Thanks. I was just about to search in the sidebar for "dimply". Excellent commentary and nice that you suggest some practical steps for helping to correct this mess we're in.
Great post! We could include keeping the two silos of government and education separate, also. (So the government may not instruct children to support government at any cost, for instance.)
Over here (I'm sure the same would apply over there) I would prohibit all politicians and senior civil servants from ever working for any commercial interest, either while in parliament/government or afterwards, on pain of imprisonment and forfeiture of pension.
If we have to pay them extra and keep on paying MPs (senators and congressmen) after they lose their seats, fine.
I would make it law that all official internal communications were public, including that pertaining to 'national security'. This might make it hard for us to interfere in other countries - good.
I would prohibit all government spending with media. No ads, sponsorships, grants etc.
I would take us out of the WHO, UN and IMF (for starters).
I would prohibit any state employee from earning more than the prime minister, and I'd set that figure at £150k, with annual increase in line with inflation. For every percentage point that inflation goes above 5% the PM would lose 1%, so that inflation of 11% would see his salary (and all salaries pegged to it) fall by 1%.
But the sad truth - shown by the pandemic - is that people like us are in the minority. Most people are credulous fools who like the illusion of comfort and safety provided by government.
They don't want to take responsibility for their own lives, especially not their failings, and for that reason I think we're doomed.
I'm obviously writing mostly with a UK perspective - we pay our MPs a full pension on their reaching retirement age as long as they have served one full parliament (generally c. five years).
It seems to me absurdly generous to pay a full pension immediately on the loss of a congressional or Senate seat if at the same time your congressmen and senators can go straight into industry and earn a handsome living based on favours they may have done for their future employers while in office.
We need to do something in all western "democracies" to cut the umbilical cord linking state power to financial power, the media, and so on.
Saying to elected representatives, this is a very good one time deal – you get elected, you are handsomely rewarded for serving the people, but you wave goodbye to your past (and possible future) business life forever, so that there is no (or less) possibility of influence, seems to me a step in the right direction?
First: destroy corporate personhood. A company has no soul, and therefore cannot be a good moral actor. Therefore any rights they have tend to be abused. So stop giving them rights like they were a person. The laws of the state that allow corporations should make it clear that such bodies are not people, and do not have the same rights. To expound: when a business is more than one man can handle, and incorporation happens, he gives up the natural right to have sole control. Because the corporate body is no longer in control by one person, it should not be treated like a person.
This is one of those places where "left" and "right" -- identities that have become muddied and disconnected from their ideological roots, but identities that we live anyway -- should be able to find the tiniest bit of common ground. I've been amazed by the "liberal" pivot from Citizens United and "corporations aren't people!" to "Hell yeah, Disney stood up to that bastard DeSantis!" Corporations as woke moral arbiters should piss everybody off.
A good start sir! We know the problems. Substackers list them - in thousands. Daily. So, how to put an updated Omaha Platform into a positive context? We could start with the basic freedoms: speech, assembly, association, movement, and religion. And place significant limits on government. Seems to me there was a document, a couple of centuries ago, that pretty clearly set forth a comprehensive set of standards we could use to govern ourselves. Add in the amendments, throw out 200 years of lawyerly bullshit, incorporate some of the common sense rationale from the Federalist Papers and we'd be well on the way to creating a set of rules we could actually live by.
Did I mention placing limits on government? When I studied economics, (over half a century ago), 'government' constituted around 30% of the economy. Now, the bureaucracy gobbles up over 60% of everything you and I produce. For which they in turn produce nothing. Sadly, governments seem no longer able to build anything. At all. And bureaucratic obstructionism is endemic. Private entities are prevented from building anything either. Looking forward to the commentariat's answers to your question.
This is how we negotiate business deals: Make three lists, 1. Issues we totally agree on. 2. Issues we are willing to negotiate on. 3. Issues that we disagree with and are non-negotiable. If list #3 becomes longer than #1 or #2, the negotiations end and the deal is off. I ask you all to make a similar list between the Right (which includes conservatives and libertarians) and the Left (which includes liberals and progressives). We did; and it's not pretty.
We've been pushing the idea for several years. We have zero common ground; and they're not going to give up. In fact, they're going to double down. I'm afraid we have only two choices: Peaceful Separation or Bloody Civil War. Separation is not as difficult as people might think.
It's nice how we have fifty states to choose from. People who just want room to live their lives according to their values can pick up and move to a state where that's possible.
On the other hand, those people who can't tolerate dissent can keep ratcheting up the federal hegemony.
Separation wouldn't be difficult if it were only a matter of acknowledging irreconcilable differences and going our separate ways. Unfortunately, we're up against a totalitarian mindset which would only ever accept that as a stalling tactic.
I think we give the other side too much credit. First, they are a very small minority; albeit backed by some very powerful people. Second, they have no minds of their own. If someone isn't there to tell them what to say, where to go, how to behave, they'd be no threat. Take out the leaders and you win. But I'm all for peaceful separation. Imagine, in 10 or 20 years we could buy those states back for pennies on the dollar.
Same here. Fortunately for me however, I had the opportunity to work on Capitol Hill for a D congressman. Saw the hypocrisy and the fraud with my own eyes. At the time I told anyone that would listen: If people only knew the way the government really works they'd be down here with torches and burn the place to the ground. Talk about vision.
Hey Chris and readers. As an Australian it saddens me to see America being torn apart from within. Admittedly I haven't always felt this way because I haven't liked the way America meddled in other countries. These days I realise more the positive role America has played in promoting freedom. I'm currently reading a critique of ideologies and I acknowledge there is no perfect system. They all eventually fail but America has had arguably one of the best. As John Adams famously said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Your request for suggestions has not gone unnoticed, I'm just not sure what to say. It's a big ask, I feel wholly unqualified.
Sadly you know the constitution better than most of our politicians! They are immoral and anti-religious and wholly inadequate to govern! We desperately need to drain the swamp of the power hungry rats that are destroying America!
How about a Bill Gates rule, that aging oligarchs can play with their money buying paintings and houses they can wander through for days lost while they plan on what to buy to fill the house with, but they and private Institutions like them can no longer plow their money into making human misery they profit by?
In other words, make philanthrocapitalism illegal. But how would we do that? Money is power. The wealthy will always do as they choose, regardless of what humanity desires.
That sounds fatalist. Especially as the philanthrocapitalists are actively making humanity dumber and more dependent daily. You might advocate on your newsletter for you first sentence, and make less of your last.
I don't actually write a newsletter or substack, or whatever it's officially called. I am extremely fatalistic. I misnamed my theoretical newsletter. If I ever write one, I'll rename it Reports from Hell, or something similar.
I'd like anything that would break the power of the administrative state. I guess a quick and dirty rule would be something like: No executive department may make any rule that deprives a citizen of his money, rights, or livelihood. In practice, this would mean that state departments of education could not require shots for school, state departments of health could not close businesses for violating mask rules they that themselves just made up, etc. You want to force something on all citizens? Go through the legislature, where you'll be compelled to debate it in public, and maybe we'll still end up seeing you in court, but you can't back-door it in through "administration."
A weaker version would be that no executive branch rule created by the federal government can go into effect without 80 percent of Americans at least viewing it during the "notice and comment" period, which would never be waived or abridged.
Americans need to familiarize themselves with the concept of ptydepe so they can call it out when they see it, and put an end to it.
A first priority would be making sure that unilateral mask orders and lockdowns from single executive branch officials, with close to zero checks and balances, can NEVER be repeated. All for that. "Go through the legislature" is right.
The trouble is, what if we have a genuine pandemic, à la bubonic plague? One can imagine extreme enough examples where such measures would actually be helpful and possibly even necessary. The trouble in the current circumstances that the emergency was manufactured.
1. "A weaker version would be that no executive branch rule created by the federal government can go into effect without 80 percent of Americans at least viewing it during the "notice and comment" period, which would never be waived or abridged."
Good luck with that. Much of the citizenry is politically apathetic, even about things that affect them directly. Nobody comes to our local town council or planning commission meetings.
But I guess I will say one other thing: What I meant was that if nobody read the proposed rules, they could not become final. Could not. We're talking abiut what we want, right? Thar's what I want.
I guess it's "good luck" for all of it. Frankly, I think things will have to get to Prague-in-1968 level, and the Boomers will have to be gone, before there is a high enough percentage of the population that sees what's up and wants to change it. Until then, the rest of us will live in our parallel structures in free-ish states and sue when we have to, and when we can afford it.
Things are going to have to get worse before they get better. The other side knows this. They are creating the worse conditions and they already have the liberty crushing solutions ready for a populace who will beg for somebody to "just do something" when the shit hits the fan. Their vision of the better after the worse is a whole lot different than ours and it looks a lot like the U.S.S.R.'s great utopia. We need to organize and be ready with our own solutions to the problems that they are creating.
We know food shortages are coming. Why wouldn't they? How else would a totalitarian government subjugate a people who own more firearms than the governments standing army?
Their plandamic fear campaign didn't do the trick so now it's on to Plan B. Stock up, plant a garden, be ready to watch your leftist neighbor starve to death if he can't shake the brainwashing his clueless parents paid $500,000 for. Be ready to shoot him if he tries to steal food from your children. Be ready to feed him if he does see the error of his ways but don't give him so much as a table scrap unless he abandons his communist ideals.
The people pushing the Great Reset want to obliterate private property and personal liberty from the human conciesness. They don't want to just take your things and subjugate you. They want to take your children and reeducate them to erase those ideals of liberty as a possibility of human thought for them and all future generations. We need to hate tyranny more than they hate freedom.
This is a good start. We need to pick the hills we are prepared to die on or prepare to die in the gulags Klause Schwab and Bill Gates are building for us.
Those suggestions are good starts. I'd include stronger anti-discrimination laws, in particular regarding viewpoint discrimination. Eliminating affirmative action is very important in the long run but I'm skeptical that support for that could be found across identity lines.
The single biggest problem though, in my opinion, is micromanagement. The single-use condiments resolution passed by your city council is a case in point. Like, just, what? This is what they're worried about? It isn't only that it's a deck chairs on the Titanic kind of thing, it's also the mindset that offends me: this assumption by elected officials and unelected bureaucrats that it is their place to tell the rest of us what we can and cannot do, down to the smallest details of our lives.
I think the best way to deal with that could be something like a Constitutional amendment. As currently written, the Constitution delineates certain rights that are not to be infringed. The work-around the managerial state has developed is to regulate the hell out of everything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. By doing so, they've been able to ring-fence human liberty without (from a legal perspective) technically infringing it.
So, in addition to specifying the rights of citizens, the document should also be very clear: any field of human life not specifically mentioned as a domain of state power, the state is absolutely forbidden from regulating.
Now, a constitutional convention is a high bar. Another way of achieving a similar end would be a law to the effect that the number of laws, and the number of government agencies, are not to exceed a certain fixed threshold. When that threshold is reached, the passage of a new law or formation of a new agency requires that a previous law be repealed or an existing agency be dissolved. By introducing scarcity into the legal code, governments would be dissuaded from ridiculous trivialities such as telling everyone how many packets of ketchup they can get with their fries. Micromanagement would become prohibitively expensive in terms of potential loss of more important regulations.
Over 70 years ago, on one of the Sunday evening radio shows, a comedian, (Benny? Hope?), got his laughs from this line: "The difference between us and them is, in America, everything that is not explicitly forbidden is permitted. In Russia, everything that is not explicitly permitted is forbidden". We thought that was funny - then.
all good, i think two general principles that should inform us are eliminating all useless restrictions on bricks-and-mortar economic activity and considering which speculative activities should not be kosher. have all the casino fun you want, but our bodes, food, water, air must be off limits to bloombergian intrusion
Returning to a sound money system based on a scarce commodity (crypto, precious metals) would go a long way towards restricting the ability to engage in predatory speculation in the first place.
Good luck ever codifying, let alone enforcing, any set of rules to right this ocean of abject corruption that engulfs virtually the entirety of humanity. Most men now live lives of near total deceit. Call out and confront the lies with truth; be they big or small, professional, governmental or personal.
I like yours, Chris. I’d thoroughly support them. I’d add a couple more. For every new law that is passed, two more that are currently on the books must be deleted. We have way too many laws and some serious editing is in order. Also, all language used to create laws, contracts, rules and regulations must be PLAINLY stated. No more legalese. In fact, for every lawyer who is awarded a law degree one must be officially retired. There are too many lawyers in this country, and too many phony baloney documents created by lawyers.
I suppose it would be a call to abondon the universities and let the corpses decompose. Defund the public school system, make education primarily a private family matter.
The internet has rendered the current model of schools unnecessary, unneeded & corrupt.
(full disclosure - I am inspired by the spirit of Don Quixote to write out this platform - he wanted to include a restoration of the laws of coveture. But it's a stretch to far)
The universities don't have to be garbage, but I don't see any easy path toward de-shitting them. They get SO MUCH public money, so there's a solution there.
The dynamic of spiritual equity - that every 'body' has the inalienable right of a sovereign to deconstruct the texts to suit themselves and the unlimited acess to the texts via the internet renders the University model unworkable. 'University' is one place fixed in time where the minds can meet and consider (learn and teach) the truth contained within the texts. The internet renders the university 'unfixed'. It's everywhere and nowhere all at once. The weltanschauung of this age insists that no text impose it's authority (it's truth) on the sovereign material body of the individual. This is absolute equality. Everyone is equally sovereign over their bodies. The spiritual element, the mind of man, is subsumed into the material. That's why everything is political these days.
It's true, the universities don't have to be garbage. But our weltanschauung, our zeitgeist, is garbage. I wish it was a money problem.
They are corrupt to the core. But if they had no money and no power, they would be quite harmless and might very well wander back to where they came from. Right now we'd be tilting at windmills. Look at the power medical science exercised during the pandemic.
Love that you're going actionable! Have you heard of Agenda Setters by Downsizedc.org?
They have 5 bills that are nonpartisan and you can support just those that you agree with. They are working toward 300 people signed on in each congressional district. Read the Bills - makes legislators read the bills entirely into the record. One Subject at a Time - limits the scope of any bill to one issue. Write the Bills - ends unelected bureaucrats from enacting laws without congressional approval. End Judicial Findings, and Restore Parole. Once there are 300 people in a district they will be asked to contact their Representative in swarms to pressure them into supporting the bills.
What I want is radically smaller government.
I personally am aging closer to the horrors of Medicare and would love to opt-out. Top issues are accountability so I am in favor of term limits and getting rid of the overwhelming power the Speakers of the House have possessed for decades, and cut way down on use of Executive orders. I'd love to cut ties with the UN, and WHO. We need to stop our war mongering for the profit of some American businesses/people. We need to streamline the criminal code so that people of similar bad actions have similar sentencing, and victimless crimes are not on the books.
For decades I have asked every candidate, in every local, regional, state, (provincial), and federal election, "What is your, (or your parties'), plan to begin to shrink government?" I have posed that question at party nominating meetings, party leadership conventions, all-candidates forums, and townhall style meetings. Often in writing. Over one hundred times.
How many would-be politicians do you think answered the question? Or even put it on the agenda? How many? Anyone?
Actually, there was one potential candidate, (at a party nominating meeting over 20 years ago), who thought that developing a plan to shrink government was a topic worthy of discussion. Part way through that meeting, (after the second ballot), the party brass 'discovered", that particular candidate was not eligible to stand for nomination - "due to a technicality".
Jo Jorgensen did address this in her campaign. Problem is then people pick away at each tangible thing either in disagreement, or in throwing it away as too small. Thank you America for NOT voting Libertarian! Why the f should we even try to clean this up? smh
"we’re burdened with a governing class that only knows how to break things and impede most useful forms of human activity."
So very true! I grew up in Glendora, CA back when CA was thriving in the 80's and fortunately moved after I graduated in 88. I have seen the destruction of the most beautiful state since taken over by demonrats, thankfully from a distance. CA is now the greatest example of what happens when the demonrats have their way. So, so sad! I just cannot believe more people don't see the consequences of "progressives" in power!
"Dimply" typo caused by a cat, and subsequently fixed by a human.
I liked the cat's version...a very thoughtful post as usual btw.
Thanks. I was just about to search in the sidebar for "dimply". Excellent commentary and nice that you suggest some practical steps for helping to correct this mess we're in.
Because cats never admit to mistakes.
Great post! We could include keeping the two silos of government and education separate, also. (So the government may not instruct children to support government at any cost, for instance.)
Over here (I'm sure the same would apply over there) I would prohibit all politicians and senior civil servants from ever working for any commercial interest, either while in parliament/government or afterwards, on pain of imprisonment and forfeiture of pension.
If we have to pay them extra and keep on paying MPs (senators and congressmen) after they lose their seats, fine.
I would make it law that all official internal communications were public, including that pertaining to 'national security'. This might make it hard for us to interfere in other countries - good.
I would prohibit all government spending with media. No ads, sponsorships, grants etc.
I would take us out of the WHO, UN and IMF (for starters).
I would prohibit any state employee from earning more than the prime minister, and I'd set that figure at £150k, with annual increase in line with inflation. For every percentage point that inflation goes above 5% the PM would lose 1%, so that inflation of 11% would see his salary (and all salaries pegged to it) fall by 1%.
But the sad truth - shown by the pandemic - is that people like us are in the minority. Most people are credulous fools who like the illusion of comfort and safety provided by government.
They don't want to take responsibility for their own lives, especially not their failings, and for that reason I think we're doomed.
We already do pay a full retirement to US Congress and Senators who lose an election.
I'm obviously writing mostly with a UK perspective - we pay our MPs a full pension on their reaching retirement age as long as they have served one full parliament (generally c. five years).
It seems to me absurdly generous to pay a full pension immediately on the loss of a congressional or Senate seat if at the same time your congressmen and senators can go straight into industry and earn a handsome living based on favours they may have done for their future employers while in office.
We need to do something in all western "democracies" to cut the umbilical cord linking state power to financial power, the media, and so on.
Saying to elected representatives, this is a very good one time deal – you get elected, you are handsomely rewarded for serving the people, but you wave goodbye to your past (and possible future) business life forever, so that there is no (or less) possibility of influence, seems to me a step in the right direction?
First: destroy corporate personhood. A company has no soul, and therefore cannot be a good moral actor. Therefore any rights they have tend to be abused. So stop giving them rights like they were a person. The laws of the state that allow corporations should make it clear that such bodies are not people, and do not have the same rights. To expound: when a business is more than one man can handle, and incorporation happens, he gives up the natural right to have sole control. Because the corporate body is no longer in control by one person, it should not be treated like a person.
This is one of those places where "left" and "right" -- identities that have become muddied and disconnected from their ideological roots, but identities that we live anyway -- should be able to find the tiniest bit of common ground. I've been amazed by the "liberal" pivot from Citizens United and "corporations aren't people!" to "Hell yeah, Disney stood up to that bastard DeSantis!" Corporations as woke moral arbiters should piss everybody off.
How do you cure people of tunnel vision?
This would be the first step toward siloing government and corporate power.
And then there's the problem of dealing with campaign funding…
A good start sir! We know the problems. Substackers list them - in thousands. Daily. So, how to put an updated Omaha Platform into a positive context? We could start with the basic freedoms: speech, assembly, association, movement, and religion. And place significant limits on government. Seems to me there was a document, a couple of centuries ago, that pretty clearly set forth a comprehensive set of standards we could use to govern ourselves. Add in the amendments, throw out 200 years of lawyerly bullshit, incorporate some of the common sense rationale from the Federalist Papers and we'd be well on the way to creating a set of rules we could actually live by.
Did I mention placing limits on government? When I studied economics, (over half a century ago), 'government' constituted around 30% of the economy. Now, the bureaucracy gobbles up over 60% of everything you and I produce. For which they in turn produce nothing. Sadly, governments seem no longer able to build anything. At all. And bureaucratic obstructionism is endemic. Private entities are prevented from building anything either. Looking forward to the commentariat's answers to your question.
Regulatory capture feels like 75% of the American crisis -- the FDA is Pfizer, with no sunlight between them. Enormous problem.
This is how we negotiate business deals: Make three lists, 1. Issues we totally agree on. 2. Issues we are willing to negotiate on. 3. Issues that we disagree with and are non-negotiable. If list #3 becomes longer than #1 or #2, the negotiations end and the deal is off. I ask you all to make a similar list between the Right (which includes conservatives and libertarians) and the Left (which includes liberals and progressives). We did; and it's not pretty.
Painfully true, and the reality that's driving so many people to the idea of parallel societies.
We've been pushing the idea for several years. We have zero common ground; and they're not going to give up. In fact, they're going to double down. I'm afraid we have only two choices: Peaceful Separation or Bloody Civil War. Separation is not as difficult as people might think.
It's nice how we have fifty states to choose from. People who just want room to live their lives according to their values can pick up and move to a state where that's possible.
On the other hand, those people who can't tolerate dissent can keep ratcheting up the federal hegemony.
Separation wouldn't be difficult if it were only a matter of acknowledging irreconcilable differences and going our separate ways. Unfortunately, we're up against a totalitarian mindset which would only ever accept that as a stalling tactic.
I think we give the other side too much credit. First, they are a very small minority; albeit backed by some very powerful people. Second, they have no minds of their own. If someone isn't there to tell them what to say, where to go, how to behave, they'd be no threat. Take out the leaders and you win. But I'm all for peaceful separation. Imagine, in 10 or 20 years we could buy those states back for pennies on the dollar.
Couldn't agree more. But I'm convinced that many "centrists" - in fact even hard-core democrats have finally woken up to that fact.
They have finally realized they've been used by the democrat party. Not that the republicans are any better.
Same here. Fortunately for me however, I had the opportunity to work on Capitol Hill for a D congressman. Saw the hypocrisy and the fraud with my own eyes. At the time I told anyone that would listen: If people only knew the way the government really works they'd be down here with torches and burn the place to the ground. Talk about vision.
Hey Chris and readers. As an Australian it saddens me to see America being torn apart from within. Admittedly I haven't always felt this way because I haven't liked the way America meddled in other countries. These days I realise more the positive role America has played in promoting freedom. I'm currently reading a critique of ideologies and I acknowledge there is no perfect system. They all eventually fail but America has had arguably one of the best. As John Adams famously said, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
Your request for suggestions has not gone unnoticed, I'm just not sure what to say. It's a big ask, I feel wholly unqualified.
Sadly you know the constitution better than most of our politicians! They are immoral and anti-religious and wholly inadequate to govern! We desperately need to drain the swamp of the power hungry rats that are destroying America!
Being anti-religious doesn't necessarily mean you're immoral. Although that might be the case with most politicians!
How about a Bill Gates rule, that aging oligarchs can play with their money buying paintings and houses they can wander through for days lost while they plan on what to buy to fill the house with, but they and private Institutions like them can no longer plow their money into making human misery they profit by?
In other words, make philanthrocapitalism illegal. But how would we do that? Money is power. The wealthy will always do as they choose, regardless of what humanity desires.
That sounds fatalist. Especially as the philanthrocapitalists are actively making humanity dumber and more dependent daily. You might advocate on your newsletter for you first sentence, and make less of your last.
I don't actually write a newsletter or substack, or whatever it's officially called. I am extremely fatalistic. I misnamed my theoretical newsletter. If I ever write one, I'll rename it Reports from Hell, or something similar.
I'd like anything that would break the power of the administrative state. I guess a quick and dirty rule would be something like: No executive department may make any rule that deprives a citizen of his money, rights, or livelihood. In practice, this would mean that state departments of education could not require shots for school, state departments of health could not close businesses for violating mask rules they that themselves just made up, etc. You want to force something on all citizens? Go through the legislature, where you'll be compelled to debate it in public, and maybe we'll still end up seeing you in court, but you can't back-door it in through "administration."
A weaker version would be that no executive branch rule created by the federal government can go into effect without 80 percent of Americans at least viewing it during the "notice and comment" period, which would never be waived or abridged.
Americans need to familiarize themselves with the concept of ptydepe so they can call it out when they see it, and put an end to it.
Your first few planks are, of course, vital.
A first priority would be making sure that unilateral mask orders and lockdowns from single executive branch officials, with close to zero checks and balances, can NEVER be repeated. All for that. "Go through the legislature" is right.
The trouble is, what if we have a genuine pandemic, à la bubonic plague? One can imagine extreme enough examples where such measures would actually be helpful and possibly even necessary. The trouble in the current circumstances that the emergency was manufactured.
No argument from me.
My comment was only in the context of proposed solutions.
I think no executive orders, period. ALL of it should go through elected representatives.
Study “jury nullification.” More people need to know about how it works to stop runaway “legal processes.”
1. "A weaker version would be that no executive branch rule created by the federal government can go into effect without 80 percent of Americans at least viewing it during the "notice and comment" period, which would never be waived or abridged."
Good luck with that. Much of the citizenry is politically apathetic, even about things that affect them directly. Nobody comes to our local town council or planning commission meetings.
2. "ptydepe".
Thanks for the cool new word and concept!
But I guess I will say one other thing: What I meant was that if nobody read the proposed rules, they could not become final. Could not. We're talking abiut what we want, right? Thar's what I want.
I guess it's "good luck" for all of it. Frankly, I think things will have to get to Prague-in-1968 level, and the Boomers will have to be gone, before there is a high enough percentage of the population that sees what's up and wants to change it. Until then, the rest of us will live in our parallel structures in free-ish states and sue when we have to, and when we can afford it.
Things are going to have to get worse before they get better. The other side knows this. They are creating the worse conditions and they already have the liberty crushing solutions ready for a populace who will beg for somebody to "just do something" when the shit hits the fan. Their vision of the better after the worse is a whole lot different than ours and it looks a lot like the U.S.S.R.'s great utopia. We need to organize and be ready with our own solutions to the problems that they are creating.
We know food shortages are coming. Why wouldn't they? How else would a totalitarian government subjugate a people who own more firearms than the governments standing army?
Their plandamic fear campaign didn't do the trick so now it's on to Plan B. Stock up, plant a garden, be ready to watch your leftist neighbor starve to death if he can't shake the brainwashing his clueless parents paid $500,000 for. Be ready to shoot him if he tries to steal food from your children. Be ready to feed him if he does see the error of his ways but don't give him so much as a table scrap unless he abandons his communist ideals.
The people pushing the Great Reset want to obliterate private property and personal liberty from the human conciesness. They don't want to just take your things and subjugate you. They want to take your children and reeducate them to erase those ideals of liberty as a possibility of human thought for them and all future generations. We need to hate tyranny more than they hate freedom.
This is a good start. We need to pick the hills we are prepared to die on or prepare to die in the gulags Klause Schwab and Bill Gates are building for us.
Perfect. No one is going to save us but us.
Those suggestions are good starts. I'd include stronger anti-discrimination laws, in particular regarding viewpoint discrimination. Eliminating affirmative action is very important in the long run but I'm skeptical that support for that could be found across identity lines.
The single biggest problem though, in my opinion, is micromanagement. The single-use condiments resolution passed by your city council is a case in point. Like, just, what? This is what they're worried about? It isn't only that it's a deck chairs on the Titanic kind of thing, it's also the mindset that offends me: this assumption by elected officials and unelected bureaucrats that it is their place to tell the rest of us what we can and cannot do, down to the smallest details of our lives.
I think the best way to deal with that could be something like a Constitutional amendment. As currently written, the Constitution delineates certain rights that are not to be infringed. The work-around the managerial state has developed is to regulate the hell out of everything not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. By doing so, they've been able to ring-fence human liberty without (from a legal perspective) technically infringing it.
So, in addition to specifying the rights of citizens, the document should also be very clear: any field of human life not specifically mentioned as a domain of state power, the state is absolutely forbidden from regulating.
Now, a constitutional convention is a high bar. Another way of achieving a similar end would be a law to the effect that the number of laws, and the number of government agencies, are not to exceed a certain fixed threshold. When that threshold is reached, the passage of a new law or formation of a new agency requires that a previous law be repealed or an existing agency be dissolved. By introducing scarcity into the legal code, governments would be dissuaded from ridiculous trivialities such as telling everyone how many packets of ketchup they can get with their fries. Micromanagement would become prohibitively expensive in terms of potential loss of more important regulations.
"...any field of human life not specifically mentioned as a domain of state power, the state is absolutely forbidden from regulating."
We had that, and it's still there, carefully ignored.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
So I wouldn't mind at all making the limit more explicit.
Over 70 years ago, on one of the Sunday evening radio shows, a comedian, (Benny? Hope?), got his laughs from this line: "The difference between us and them is, in America, everything that is not explicitly forbidden is permitted. In Russia, everything that is not explicitly permitted is forbidden". We thought that was funny - then.
all good, i think two general principles that should inform us are eliminating all useless restrictions on bricks-and-mortar economic activity and considering which speculative activities should not be kosher. have all the casino fun you want, but our bodes, food, water, air must be off limits to bloombergian intrusion
Absolutely agree.
Returning to a sound money system based on a scarce commodity (crypto, precious metals) would go a long way towards restricting the ability to engage in predatory speculation in the first place.
Good luck ever codifying, let alone enforcing, any set of rules to right this ocean of abject corruption that engulfs virtually the entirety of humanity. Most men now live lives of near total deceit. Call out and confront the lies with truth; be they big or small, professional, governmental or personal.
I like yours, Chris. I’d thoroughly support them. I’d add a couple more. For every new law that is passed, two more that are currently on the books must be deleted. We have way too many laws and some serious editing is in order. Also, all language used to create laws, contracts, rules and regulations must be PLAINLY stated. No more legalese. In fact, for every lawyer who is awarded a law degree one must be officially retired. There are too many lawyers in this country, and too many phony baloney documents created by lawyers.
I'd like to start by making the Interstate Commerce Clause real again, and putting a stake through the heart of Wickard v. Filburn.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/317us111
Jury Nullification is a good tool for the people.
I suppose it would be a call to abondon the universities and let the corpses decompose. Defund the public school system, make education primarily a private family matter.
The internet has rendered the current model of schools unnecessary, unneeded & corrupt.
(full disclosure - I am inspired by the spirit of Don Quixote to write out this platform - he wanted to include a restoration of the laws of coveture. But it's a stretch to far)
The universities don't have to be garbage, but I don't see any easy path toward de-shitting them. They get SO MUCH public money, so there's a solution there.
The dynamic of spiritual equity - that every 'body' has the inalienable right of a sovereign to deconstruct the texts to suit themselves and the unlimited acess to the texts via the internet renders the University model unworkable. 'University' is one place fixed in time where the minds can meet and consider (learn and teach) the truth contained within the texts. The internet renders the university 'unfixed'. It's everywhere and nowhere all at once. The weltanschauung of this age insists that no text impose it's authority (it's truth) on the sovereign material body of the individual. This is absolute equality. Everyone is equally sovereign over their bodies. The spiritual element, the mind of man, is subsumed into the material. That's why everything is political these days.
It's true, the universities don't have to be garbage. But our weltanschauung, our zeitgeist, is garbage. I wish it was a money problem.
Money may not be the core problem - but it certainly exacerbates it!
They are corrupt to the core. But if they had no money and no power, they would be quite harmless and might very well wander back to where they came from. Right now we'd be tilting at windmills. Look at the power medical science exercised during the pandemic.
Love that you're going actionable! Have you heard of Agenda Setters by Downsizedc.org?
They have 5 bills that are nonpartisan and you can support just those that you agree with. They are working toward 300 people signed on in each congressional district. Read the Bills - makes legislators read the bills entirely into the record. One Subject at a Time - limits the scope of any bill to one issue. Write the Bills - ends unelected bureaucrats from enacting laws without congressional approval. End Judicial Findings, and Restore Parole. Once there are 300 people in a district they will be asked to contact their Representative in swarms to pressure them into supporting the bills.
What I want is radically smaller government.
I personally am aging closer to the horrors of Medicare and would love to opt-out. Top issues are accountability so I am in favor of term limits and getting rid of the overwhelming power the Speakers of the House have possessed for decades, and cut way down on use of Executive orders. I'd love to cut ties with the UN, and WHO. We need to stop our war mongering for the profit of some American businesses/people. We need to streamline the criminal code so that people of similar bad actions have similar sentencing, and victimless crimes are not on the books.
For decades I have asked every candidate, in every local, regional, state, (provincial), and federal election, "What is your, (or your parties'), plan to begin to shrink government?" I have posed that question at party nominating meetings, party leadership conventions, all-candidates forums, and townhall style meetings. Often in writing. Over one hundred times.
How many would-be politicians do you think answered the question? Or even put it on the agenda? How many? Anyone?
My opening guess is zero, and they mostly squinted at you like they were a little frightened.
Actually, there was one potential candidate, (at a party nominating meeting over 20 years ago), who thought that developing a plan to shrink government was a topic worthy of discussion. Part way through that meeting, (after the second ballot), the party brass 'discovered", that particular candidate was not eligible to stand for nomination - "due to a technicality".
Jo Jorgensen did address this in her campaign. Problem is then people pick away at each tangible thing either in disagreement, or in throwing it away as too small. Thank you America for NOT voting Libertarian! Why the f should we even try to clean this up? smh
"we’re burdened with a governing class that only knows how to break things and impede most useful forms of human activity."
So very true! I grew up in Glendora, CA back when CA was thriving in the 80's and fortunately moved after I graduated in 88. I have seen the destruction of the most beautiful state since taken over by demonrats, thankfully from a distance. CA is now the greatest example of what happens when the demonrats have their way. So, so sad! I just cannot believe more people don't see the consequences of "progressives" in power!