Can We ‘SAVE THE AMERICAN DREAM’ without transforming America?

The Heritage Foundation, a non-profit organization which alleges that it is against Progressivism and the programs of the Left, is promoting a “comprehensive plan to rescue our country from a disastrous decline, called Saving the American Dream”. Now, this plan and its positions are pretty much typical, I submit, of the response to statism by Republicans and other conservatives , and illustrates why, in my humble opinion, something much more radical is required.

Here, briefly,  is the Heritage program in outline:

• Reform the existing tax code: a single rate for all, reduce both corporate and personal rates, eliminate the estate tax.

• Cut the size of government: go back to 2008 spending levels, etc.

•  Reform health care: repeal the Affordable Care Act and develop “positive” health care  reforms.

•  Solve the entitlement spending crisis: revise the entitlement programs to put them on a sound financial footing, “reforms that will protect the system…”

Our current president said he wanted to “transform America” and he is certainly well on his way to doing so; given the kind of opposition  he faces from most Republicans and organizations like the Heritage Foundation, he will likely succeed. I agree that a transformation is needed, but the qualities and content of such a change are much more serious and must go deeper than anything so far proposed.  We need something more than warmed-over platitudes like “limited government” and “individual responsibility”; these have gotten us nowhere over time, even when supposedly anti-Leftist representatives, e.g Ronald Reagan, have been elected. For all their rhetoric, they have served only one function—putting their political finger, as it were, in the dike, stanching the flow, temporarily, of statist programs and proposals, holding the line on expenditures, only to have both the expenditure levels and number of statist programs resume their increase once they have left office.

You need to ask yourself: when, in recent memory, has the temporary ascendance of so-called conservative Republicans ever resulted in such permanent changes as:

• Elimination of even one cabinet-level department;

• A balanced federal budget for more than a year or two;

• Any reduction whatsoever in the total national debt (even in the face of a nominal annual budget  surplus!);

• The major overhaul of any government sponsored program or entity that was accompanied by an institutional reform (e.g. a Constitutional Amendment) that would ensure its permanency?

The answer is, of course, no you can’t. The reason, I assert, is that none of the “conservative” proposals are seriously focused on the fundamentals, either morally, or practically. (There’s that Moral and Practical business again!)  None of them goes to the root of the problems.
A real, honest-to-God, program that would fundamentally transform America and reverse the all-encompassing trend toward statism would include, at the minimum, the following:

(1) Complete elimination of the Internal Revenue Service and its Internal Revenue Code with both an amendment and mirroring legislation that would forever banish taxation of incomes, either personal or business, and replace it with a smaller, kinder, kind of tax—a national retail sales tax whose revenue stream would be designed ultimately to cover only the functions justified by the enumerated powers according to the Constitution. Emphatically not revenue neutral!

(2) Scaling back the powers and operations of the Federal Reserve Board so that it operates on a rule-based modality for monetary policy until such time that it can be completely eliminated and currency can be tied to some objective standard of value, or that we can return to “free banking” as it was practiced in earlier eras.

(3) An amendment to require a balanced federal budget, which would be enforced by presidential line item veto. Executive failure to enforce would be an impeachable offense.

(4) Rolling back of the Regulatory State: the entire Code of Federal Regulations would be made subject to expiration after a term certain; in the mean time, each category (environmental, financial, etc.) of regulations would be examined by congressional committees set up exclusively for that purpose, and standards, including cost-benefit rules, would be developed for justification of each and every regulation. All regs not justifiable by actual demonstrable harms prevented would be dropped.  All new regulations would be required to be in the form of statutes, with suitably detailed attention in congressional hearings ( no more rule-making by agencies, with “public comment periods” being the only remedy for bad policy).

(5) Repeal all statutes which force employers to recognize unions and to bargain collectively. This is not the same as banishing unions; see below.

These five measures constitute the minimum necessary to begin our return to a non-statist orientation toward governance. Note that items (1) – (3) above are basically identical to the concepts in my Three Plank Platform (q.v.).

In addition, but of somewhat lesser urgency, are the following:

(6) Reconsideration of Procedural ( Criminal ) Justice:

(a) Repealing and otherwise limiting the number and types of federal crimes to conform to the Constitution. The Founders never intended that the federal government should have a general “police power”.

(b) Focusing on the concept of restitution instead of “correction” or rehabilitation wherever possible.

(c) Restoring the historic role of the jury as a body which is entitled to judge both the law and the facts instead of the current notion of the jury only as the “trier of fact”.

(7) Deal with the damage done by years of judicial construction and interpretation of our Constitution; in particular, the ability to simply ignore the enumerated powers concept, the creation of new rights and other expanded legal concepts for which there is simply no basis either in the historical record or the document itself.

(8) Provide a mechanism allowing a way to move  from “government schools” to a fully private, free market supply of education.

All of the above issues I have presented in the most brief form, so as to provide an easily grasped overall idea of the scope of the problems needing solution. Below, I will expand on each of the first five topics, again not exhaustively, as each topic deserves a full-blown post of its own in good time.

( Those who know me know that I have omitted one topic that I feel strongly is of great importance, and have done so in order to avoid the risk of alienating my audience and deflecting it from the huge fiscal and monetary issues that beset us. In line with libertarian notions generally, I am against interventionism; here we deal with domestic intervention by the state  into the economy and life of the people—we also need to deal with our tendency to carry this interventionist mode forward in foreign relations. Sadly, many so-called conservatives who claim to abhor domestic intervention have no qualms whatsoever about intervention in our dealings with other countries. I will take this on in a major post at some future date.)

[ UPDATE NOTE: the future is Now! Latest post re: Libertarians and Conservatives at least begins the foreign policy discussion. Check it out.]

Moving on then, let us consider the positive results which would flow from each of the changes mentioned above.

Radical Measure No. 1 – Eliminating taxation of incomes and substituting a modest sales tax.  Abolishing the income tax and the 54,000 or so pages of the Internal Revenue Code would arguably be the most far-reaching fundamental change that could be made against statism; the benefits are manifold, and include:

●    Lowering by at least half the total amount of tax removed from the private sector and providing both individuals and firms a way to predict cash flows would allow for huge increases in capital formation and increase profits.  Every dollar that is removed from the private sector is a dollar that cannot be used to increase our standard of living. For Progressives, this sounds awful, because in their lexicon, profits are evil, whereas most conservatives and all classical liberals know that economic progress is only possible when there is a surplus created by economic activity and when that surplus can be re-invested. The name of that surplus is PROFIT.

●    All of the historic objections to the income tax and its voluminous code are dealt with including the marriage penalty, double taxation of corporate profits, high corporate tax rates vis-a-vis other countries, the progressive nature of the personal marginal tax rates, the need to consider tax consequences in tandem with or ahead of other investment considerations, income “creep” and the Alternative Minimum Tax scheme, the huge amount of personal and/or corporate record-keeping required, and the cost to hire an expert simply to file one’s taxes.

●    A major benefit is the elimination of tax preferences, the vehicle by which certain classes of taxpayers are benefited by having deductions or tax credits for which others do not qualify. This is one of the state’s principal ways to structure behavior in ways that it construes as beneficial, and a principal way to implement statist policies. This includes the well-known deduction for mortgage interest, which has propped up the housing industry for years, as well as dozens of tax credits for specific economic behaviors, each of which was intensively lobbied for by interests both within and without the government, for example, the following environmentally related tax credits:

Qualified Electric Vehicle Credit
Credit for Alcohol Used as Fuel
Credits for Residential Energy Savings ( IRC Sec, 25C, 25D)

Tax credits (which go directly against tax owed) fall into two categories—non-refundable  and refundable. The former reduces only a positive tax due balance while the latter is available to tax filers even if no tax is owed.

Non-refundable tax credits include:

Child and Dependent Care Credit
Education credits
Credit for the Elderly or Disabled
Child Tax Credit
Foreign Income Tax Credit
Residential Energy Credits
Retirement Savings Contribution Credit
First-Time Homebuyer Credit

Refundable tax credits include:

Earned Income Credit
Adoption Credit
Excess Social Security Credit
Additional Child Tax Credit
Health Coverage Tax Credit
American Opportunity Credit

There are at least twelve personal tax credits, and no fewer than 29 business tax credits which the state can use to program your economic behavior. Remember that tax credits, unlike tax deductions, reduce your final tax liability dollar-for-dollar.

The most egregious of these is the refundable Earned Income Credit, which is nothing more than an income redistribution scheme, a type of negative income tax.

All such credits, together with the hundreds of deductions against income that exist, are designed to structure our behavior in ways that the state favors. More important, the removal of these from consideration also removes the major temptation to corruption by elected officials in that they will no longer have something to sell, i.e. their influence over tax legislation to create credits and/or deductions favoring some special interest. A huge opportunity for abusive legislation is forever eliminated. Moreover, it is easy to see how this field of legislation is the most likely area for violations of the rule of law, which requires that the law be universal with respect to all people ( no exceptions or special cases).

●    Elimination of the IRS and the code also bring with it the elimination of income tax withholding as a concept, which concept surely implies that one really does not own his income if the government can intercept it and appropriate it before it ever even goes into your bank account. ( See my more extensive discussion about the claim that you do not own your pre-tax income made in the book entitled The Myth of Ownership in my post “Justice and Fairness, Part Two”)

●    Exchanging the income tax for a retail sales tax also reduces the compulsory nature of the tax, and gives individuals some leeway in adjusting the amount of tax they have to pay; it also eliminates the most ambitious and over the top enforcement agency we have, the IRS. Enforcement of the sales tax is largely an issue of auditing the retailers’ books.

●    Eliminating the IRS also eliminates all of the issues surrounding tax exempt organizations and in particular the abuses which have most recently surfaced regarding politically influenced withholding of approval for certain non-profit groups.

●    Without the IRS or something equally vicious, the Affordable Care Act’s enforcement mechanism is crippled or eliminated.

●    While there are legitimate objections to the sales tax concept, they pale in comparison to the benefits discussed above. And to many other benefits which exist, but due to space available, are not mentioned here. Yes, there would be an underground economy in which unaudited sales would take place and no tax would be collected. Yes, the rate required to duplicate today’s federal revenue would be excessive, perhaps in the 20-25% range. And there are others objections as well.

As with all truly radical proposals, opposition to this change in tax policy will be huge because far too many people’s oxen will be gored—special interests will not wish to lose their advantages and this includes many so-called conservatives and limited government advocates. It is time that everyone clarifies where he stands—Republicans and other “conservatives” who continue to insist on using the tax system to manipulate people and to benefit themselves as purveyors of special favors need to get out of the way. (This is the motivation, I believe, of the so-called “tea party” movement in its propensity to challenge sitting Republicans at the primary election stage, a strategy which causes the hackles to rise on establishment types. ) It is high time that people generally see that giving up something like a legislated special benefit is not a sacrifice if it means preserving and improving the free market approach, which, even while hobbled with controls, has been the basic cause for our prosperity for more than 200 years. Only by eliminating the ability to satisfy rent-seekers can we move in the direction of a fully unhampered free-market economy. That the establishment Republicans object to this is evidence enough to deny them our support. Having an “R” after your name has been shown, time and again, to not be a sufficient guarantee of proactive resistance to statism.

Radical Measure No. 2 – Reducing the role of, and eventually eliminating the Federal Reserve.

I experienced a serious internal debate over whether to place this measure as my No.1. The damage done to all of us by the Fed over time competes strongly with the tax code as something to be eliminated.

The existence of a central bank, with all of the powers to create new money and manage rates of interest serves only two masters—banking interests in their desire to be protected from the natural risks inherent in their operations, and the interests of the state in supporting and expanding the activities of government through low-cost borrowing instead of taxation. It serves no one else. And the consistent inflation which central bank policies usually foster robs the common people of their wealth through deterioration of the value over time of their savings and assets. Absent the activities of the central bank, there is no reason why inflation would be a continuous feature of the monetary system, and in fact, the more likely occurrence of moderate deflation would be infinitely preferable, to all except debtors, and in particular, mind you, the government, which wants perennially to operate on ever-expanding debt. Note that if debt increases were not so easily available, the state would have to raise taxes much more frequently, an action that draws attention to its profligacy and which statists overhwelmingly desire to avoid.

The Federal Reserve should be reduced to a role that can be administered out of a small office with a personal computer, namely, adjustment of interbank interest rates by a rule-based algorithm such as the one advocated by economist John Taylor of Stanford University. The regulatory powers¹ of the Federal Reserve should be eliminated forthwith. Statutes should provide for a study of how best to phase out the entity in its entirety and migrate to a currency which  is backed by tangible commodities, and/or that we are able to return to some form of  “free banking” as once existed in this country.

Currently, the monetary policies pursued by the Fed have all but ruined the income prospects of any one who relies on fixed rate instruments ( savings, bonds, etc.) inasmuch as near-zero Fed rates bring down all rates in tandem: the long-time average² annual passbook rate for savings of around 5% has been reduced to perhaps 0.25% if you are lucky, while CDs are around 1-3%. This has provided a perverse incentive to those holding cash to invest in equities and to create a stock market bubble as a result. It goes without saying that a stable monetary system based on naturally occurring unregulated interest rates will not give these kinds of results. Furthermore, the elimination of the Fed and its role as “lender of last resort” will end the moral hazard of taxpayer bailouts of failing institutions ( and many still-solvent, but stressed institutions).

Of course, the most damaging aspects of the Fed are (1) the policy of using open market operations³ that, in effect, creates money where before there was none in order to provide an economic “stimulus” and (2) the influence on market rates of the arbitrary setting of interest rates via the interbank lending rate. Beginning in 1913, these policies have resulted in numerous unjustified increases in investment which could not be sustained ( so-called bubbles), which then went bust causing extreme problems for everyone, not just the investors who were fooled into rampant malinvestment. The most notorious of these events was, of course, the Great Depression. The most recent of them was the aptly named Great Recession of 2008-9. One cannot too strongly emphasize that the huge damages caused by these events would not have occurred absent the central bank’s policies; recessions and depressions are not naturally occurring phenomena, as some economists would have you believe; the cause is invariably due to government policy, monetary or fiscal.

That there are literally scores of highly regarded economists, including virtually 100% of those who consult for the government, who both accept and encourage the central bank’s role as legitimate only demonstrates the degree to which even those regarded as experts can be wrong, and the extent to which economics, as a social science, has been perverted by scientism and by the philosophies of positivism and formalism.

Radical Measure No. 3 – Getting to an enforceable Balanced Federal Budget year after year.

Yes, I hear you. I hear you saying that under President Clinton from 1998 to about 2002, revenues exceeded spending, yielding a surplus. Oh, and Mr. Clinton was a Democrat! If this is your line of thinking, I suggest you consult the historical background of this short-lived surplus era and how it came about; it most certainly did not follow the paradigm ( even higher taxes and limited or no spending cuts) that our current White House occupant wants.

Did the “surplus” created in the years of the Clinton administration result in any reduction in the National Debt? No. The amount of debt increase in the years 1997-2003 ( the Clinton years) was $ 1.4 trillion.

The only way that debt reductions can occur is that surpluses are a common occurrence. The only way that is possible is if the general trend is toward a balanced budget, and the notion that deficits are at all acceptable is abolished in the public’s mind, and for that to occur the prohibition on deficits must be institutionalized, i.e. put in the form of a constitutional amendment.

There have been at least 18 varying proposals over the years for a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA). My version differs from most of them in that it includes some special provisions: the president must go beyond just submitting a budget that is balanced— if Congress submits an unbalanced budget, he must use a newly minted line item veto power to trim items until the goal of balance is reached, and, moreover, I suggest that ignoring this requirement and failing to do so should be made an impeachable offense. My proposal (see the Three Plank Platform on this blog) also includes a cap on spending and a super-majority requirement to change the cap percentage, but these or similar provisions are included in other, earlier proposals.

Despite the often extreme opposition of a majority of economists to this idea, acceptance of the notion of not spending more than you take in is growing and the proposal may be the least radical of my three planks, inasmuch as 29 out of the required 34 state legislatures have petitioned for a constitutional convention to take up this matter. The normal path for a constitutional amendment is that a two-thirds congressional majority passes the amendment and it is subsequently approved by three-fourths of the states; the provision for initiation by the states themselves has never been used, but given the recalcitrance of Congress, it may yet happen.

Radical Measure No. 4 – Planned Rollback of the Regulatory State

Republicans and other conservatives rail against the mass of regulations that they insist, rightly, inhibit investment and confound the legitimate activities of most businesses, yet the thrust of this concern is almost never directed at regulations already imposed, nor is there any consideration of reforming the entire regulatory landscape, as a good radical solution would require.  Allowing the huge mass of regulations already promulgated to continue existing is not an option, except in the minds of the 70-80% of Republicans who are unwilling to challenge the status quo; this is yet another reason to challenge sitting Republicans at the primary election level.

The current bloat of federal regulations is the result of 50 or more years of legislation which has created new agencies of the federal government and has given them the charter to continuously generate new rules and regulations in various areas, e.g environment, financial institutions, transportation, food and drugs, and on and on. Every perceived problem has become the subject of a regulatory scheme. This trend has spawned a huge ongoing bureaucracy of overpaid career federal employees who continue in place from one administration to the next, so that, even if the new administration is not as statist-inclined as prior ones, the philosophy and impetus to still more regulations persists, inasmuch as the continuance of these people is not reviewed; only the highest level appointees may change, and the agency simply goes on as before.

The pernicious aspect of this is that the rule-making procedure has become almost totally removed from pushback by those affected. Once it is set up the typical regulatory agency is allowed rule-making powers that consist basically of propounding the rules behind closed doors and then allowing a brief “public comment period” before said rules are implemented and compliance by a whole sector of the economy in many cases is required. The concept of cost versus benefit is scarcely used, and is certainly not a requirement in most cases. More important, there is no necessity that the bureaucrats, having received the “public comments” pay any attention to them, much less provide a rebuttal or explanation as to why they may safely be ignored; the majority of them, the majority of the time are ignored on the march to implementation.

Now to my mind, we elect representatives to our legislative bodies to deal with rule-making, not just to consider the abstract concept of a broad need for regulation and give vast power and discretion to some new agency, an entity that will likely live on forever, and will continue to find new areas of concern to engender additional regs in order to justify its continuation. It is in the nature of such an organization to do so. So, I would propose that we roll back the situation to where the actual, detailed rules and regulations, to the extent they are actually needed , be considered by and voted on individually by our elected representatives, with full congressional hearings, as befitting actual publicly expressed concerns, not concerns manufactured by bureaucrats in their little hovels. Doing so might actually occupy the legislators to the extent that the volume of new legislation on mostly unconstitutional subjects would be reduced due to the needed attention to the details of whatever legitimate regulations were found to be appropriate. The end result would be similar to the current Code of Federal Regulations, but would be in the form of statutes. In many cases, regulatory agencies could be abolished and replaced by expert witnesses at congressional hearings; note that this (i.e. public hearings)  would give a much more viable opportunity for objections by the general public, and to get a sense of just how pervasive is the problem to be solved by the statute.

The beginning of this process would entail a complete re-consideration in the above-described manner of each major section of the Code by special committees of the Congress; given a time limit, each existing regulation should be scrutinized and testimony taken on its need and effectiveness. When the time limit has expired, the slate would be wiped clean and  only those regulations passing scrutiny would be retained; representatives feeling strongly about lost regs could sponsor new legislation to add them back. To repeat, all new regulations going forward should be in the form of a statute with full hearings.

Radical Measure No. 5 – Eliminate Forced Collective Bargaining

Trade unions have become a real problem in this country. The conventional wisdom is that unions came into being to counter the concentration of power and influence that firms and employers were able to wield in the contractual arrangement for employment, i.e. it was asserted that the employer has an innate advantage (greater bargaining power)  over employees when the encounter is one-on-one, and that this advantage is reduced or neutralized through the ability to bargain collectively.

Well, it would appear intuitive that this might be true; the only problem is that it may be true at some times and under some circumstances, but is hardly a general rule. The supply of labor, especially labor of a particular type, strongly influences the individual’s bargaining power in the transaction and the demand for, and/or supply of labor is constantly varying.

As someone who believes in liberty and freedom to contract, I submit that it is almost axiomatic that individuals have the right to band together and seek to bargain for wages as a group, and also to petition the employer regarding safety and working conditions. Many people assume that employers will ignore such employee associations and their requests, but in many situations, it is not in the employers’ best interest to do so. So, unions which are voluntary associations of individuals working at a particular firm are certainly an appropriate type of organization. What makes them inappropriate and damaging is (1) when the association is not voluntary (i.e. all employees are mandated to be in the union, or alternatively provide financial support to the union as if they were members) and (2) when the state mandates that the employer must bargain with the union and may not resort to individual employment contracts once a union has been formed.

No one who believes in liberty can object to people voluntarily joining an association like a union. Also the union should be able to strike, in other words to walk off the job as a group in order to impress upon the employer the intensity of their feelings regarding certain issues. What is not acceptable, and is an elemental violation of liberty is the notion, insisted upon by unionists, that the formation of such a voluntary organization automatically obliges the employer to recognize and bargain exclusively and collectively with it. Employers should be free at all times to replace, in a wholesale manner if desired, all the striking employees with new employees who are willing to engage in individual contracting. Also, liberty requires that no one is forced to join and/or support a union as a condition of employment at a firm.

Yet these issues are at the heart of contemporary labor law, and such mandates have been allowed to stand despite what to me, and libertarians generally, is a clear case of failure to abide by the Constitution’s respect for freedom of contract.

Now I am the first to admit that an examination of the history of labor law in both England and the early United States shows an inimical attitude toward trade unions, to the extent that unions were frequently convicted of conspiracies in restraint of trade, citing English Common Law among other things.⁴ So, initially, even the transitory existence of voluntary associations whose purpose included attempts to bargain collectively and to raise wages resulted in criminal penalties. This situation did, however, change over time, so that, by the 1870s, labor unions as such had achieved legislation that enabled their unfettered existence, and sanctioned strikes as a tolerable activity under the law. It would not be fair to say that liberty was well served by the attitude of the state up to that time, including numerous instances of the use of government force, inlcuding the military, to break up strikes, and that in many cases it was not civil disorder, or any other legitimate social problems that motivated this, but merely the desire of the state to co-operate with those who opposed the unions, i.e. business interests. So this is an example of reforms needed to rid the polity of what is today called “crony capitalism”, but then was more a product of mercantilist thinking, wherein one of the state’s purposes was the outright support and promotion of the interests of the merchant class.

But the evolution of the trade union from a virtual outlawed status to a tolerated one does not stop with having achieved recognition and that there is essentially nothing illegal per se in its existence or purposes. It has moved beyond that to a position of favoritism by the state which makes any discussion of unions providing a “level playing field” a laughing matter. Assuming there is a need for something to balance the supposed excessive power and influence that employers have, legislation currently in force so overbalances the situation that the tilt in favor of unionism is nearly vertical.

The turning point in this progression is in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935; this act enshrines the requirement that an employer must bargain collectively once the union has been created. It also created the National Labor Relations Board, which promulgates what is termed “fair labor practices” behaving in much the same manner as the regulatory agencies described above in this post, i.e. originates rules which are difficult or impossible to retract. To give you the flavor of the composition of this overarching Act, all of the original “unfair labor practices” cited in the Act were ascribed to the employer.

One can see the one-sidedness of the Act by this one quote describing its intended purpose:

It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self- organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.

The other major piece of legislation which has changed the landscape of labor/management relations in these United States is the Federal Labor Relations Act of 1978, passed during the Carter administration. This Act enabled union organization of federal employees, and has led to the egregious situation regarding pay and pension benefits which is currently much discussed. It should be obvious that to create a collective bargaining agent (union) for a group of employees which is then able to make contributions to politicians who are ultimately responsible as the bargaining agents for “management”( i.e. the government) comprises an inherently corrupt situation and a built-in conflict of interest. Once again, a quote from the Act serves to show the attitudes involved:

In passing the act, Congress declared that it wished to encourage collective bargaining between federal employees and their employers. Congress declared that collective bargaining is “in the public interest” because, among other things, it “contributes to the effective conduct of public business” and “facilitates and encourages the amicable settlements of disputes between employees and their employers involving conditions of employment.”

In the many years since these acts were passed, the results show how ill-considered the actions were: (1) the membership in private sector unions has dropped precipitately, primarily, I suggest because the supposed beneficiaries of union activities, the members, have perceived that it is not basically in their interest to belong, and (2) public sector pay scales for jobs that compare favorably with similar private sector jobs is as much as 40% higher, and that the pension and benefits burden of public sector employees threatens eventual fiscal insolvency when combined with other egregious government over-spending.

The solution which goes to the root of this problem is to repeal the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Labor Relations Act. Employers should once again be allowed to avoid mandatory collective bargaining, and all federal employees should contract individually for their employment contracts.

*                                                 *                                               *

So, looking around you, do you see anyone, from either of the major political parties who is advocating a program of this magnitude? Is there anyone who is talking about not just resisting additional moves toward statism, but actually rolling back, repealing or reducing the influence of the state on our lives? Yet, if we don’t do all these things, we move closer to the edge of the abyss—the point where personal freedom is gone, personal wealth is totally commandeered, inflation reduces asset values to a pittance, and the prospects for a vibrant economy are surrendered to the manipulations and interventions advocated by those economists and politicians whose only concern is to further aggrandize the state and its role as saviour.

Well, when I look around I see maybe one, maybe two individuals who are brave enough to advocate as I do.  It remains to see, however, whether they will forsake the safety of the status quo and do so.