You say you want a Revolution?

It’s a little disturbing that one of the most common web searches bringing people to this blog is, “Give me hope, please.”  But what really worries me is how many people are typing, “violence” and “revolution,” to end up here.

My fellow Americans, what the !@#$?! are you thinking of? 

What is violence going to accomplish that your votes did not?  You got what you voted for.  You want something else?

What?!?

OK, so I have nothing to say to “centrists.”  These human dandelion seeds have no senses, apparently; and just float the prevailing wind.  I wish I did have words that’d shake them down.  But centrists are not just the problem; they’re proudly the problem. 

And true socialists are twisted, ruthless monsters who know that their violence and oppression is self-serving to the elite group to which they feel they belong.  They know what I’d want to say to them, but they’d happily have it tortured out of me anyway.

But most people of the so-called “left” are not those socialists, and they’re not hopelessly foolish.  They simply don’t know that they’re invoking, promoting and unleashing violence upon their fellows.  The multiply-pierced, tattooed but still smiling Obama fan you see at Whole Foods really does want a peaceful society; he just hasn’t thought any more deeply about politics and market economics than he thought about that ring in his nose.  He doesn’t know that his free-love-and-world-peace dreams drag us all into Stalinist nightmares.

Sadly, most of the so-called “right” are no better.  Maybe they’re even worse in hypocrisy and idolatry.  While many righties pray to God, they put their hands on their hearts and promise to obey a symbol (really; think about that).  While they know the word “constitution” invokes good imagery, they have no idea what the constitution is for, let alone what it really says.  Just like the lefties, they advocate bigger, costlier, more intrusive government – but they deny it.

Frankly, I’d rather hang out at Whole Foods than listen to self-righteous ignorami spouting off about the “coming revolution” or even secession.  They’re not as bad as centrists, but their rising mood of undirected, goal-free violence is not helpful.

What do they suppose a revolution is going to do if they don’t even VOTE for what they say they want?  And what would secession accomplish if it creates only a clone of our current mess?

After years of trying to find ten Republicans who know what the heck it is that they want, I’m hard pressed to see any difference between the “right” and the “left” other than the aforementioned tattoos, piercings…and the type and degree of hypocrisy. 

Well, actually, I like Whole Foods.  The one near my work in Houston has a great selection of Belgian beers.  The GOP has nothing like it.

Now that they’ve given up their catbird seat and their hands are tied, the GOP talks (almost) like Ron Paul.  But when they held the reins of power they did only evil and then chose John McCain to lead them into more of the same.  They had a chance – a very good, record-breaking, youth-energizing chance – to set things right according to the words they speak from their mouths.  But their voting arms, inexcusably, chose otherwise.

And now they complain?  Inexcuseable.  Shameful. 

What do you want?  Please don’t say you want “American Exceptionalism” unless you can explain to even yourself what the heck that really means.  

How do you want to live?  Please don’t tell me “with American Values.”  We’ve all seen plenty of American Values, and I think that’s why we’re all so hopeless, disgusted, and crying for revolution.

On these pages I’ve said that I want my rules written down, and that’s true.  I don’t think we can live in peace without some hard and fast rules.

Good fences make good neighbors.

But if I were to paint my picture of The Good Life, here’s what it’d look like:

1. Citizens can do whatever the heck they want to do as long as they don’t harm anybody else, or take what’s not theirs.
2. We’d have no more government than necessary to maintain #1.
3. We write this down in plain speech and call it law.
4. We invite others around the world to emulate our success, but otherwise leave them the heck alone.

So caveat emptor replaces the FDA, FTC, FDIC, FCC and a zillion other Fagencies.  Common sense, competition, voluntary associations, charity and free market options galore replace union/corporate monstrosities, Medicare, Social Security, lobbyists, regulations, litigation and price controls.  And because of the preceding, you get to keep what you earn, buy what you like (smoke it if you’re fool enough – and as long as you don’t blow it in my face), and live however and with whomever you want…as long as you leave others, and their stuff, alone.

That’s all.

Is that really so bad?  Could you live with that?

Because you know that the alternative plan is not working, right?

 

Plan B (AKA, the “Virtual Constitutional Convention”)

1. Of course we’d rather keep the country together; and we’d be completely satisfied with the existing state and federal constitutions obeyed as written.  But you and I know that likelihood of that is exceedingly, increasingly small, and that we really should prepare for what may happen next.
2. Of course we hope we’re wrong about our probable course.  But monetization of our national debt, now at over 40% of the GNP, almost assures dramatic and awful consequences both here and internationally.  It’s wise to consider both political and economic retrenchment to the most basic, proven forms.
3. Of course we would hope that all people everywhere would choose to live free.  But history demonstrates this to be a vain hope.   While there is no way to be certain where human politics are concerned, it seems logical to plan for a smaller geographical unit than the current USA, and to first consider an area with a culture and history of independence.  Many states have an equal or even greater percentage of liberty-minded citizens, but Texas seems to be a good draft model.
4. Our goal is to live in peace.  Voluntary interactions between humans and the suppression of human violence in all forms are both goal and method.
5. Toward this, we are creating a written social covenant called a “constitution” for a proposed political state under the Rule of Law.  This constitution will be the sole authority of all powers delegated to this state.  The state will have no powers that are not clearly and specifically written into this constitution.  This constitution will be the law of the proposed political state.
6. The words of this constitution will be clear enough to be understood by all; few enough to be known by all; and universally applicable to be obeyed without exception by all human beings within the border of the proposed state.
7. Three general rules:
   1. What is wrong for citizens is wrong for the state.  For example, exceeding the state’s contractually limited taxing authority is criminal theft; unauthorized killing is murder.  
   2. Citizens have infinite inalienable rights, while the state has no rights; only limited authority.  Therefore, what’s right for citizens isn’t always right for the state.
   3. Crimes committed by state officials are to be considered worse than crimes committed by citizens.

Clarification of purpose

We’re quickly assembling an excellent team.  Thank you!

But based on some of the email responses I’ve read today, I should have explained this whole thing a little better. 

Those who know anything about me know that, for decades, I’ve been promoting Rule of Law under existing constitutions, as written.  I’m delighted that I’m no longer feeling so lonely in that quixotean struggle.  There are efforts here and here that are better organized, and certainly better funded, than anything I’ve ever done.

Of course I wish them well.  I truly hope they succeed, and if I thought I could help them in any significant way, I would.

(On the other hand, I had asked if I could help, and all they wanted from me was my money.  …But that’s another story.)

Ron Paul’s successes during and after the 2008 Presidential campaign have been even more exciting and hopeful.  The “Ron Paul Revolution” is still winning friends.  If I can help with that, I will.

What I’m proposing is that we certainly work toward these efforts’ success, but prepare for their failure. 

I hope that there will be a USA for many years to come; but I am pretty sure that there will not be.  And while I hope our end is relatively benign like the collapse of the USSR, I think it’s prudent to create a plan for something better than the more typical societal collapse, oppression, slavery, genocide and war that come as regularly as sunrise and as persistently as …death.

I do not believe that we can resurrect the whole nation, and instead think that it’s wise to think more locally.

But…

I’m not thinking that Texas is really any more likely to rise from the ashes than is any other state or region.  Yes, I’m focusing on Texas in the particulars of this written constitution.  But if the Czech Republic would actually adopt this constitution while others take a pass, then já vůle brát má čeleď až k člen určitý Čech Republika!

Who knows who’ll come to their senses first once the truth about our political order is revealed?  Who knows how people will respond to the spanking they’re about to get?  God knows I sure don’t.

So our virtual collaboration has several purposes, but mostly these:

1. Get people thinking and talking about some very basic, critically important things; things like, “how shall we live?”
2. Give smart people a focal point, a rallying flag, a critical task when we most need it…before calamity makes it much, much more difficult.
3. Offer a real “Public Option” for peace, prosperity, security and justice.

We need all the help we can get, and I don’t care if you’re in Prague, Terre Haute, or Austin.

Fierce Individualists Needed

Can you eschew obfuscation?  Are you direct and unambiguous in your written words?  Have you read and understood your state and federal constitutions to the depth and breadth that most people think is stupid?

I’d like to hire you, at twice what I’m getting paid, to help me devise a plan for a Phoenix-like resurrection of liberty and justice for all.

All races, genders, religions and even sports preferences welcome.  But I’m looking for a particular species of ideologue.

If you truly understand and desire free markets, individual accountability and, in general, governed government, then join me.  If you know others who you think would be a good fit as well, bring ‘em along.

Here’s why:

You already know that our constitutions are dead ink.  The contracts were broken long ago.  They’re a law without force; just a bunch of words that few have read, and even fewer have obeyed.

What we’ve lost is literally forgotten.  Nobody alive today remembers a free market, or the kind of liberty that existed for even freed slaves like Frederick Douglass a hundred and twenty years ago (before the worst of Jim Crow laws ruined our hopes of Liberty and Justice for All).

In addition to their irrelevance as law, and despite our federal constitution’s fame as the framework for the freest, most egalitarian nation of all time, our Rule of Law just didn’t work.

And as much as it saddened me to say that, I’m even sorrier to report that there is no hope of reviving the existing constitutions; not on the scale of the USA. 

There’s too much baggage, too much flowery speech, too much irrelevance in those once-precious contracts and too much ignorance about them to ever put things right.  It’s just not going to happen.

What is going to happen next is ugly, and I’m betting you know it.  The comfort that allowed our ignorance and torpor is about to end.

We need to plan, and we need to be ready when people are looking for real hope.

The kind of trouble coming our way usually ends very badly indeed.  The success of the USA’s Revolutionary War was historically unique.  It almost never happens that smart people get involved in politics.  It’s even rarer that smart people both get involved in politics and plan ahead.  And it just never happens that such smart people get involved, plan ahead, and do it for the right reasons, and on behalf of their fellow humans.

That just never happens.

So what I’m hoping is that lightening can strike twice in the same place (or least somewhere on this planet!). 

What I’m asking is that we develop a virtual Constitutional Convention to establish a peaceful transition to a truly peaceful, prosperous and secure new nation.  One that’s actually conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that we’ll never again trust politicians with so danged much.

Politics on a leash of law, citizens with real liberty under law, and all based on the notion that what’s wrong for you is wrong for government too.

This draft isn’t up to date, but it’ll get you close to the idea.  We have a new wiki project, but I’ll have to get to know you before you’re invited to join.

What say you?

andrewhorning@hotmail.com

 

Things would’ve been worse!

I take personal offense when politicians claim that their bailouts, color-coded alerts, regulation, litigation and other silly actions saved us from worse socioeconomic troubles.  Not only has their paper money and corporatist fetish been enormously destructive (the worst is yet to come), but it is actually I, Andy, who have saved us all from greater calamity so far.

That’s right.  Me.

You can’t imagine how much worse things would be now without my protests and angry letters to politicians about all the voodoo that they do.  My efforts have spared you from foreign marauders, socioeconomic collapse, and even the Ice Age that would’ve happened in the 1970’s if, well …

If it weren’t for me.

What; you take their word over mine?

Which government program has ever done what it was supposed to do, on time and within budget?  How’d the “War on Poverty” work out?  How about the “War on Drugs?”  Have we had a year’s peace since the “War to End All Wars?”  So far, the “War on Terror” has lasted longer and cost more than did WWII, and it seems we’re now looking for new enemies. 

Just imagine how much worse this could’ve been if it weren’t for me!

Politicians raise taxes to stimulate the economy and cut taxes to stimulate the economy.  They subsidize sports teams and rich bankers and pornographers and foreign dictators to stimulate the economy.  We should’ve been stimulated past Pluto by now but for one key fact: politics doesn’t work. 

Check any history book and you’ll see a perfectly unbroken, ancient and ongoing record of corruption, oppression, slavery, genocide and war.

So our once-precious Rule of Law gave way to violently Robbing Peter to Pay Paul; and you are not Paul. 

No, don’t thank me.  I expect nothing from my tireless efforts on your behalf.  But quit the Stockholm Syndrome with politicians.  They’ve got your money; they don’t need your praise, too.

A Short History of Health Care: Let Doctors Be Doctors

I just ran across this on another website.  It’s a column I wrote for Indiana Policy Review a couple of years ago that seems more appropriate than ever now.

A Short History of Health Care: Let Doctors Be Doctors
By Andrew Horning

Healthcare is an odd business in that it has always been both expensive and unpleasant. Until the 1920s, the average doctor couldn’t even help with the average ailment. While medicine then included a range of arts like phrenology, acupuncture, homeopathy and allopathy it really was a coin-toss whether you’d be saved or killed by a doctor’s work.

Then the 20’s brought insulin, sulfa, other “miracle” drugs and sterile fields that meant, for the first time, that healthcare actually worked more often than not. From there, doctors, scientists and medical engineers really took off; rapid advancements increased life expectancies and decreased suffering. And because of increasing effectiveness and supply, healthcare was even becoming cheaper in real cost-benefit terms.

However, politicians had nothing at all to do with this, and that was apparently a problem. Teddy Roosevelt proposed a German-style, cradle-to-grave “socialized” healthcare system, but it was assailed as “the Prussian Menace” in those anti-German years before WWI, and Teddy’s scheme died. Even so, politicians wanting to seem compassionate started promoting socialized healthcare. The July 1919 issue of the Insurance Monitor made this prescient assertion: “The opportunities for fraud upset all statistical calculations. . . . Health and sickness are vague terms open to endless construction. Death is clearly defined, but to say what shall constitute such loss of health as will justify insurance compensation is no easy task.”

No matter. Between The Revenue Act of 1939’s health-related tax breaks, and 1943, when the War Labor Board excluded employer-paid health insurance from its wage freeze, American politicians charged into health care on their favorite horse, income tax.

In a nutshell, here’s what happened: Tax breaks for employer-paid health insurance meant that health insurance became a part of employment, and insurance became an integral part of healthcare. This inserted middlemen, which of course made everything more expensive. But who cared? The tax-subsidized, payroll-deducted cost was invisible enough that Americans started using insurance to pay for routine visits, dental checkups, eyeglasses and even plastic surgery. Group insurance offered large corporations better plans than small companies could muster, giving large corporations even greater advantages in hiring and competition than corporate laws already gave them. This also meant that the poor, or worse, the self employed, were even further distanced from the rich and incorporated in a very serious way. Obviously this created problems, but politicians never admit error, do they?

Four days before Tax Day, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower established the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, giving government even more direct control over some of humanity’s most precious commodities. More political money and power meant more reasons for businesses to make campaign contributions and lobby. Of course, politicians at every level of government have used healthcare policy to reward their friends and punish their enemies. That’s their stock in trade.

Now tax money and policy is sifted and sorted through political appointees, immortal bureaucracies and defense-contract-style arrangements to feed a dwindling number of profit-starved insurance companies who then deny your claim. Doctors hire legions of workers to manage the regulatory, litigative, and insurance paperwork hassles; or leave private practice to become an employee within a clerically staffed healthcare corporation. So healthcare is still both expensive and unpleasant. But now it’s only because politicians, not doctors, are practicing medicine. Our healthcare injustices and vital statistics have decayed into an embarrassment at just the time when technology should make healthcare cheap, effective and available to all.

It is hard to imagine what politicians could have done to make our healthcare situation any worse. Yet, according to a July 2006 Harris Poll, Americans rate the issue of healthcare well-behind Iraq, the economy, immigration and even gas prices. Even more strangely, most people now think we must, to some degree and by some unspecified method, “socialize” healthcare just as Europe, Canada and other nations are now scrambling back toward free market reforms. What are we thinking?

Let politicians have their way with Iraq, the Colts and toll roads. Let them run lotteries and practice voodoo. But please, let doctors do healthcare at last; they’ve earned the right.

“Middle Ground” on enumerated right?

Thanks to Jim Tomes of the 2^nd Amendment Patriots group in southern Indiana for alerting me to a typically biased CNN story on gun rights…and for telling folks to leave a 30 second comment at 1-877-692-6349.

Here’s what I said:

For now I’ll hold my tongue on the 2nd Amendment, and whether there’s a so-called “middle ground” to this clearly enumerated right. 

But I propose that it’s time to find some middle ground on the freedom of the press.  For too long the media have been allowed to operate unregulated, and in public places.  It’s time to do with reporters what we’ve done with Ten Commandment displays.  It’s time for the media to learn that freedom is no longer a right.

Andy Horning, Kingwood, TX

I wish I’d said that…

I read this column by Roger Roots some time ago (I’m guessing in November of 2008), and came across it again today.

It’s brilliant.  I can’t do better.  So in honor of Constitution Day, I’m reposting it:

http://rinf.com/alt-news/politics/constitutional-dead-letters/4851/

The “Public Option”

Who’s kidding who?  Politics never was, and certainly isn’t now ”public.”  Secret dealings between elitists who can’t do anything without at least the threat of violence is not public, nor is it very nice.

It is by both the rotten nature of humanity and by sick minds’ malevolent twisting of words that humanity’s greatest evidence and amplifier of sin is called “public.”  It’s sad that words and phrases like “liberty,” “freedom” and “free market” have been made into expletives.

The Free Market is public.  It’s also completely democratic.  It’s non-violent by definition.  It is the one human invention by which every deal is to some degree mutually satisfactory, enhances wealth and spares lives.  It is a fountain of genius and benevolence.  The Free Market is one of humanity’s few Good Things.

On the other hand there is another Public Option.  It is not non-violent, and it is never satisfactory for everyone.  It is perhaps necessary in order to refresh the Tree of Liberty and restore Common Sense; but it more often turns out badly.

1776 doesn’t happen every day, you know.  And Constitution Day should be a yearly reminder that the freedom and prosperity Americans built here under Rule of Law (politicians on a leash) happened only once in human history, and at immense cost.

What we’re losing now may be lost forever.  It’s your choice.

Politics isn’t cool. It’s deadly.

It is the current fashion to blame “big corporations” and “the influence of money” on our social problems.  But that is a dangerous self-deception for at least three reasons:

1. Corporations are not monsters of a so-called, “unregulated free market.”  On the contrary, corporations are inherently political creations with special legal privileges intended to suppress the absolute accountability in true free markets.
2. Corporations can’t buy influence that’s not for sale; and politicians are the influence peddlers.  Politicians are in fact the agents of all large-scale injustice.
3. Yet Americans have no problems that voters haven’t repeatedly chosen with a greater-than-98% incumbent reelection rate.

We citizens need to understand our power and accountability.  The last thing we need is an imaginary whipping boy.  Our economic and social troubles will abate only when, or if, we come to our senses, act like grown ups, and quit putting our faith in politicians.  Politics isn’t cool and it’s never safe.  After all, the history of politics is the history of oppression, slavery genocide and war.  The whole point of constitutions is, in fact, to put politicians (not corporations, and certainly not you) on a leash.  

Do something unusual on Constitution Day.  Read the Constitution.  You’ll find that:

1. You’ve been lied to for long enough.

2. The truth really can set you free.