we abdicate our duties as American Citizens. It means that we take the 10 minutes out of our day to exercise the right that our forbearers died to give us. The vote. If we do not, then may whatever God you believe in have mercy on our future and the future of our children, because we will surely deserve whatever fate awaits us.
In my eyes the choice is clear, its between Rob Astorino who stands for local governance with fiscal responsibility so that we have a chance at a free and prosperous economic future or Noam Bramson who promises more big government tyranny which has never resulted in a truly free and prosperous society. Noam’s agenda is not his own, it comes from elitist international organizations and think tanks. That is why his words sound like they were crafted by a top notch PR firm.
One thing this election is not about is the fake divisive wedge issues that Noam Bramson has injected into this campaign, none of those issues are determined at the county level. What IS determined however is your taxes and your local rights that affect everyone person equally, neither men’s personal views on these social issues have any bearing on their job as county Executive, Rob Astorino knows this, Noam is hoping you are not smart enough to figure it out. Taxes and Individual Rights effect us all equally, this hyperbole about “values” from Bramson is just smoke and mirrors.
I hope you will all fulfill your duty as citizens and cast your vote on Tuesday November 5th. If you need to lookup your poling station I am providing the LINK for you. NO EXCUSES, remember we get the government we deserve.