God I love that headline. I knew there was something terribly wrong the first time I read it and now maybe I think it indicates how wrong things have really gone. Like with us. Like with the world’s various governments. All the NATO’s and Euro-Zones of the world are high on crack and diddling each other with sharp instruments. It’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.
My belief is that Federal Government’s job is to create and maintain national infrastructure, keep a standing army and keep our borders safe. That’s pretty much all the framers of the constitution had in mind. The states handle the rest since they can more easily cater to their local citizen’s desires.
As it turns out an affluent people like ourselves sometimes choose to pool their money in other ways for the betterment of society. Usually this means funding for infrastructure, science, research and art. I support that because I am willing to pay my small part to influence those areas. What I am not in support of and hence not willing to spend my money to fund is “America the World Police”, “America the busybody old spinster” who is always in everyone’s business, “America the evangelical nation” where we push our religion and national philosophys on other peoples. I can’t support the Department of Education any further than them publishing guidelines for the states to peruse and follow at their own discretion. Nationalistic Education Curriculum has been a bad idea throughout history. “Beware of those who would control information, for in their hearts they feel themselves your master”. Same with healthcare – the government could sponsor a competition to design an affordable health plan, create a website where insurers could post plans and prices (hence spurring free markets) but they have no business in healthcare. We are not socialists and we had better all remember that. There is more, much more but it will have to wait. Ron Paul is right about getting rid of the seven agencies you know, but his elderly demeanor and squeaky voice make it harder for shallow voters to listen to him.
Ronald Reagan: "Ron Paul is one of the outstanding leaders fighting for a stronger national defense. As a former Air Force officer, he knows well the needs of our armed forces, and he always puts them first. We need to keep him fighting for our country."
The biggest things we have to fear from our government right now are these:
(1) It costs way too much money to run for office. We need to open up PBS as a free forum for candidates by using one of their spare frequencies. We need a ten year moratorium on all advertisement outside of the free public forums in order to break the billion dollar election cycle. Politicians spend most of their time raising money and politicking, then in elected fulfilling promises to the special interest groups that got them elected. This will be the most heated and fought against topic anyone could bring up right now. The two major parties like it the way that it is. Hundreds of millions of dollars are pumped into the media during campaigns, and they will fight it tooth and nail. The special interest groups will pull out all the stops to get any meaningful campaign reform killed. Basically everyone except the majority of the American people will be against it. But it is too important to put off – we have to have drastic campaign finance reform now before it is too late. That goes along with campaigning time limits as you will see next.
(2) There is absolutely no reason why a politician should campaign for two or three years to get a four year job. Think about your own job. While a certain amount of politicking goes on at every job if you had to spend big money campaigning for 3 years to keep your job for 4 years you would never get anything done and your company would go out of business. This is exactly what is happening to the USA right now. Our politicians can’t get anything done because if they aren’t working for donations they are traveling trying to get elected. They work less than 25% of their time in office as a general rule. You or I do that at work and we will be out the door. We need to set limits on how long a politician running for national office can politic for his job. I’m not proposing this be made effective for the states – this is a federal issue. The number that strikes me as the appropriate amount of time to campaign for office is five percent of the office’s term. That would be 73 days for a 4 year term or 18 days per year of the term of office. This way they need less time to raise money, campaign less and can concentrate on the business at hand – running this country!
(3) Virtually every politician on the National level thinks he is your master and not the other way around. In their minds we exist to fund their projects, pay their buddies and enrich themselves. We are people they have to put up with in the course of their jobs. There are no public servants in the national political arena – only players. We are run by professional politicians who are little more than actors and they want the leading role. Somehow politicians must be humbled back into their public service role where their only goal is to further the immediate goals of our country on our soil. When we have our house in order then we can begin to nonviolently help raise other countries standard of living as an altruistic venture – as long as we can pay for it as we go.
(4) National Debt/Deficit Smoke Screen. Since the 1980′s politicians have been trying to confuse people about the budget deficit and the national debt. There have been claims that deficit spending stimulates the economy. The National Debt is somehow an asset instead of a liability. The fact is that to pay off the national debt we have to balance our budget (zero budget deficit) and set up a repayment plan over the next 20 or so years to pay back the national debt. This has gone on too long and is out of control. The people that don’t want this to happen are the Federal Reserve, enterprise sized banks and the countries who we owe the money to and their central banks. We pay them a huge amount of money every year in interest on this debt – and we pay our bills on time so they know they’re gonna get paid. They really don’t want us to pay it back. The National Debt exploded under Reagan and has been mushrooming ever since. We are just about to the point where we will have to slash all government operations in order to service this debt. That means smaller government, less money spent on infrastructure, no entitlement programs of any kind, a tiny little military and less of all things government provides. While I’m a big fan of a smaller, less intrusive Federal government I would like a controlled reduction over time rather than a forced downsizing.
(5) Constant War. There is absolutely no reason for us to go to war in this day and age. We have the ability to solve conflicts remotely with drones and missiles or with small heavily armed special forces teams that inflict great damage. Fact is our most recent wars weren’t really any of our business. Iraq invades Kuwait…aren’t there countries in the area who can take care of this? They didn’t have to because we jumped in. Wars solidify a President’s place in the history books and enrich the “Military Industrial Establishment” and serve little other purpose unless we are attacked. Then it’s Katy bar the door because your average American will take up arms to protect our country.
(6) Forcing Regime Change. We are way too up in other peoples business. Over half the time when we topple the government in another country it backfires on us. Call it “blowback” if you like. If we were able to liberate a country and set up a legitimate government for the people and of the people and then promptly get the hell out, we could make friends in doing so. However we don’t have a government “of and for the people” ourselves, so we have absolutely no chance in setting one up anywhere else. The best we can hope for is to set up a regime that will “Play Ball” with us for a time until they become so corrupt and rich that they no longer need us. Ron Paul is right about this one too and the reason the establishment hates his opinion on this topic is because there is HUGE MONEY in wars and producing weapons and intelligence for war. There is no reason for us to covertly force regime change if we learn to mind our own business. We have trained diplomats for that.
(7) Forcing you to live a certain way. I dare say that National Health Care in it’s current form will be found largely unconstitutional. We are going to need a constitutional amendment to ensure the right to every American for health care before we can have a national mandate. At the point where we realize this we will also realize that the current system of insurance companies and private health care facilities will no longer work – we will have to exercise eminent domain and just TAKE the hospitals and clinics and make the health insurance companies largely irrelevant. When sick your first health care contact will be a pharmacist who will treat you or refer you to a doctor as needed. Urgent care would be handled similar to now except every medical facility in the country would be owned by us – the US government. While we could certainly make that work for us – and the massive unemployment caused by killing the medical corporations could be easily handled in retraining those employees to help meet the vastly increased demand for actual health care – not an unnecessary, ancillary position like they held before. We could do that. Or we could castrate the FDA, the HHS (and others) in effect deregulating health care to a degree that will allow individual doctors to practice medicine on their own again. Health care has got to be taken out of the hands of the government and the huge medical corporations and put back in the hands of the Doctors, Nurses, Pharmacists and other health care professionals that really don’t require a lot of regulation or paperwork to do their jobs.
(8) Lobbying. Honestly there should only be one lobby in this country. The lobby for the American People. That’s not the way it is and “K” street rules Washington with an iron wallet. The way to fix this is a clear two pronged strategy. The first is to put a ten year hiatus on professional lobbying. That is to say only people who get paid to lobby need to find other jobs. Regular people could still try to talk to their Senators and Representatives as it should be, but no paid lobbyist allowed. Ten years of a moratorium would kill the industry and after that we could reassess our National position on the subject. The second is to put a ten year hiatus on politicians taking money from any person or business while they are holding elected office. We will provide apartment like housing for them and their families in DC, but not over the top lavish, just nice middle class digs. We will pay them a reasonably high salary and provide full benefits during their term. They’ll get a company car and a gas card. I’m trying to describe very good middle class benefits that we all wish we got with our jobs. We treat them well, but they can take money from no one during their time in office except for their Federal Government paychecks. Taking the money out of politics will weed out the fortune seekers and help us elect candidates who will actually work and when their term is over they will go home.
(9) Government intrusion into your privacy. The police and federal police and military agencies have stacked the deck. If they merely suspect you of some subversive activity (like being black or Muslim) the laws are in place to let them violate your privacy in any number of ways. They can toss a gps tracking device on your car without a warrant. They can tap your phones, watch your house, take thermal video inside your house from the outside, electronically snoop through your cell phones and computers, set up listening devices to hear you inside your home, etc. I do believe this was covered in the Bill of Rights which is of course, the first ten amendments in the Constitution. It reads:
- Fourth Amendment – Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
- The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The framers didn’t leave a lot to the imagination there, did they? Yet this simple topic has been debated, stretched and misconstrued until the simplicity of the statement has become full of nuance and implied powers that were clearly never intended to exist.
(10) Federal Government Gathering Power and Increasing in Scope and Size. I don’t think that the folks that run the Federal Government are evil, I really don’t. But department heads being what they are they hate to reduce a budget and indeed lobby for a bigger budget every year. This alone increases the size of government somewhat. Big departments like the CIA, FBI (+other law enforcement) want to increase the scope of their power and influence because it make their job easier. Lots easier to catch bad guys if you can ignore everyone’s constitutional rights. It doesn’t make them evil they are just taking the path of least resistance. Agencies like the DOE’s (Education and Energy) seem hell bent on controlling every aspect of their charges. They believe they are smarter than we are and have all the answers. This attitude from some departments is the scariest thing because that’s how big government is born. They come up with an idea to protect the children, they sell it to you relentlessly until you believe it and then it becomes law…or at least policy. Social and moral issues have no place in the Federal Government, but politicians campaign on these hot buttons to keep you from realizing that while they may be electable they are absolutely incapable of doing the job they are trying to get elected to.
To Recap:
• We must virtually eliminate commercial political campaigning on the National Political Stage for at least ten years (if not permanently) in order to break the system power brokering and corruption that is fueling a runaway government.
• Lobbying must be completely stopped during that time while new approaches are studied.
• Those who seek political office should be doing it out of a desire to briefly serve their country before moving on to let the next person have the honor.
• We must curtail spending to the point where we can pay back the national debt in a reasonable time.
• We must stop the incessant wars and pull most of our troops out of their current deployment, reinforce our own borders while leaving a reasonable number of strategic bases around the world.
• We must mind our own business. Diplomacy must be used exclusively in negotiating with other sovereign countries.
• The government needs to exit the strategy of trying to protect people from themselves and legislating morality. Give people the benefit of the doubt that they can make good choices for themselves and if they don’t, well we’ll have less stupid people to take care of.
• The government must make itself smaller, less intrusive and more efficient. I suggest a fair flat tax on sales with few exclusions and retrain the employees of the IRS (since we won’t need that expensive entity anymore) into efficiency experts who would then disperse into the nation reviewing the daily operations of government offices and making recommendations for changes that will save money and increase productivity. Kind of a “Federal Government Efficiency Audit”. The final directive of that Federal Efficiency Department would be to eliminate itself.
