Last March, I laid out my “Thirty Day Plan” for de-socializing America. But I didn’t scrap all of big government; now it’s time for more:
DAY ONE: Foreign junkets are outlawed. If anyone on the federal payroll wants to fly overseas, he has to buy his own ticket. The State Department, Congress, and White House go into hyperventilation.
Special interests have long used the democratic political process to produce legislation for their own private benefit, and the U.S. Constitution contains flaws that make this easier. One attempt to remedy these flaws was the Confederate Constitution.
The international diamond cartel, the most successful cartel in history, far more successful than the demonized OPEC, is at last failing on hard times. For more than a century, the powerful DeBeers Consolidated Mines, a South African corporation controlled by the Rothschild Bank in London, has managed to organize the cartel, restricting the supply of diamonds on the market and raising the price far above what would have been market levels.
It’s true that the U.S. health care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls.
Old Right journalist Garet Garrett described the New Deal as a revolution against America’s tradition of private property, limited government, and the rule of law. Indeed it had all die earmarks. President Roosevelt ran against government spending and deficits, but once in office acted like a dictator.
Roosevelt overthrew the traditional limits on government’s role and instituted central planning and welfarism in every sector of the economy.
American government, we are told, is notable for its stability. And so it seems, at least on the surface. But stability over a long period, as the Russian tsars could tell us, is no guarantee of permanence. And the tsars fell very suddenly after ruling far longer than the U.S. government’s two centuries.
Did 12 years of Reagan-Bush corrupt the Right? “Whatever they might say in their after-dinner speeches or in their op-ed pieces,” writes former Wall Street Journal editorialist David Frum in his new book Dead Right, conservatives have “effectively thrown in the towel on government spending” and given up the war against big government.
Think of the U.S. Postal Service as a Soviet planning bureaucracy. The P.S. causes severe and systemic dislocations, imposes a terrible burden on enterprise and the citizenry, and is sometimes tyrannical. Also like Soviet planning, the longer it lasts, the worse it gets. It is doomed to fail and be dismantled.
