Eight Steps to Success

Here’re my suggestions for Peace, prosperity, Security and Freedom in eight steps:

1. End the cronyism/corruption network and culture.  This is fundamental and critical.  Our government is captured by people and parties who do not share our collective best interests.  So we must bust up the self-appointed, inherently divisive, eternal tug-of-war “Two Party System,” and nullify the recent, unconstitutional, immoral state codes that suppress competition, create classes and sub-classes of citizens, and make taxpayers pay for the promotion of only D and R candidates at the expense of everybody else.  To do this, we need to …vote them out of power.  Not just the individual candidates – the whole power network behind the curtain.  This needs to happen.  And make no mistake…this is not just about the parties themselves, which are really just puppet shows for a much wider, deeper system of cronies that we scarcely see.  We won’t get anywhere trimming the claws of kingmakers, bundlers, lobbyists, permanent staffers and eternal bureaucrats without first replacing the 2-party puppet show and firewall that prevents us from doing the rest of what follows:
2. Stand down our military-industrial complex and global imperialism, and replace it with strong, constitutional national defense.  This of course includes killing the CIA/NSA monster to which Eisenhower also referred to in his famous Farewell Address as the “scientific-technological elite.”  Besides, we’ve been misidentifying real dangers.  China is already in a very effective, winning war against us, and we apparently don’t even know it.  Hopefully their internal problems will lessen the danger soon, because it is the worst, in my opinion, this nation has ever faced.
3. Monetary/banking reform.  Click the link for details.  I wish this could be #1.  It is a fundamental, and currently a terrible, fast-growing problem that’s about to result in massive inflation and turmoil.  The system of monetized debt begun here in 1912/13 has gone global, and is perhaps the biggest enabler of corruption.  But as with #2, it is well protected by the crony system.  
4. Rule of Law.  …Which of course means, kill “The Administrative State” of executive agencies and unelected bureaucrats that have taken unto themselves legislative, judicial and executive powers. This would cut a lot of stuff from what we’re calling “government” today. You may not like some of the cuts; but I’m certain you’d like the end result.
5. No more loaded bills. One subject at a time, and no earmarks/pork.
6. End special classes, special deals for special people – equality under law for all at long last.  This is partially implied/ included in #1, but needs to become a fundamental moral of our society if any real progress is to last.  And it would involve scaling back and phasing out many of the extraordinary powers, rights, perks and immunities granted to politically powerful corporate abstractions.  In other words, we need to stop fearing “Big Pharma,” “Big Ag,” “Big…anything.”  We’re all people here.  We should all be equal under the law.  That is certainly not the case now.
7. Sunset provision/amendment to refine and reduce the number of laws, and keep them few, simple and important so that our rules are:
   1. Few enough to actually know.
   2. Simple enough to actually obey.
   3. Important enough to enforce without exceptions or special classes.
8. Term Limits.  Let’s face it; voters haven’t been doing their part, and there’s no procedural fix for bad choices.  But term limits won’t happen until after voters make better choices.  Similarly, I have for decades favored alternative voting schemes like Condorcet, Ranked Choice or Approval Voting (RCV or AV).  And I definitely love the idea of increasing the number of representatives to better suit our population; and we have the technology to keep them in their districts with more local accountability.  But we won’t get such changes UNTIL we get rid of the politicians who like things the way they are.  That’s why I’m placing term limits last both procedurally, and in importance, because we’ll get term limits only after a sufficient number of people wake up and act appropriately such that we fire the bad guys and, at least for the short term, defuse the huge advantage of incumbency… particularly the power of “committee” rulers based on tenure.   …But after that cultural epiphany and revolution, their kids and grandkids will gradually fall asleep again.♣   That’s just how civilizations inevitably decay and die.  If we’re to delay our self-destruction at least a little, we need term limits shorter than human life expectancy…particularly in the context of tenure/corruption-based power structures.

To summarize, I want to cut the cost, intrusiveness, abusiveness and ineffectiveness of our central government by actually cutting powers, programs, agencies…and people, from that government. I mean to establish a truly federal (instead of our increasingly unitary) government as defined by the authorizing compact.  I want to make living life more voluntary, and much less driven by deceit, tribalism, anger, fear, mandates, prohibitions, and an impenetrable thicket of taxation.

♣A good part of my reasoning for term limits is encapsulated in this quote:  “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.” ― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

I believe it takes “strong men” (strong-minded, individualist, non-tribal voters) to fire bums and clean up corruption.  But the “weak men” (look around) who follow will let anything go, and continuously reelect bad politicians…or let the whole system collapse.

…Gun control? Who’re we kidding?

During the slippery slope SCOTUS case, VOISINE ET AL. v. UNITED STATES, Clarence Thomas shocked everyone by asking his first question from bench in ten years:

“Can you give me another area where a misdemeanor suspends a constitutional right?”

He was talking about the 2^nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms, of course.

Thomas was right to raise the question, since even though all of our rights have been demoted to conditional privileges, the 2^nd Amendment is under special attack these days.

And despite Thomas, our Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot-leaning SCOTUS ultimately decided that, of course a misdemeanor is sufficient to suspend a constitutional right. What isn’t?

I’m not a “gun nut” by any stretch. I love almost every other kind of gadget, device, machine or app. But I’m not a fan of guns. I’m not fond of what they do.

But the 2^nd Amendment isn’t about guns. It’s about violence, and trust. I hate violence, and I definitely don’t trust politicians with a monopoly on it.  It’s THEIR guns that most need restraint.

But humans, particularly in groups, are very emotional creatures. Where there’s a conflict between fact and feelings, feelings almost always win.

That’s why demagoguery works. That is why nearly all of human history is about oppression, slavery, genocide and war; and why peace, freedom and prosperity are very, very rare, but precious, blips.

…Because it’s not the emotions of love and loyalty and empathy that drive humankind’s political governments.

No, it’s fear, and greed and envy and sloth and…all the evil stuff.

So let’s be real clear on who oppresses, enslaves, commits genocide and war:

Our politicians, under that abstract incantation we call “government.”

It’s politicians – specifically our own politicians, invoking and blaspheming the common good while fanning the flames of all our worst emotions – that take away the freedom that’d be ours if left alone.

This is why human governments have a 100% failure rate. Aside from the obvious violence, they devalue currency, steal across generations, and generally self-destruct.

And it’s why people even consider the catchy but crazy “no fly, no buy” talk in the US Congress.

Yes, The Home of the Brave is terrified; so much so that The Land of The Free is surrendering even more of its tattered freedoms to promises of security from our entrenched, corrupt, arrogant, lying, thieving, heavily armed and violent ruling class.

While there can be some reasonable debate whether more guns mean less crime, or what the 2^nd Amendment is really all about, there’s really no denying that gun control laws don’t work as politicians claim they do.

As the gun control debate has been going on for centuries now, there’s plenty of objective evidence demonstrating that, considering that some cultures are just more violent than others, gun control laws are, at best, ineffective. The pro-gun control arguments I’ve ever read or heard so far rely on either post hoc ergo propter hoc or false-choice logical fallacies, or disgorged-from-the-gut emotion. And only the purely emotional arguments for gun control suggest that gun laws would actually work.

No Fly, No Buy is No Different in terms of any promised effects.

I’m not objecting to the No Fly, No Buy marketing campaign just because of that; or because our increasingly militarized empire is pushing for a political monopoly on weapons, or because it’s another example of bureaucrats with too much power. And it’s not just that we beleaguered taxpayers are expected to arm everybody on the planet except ourselves.

I’m more concerned with how our political emotions work on the fundamental, psychological and even religious level.

We excuse the deceit, transgenerational theft, corruption and destruction inherent in politics because our fear, hatred and envy lead us pray to the false gods of politics for protection and vengeance. Wise people knew this to be unwise, so we’ve got some very excellent constitutions, state and federal, to keep a leash on our tendency to, for example, sacrifice our children to the whims of state.

But that wisdom has been discarded, and our government is now completely ungoverned. The regulators are unregulated, and the police are unpoliced.

The No-Fly, No-Buy canard isn’t just the abrogation of the enumerated rights to arms and due process; it stomps on the whole point of constitutional rule of law –

– That it’s our politicians who need to be restrained…not us!

Our government has always kept secret lists of people, and there’ve been secret, but less-formal no fly lists for decades, enough has been said about the No Fly list as it exists today. The FBI and TSA denied it existed for the first 2.5 years of its now-acknowledged existence, which is plenty to lead us to suspicion about this embarrassment.

But the fear and loathing represented by this list are not only our nation’s recurrent gestalt, it’s what’s been, through the past one hundred years nurturing, fomenting, exacerbating and elevating to godhood a costly military industrial complex and thieving, murderous racket.

I’d recently written about our Middle East Madness; and by now we all know that our own government creates, trains, arms and funds our enemies such that we end up in war against ourselves all over the world.

I’ll wrap this up with some context:
Our militarized police anti-constitutionally/criminally take more property than do all other criminals combined; and you’re 58 times more likely to be killed by cops than by terrorists. But it’s politicians who’ve increasingly put police into their ever-more adversarial role. And as already mentioned above, our politicians lie about pretty much everything all the time. They’ve destroyed their moral authority to issue speeding tickets; they hardly deserve any trust with a secretive, heavily armed, and globally aggressive crony network with control of nuclear weapons and our sources of information, education, food and water.

They created the situation that we feel we must respond to with laws that increase their power, secrecy and unaccountability…at our expense.

I say we run, not walk, in the opposite direction.

Over two thousand years ago Marcus Tullius Cicero said, “The more laws, the less justice.” We know that the “War on Terror” has dramatically increased terrorism. I think facts support the notion that the less politics we tolerate, the more security, prosperity and of course, freedom, we’ll enjoy. So I suggest that instead of more laws, we nullify our way out of this corrupt and complex tangle we’ve made of our nation, and try, at long last, what our wisest founders hoped we’d actually become; a nation where all are equal under law, and where prosperity and security come from liberty, and justice, for all.

4 July Done Proper

Do you want to celebrate 4 July in a way that’d do our founders proud? 

It’s been a year since our national-news-making tax protest on the Governor’s lawn, and we’re worse off than ever.  Our politicians have strayed even further from the laws that protect us from them (the constitutions). 

So this time, we’re not going to be distracted by the tax policy sub-issue.  We’ll no longer nibble at the branches of the problem of lawbreaking lawmakers.  We’re not going to fuss over symptoms – we aim to cure the disease of ungoverned government.

We will demand Rule of Law under Constitutions.  We will demand that our politicians obey the constitutions, as written.  No “interpretations,” no ifs, ands or buts.

Same place as last year …the Governor’s Mansion on North Meridian in Indianapolis from around 10 to 11am.

Contact me at andrewhorning@hotmail.com if you’re interested in making history.  Again.