The list of what to discard is long indeed; this is not
surprising in the face of the huge flood of debt at the federal level. We need
to refrain from sending our young men and women to fight when we or our close
allies are not directly threatened. We should leave behind the attitude that
the purpose of our defense budget is to provide jobs; rather, we should spend
only what we need to keep the country safe from attack. We should phase out
programs like Social Security and Medicare which tax the young to subsidize the
old; we should save for our own needs and use government money to assist only
the truly needy. We should abandon our current tax code in favor of a negative/flat
tax (described by Dr. Milton Friedman) and abandon tax policies which favor
income from interest and capital gains over income from work. We should abandon
the corporate income tax which reduces the flexibility of our corporations;
rather we should tax the profits when people receive them (dividends or capital
gains). Our federal government should leave behind subsidies for food, mortgage
interest, health insurance, and education; subsidies tend to raise prices and
the money which we send to the Department of Education in Washington is needed
at the school down the street where we send our kids.
Our federal government should leave behind support for
unions, public and private; unions institutionalize adversary relationships
which weaken companies, cities, and states and contribute mightily to the
flood. Our federal government should re-learn the lessons of the prohibition of
alcohol (our 18th amendment to the constitution) and its repeal (our 21st
amendment) and apply those lessons to repeal drug prohibition. We must leave
behind anti-trust laws which kill innovation or prevent companies from gaining
efficiencies; government regulators are never smarter than free markets. The
government should leave behind tariffs which interfere with free trade and
penalize consumers. We must leave behind the unregulated jungle of tort actions
and class-action lawsuits that lead to company-killing penalties and outrageous
medical malpractice awards (in the absence of criminal intent), and unaffordable
malpractice insurance. Our government should repeal the law against work, the
so-called "minimum wage;" we need all the willing, able-bodied
workers we can find and now is not the time to prevent people from working just
because they cannot command a wage set arbitrarily by people who know nothing
about their situations or about the situations of their potential employers.
*****
Good luck to us all in the rising flood of debt. As we seek
higher ground, the better decisions we make, regarding what to take and what to
leave behind, the better chance we will have to survive and to gain a higher
quality of life. As I survey my own situation and the situation of the company
where I work, I have a good idea of what to keep and what to abandon. When it
comes to my local, state, and federal governments and the candidates for office
in the coming elections, I intend to support those whose concept of what to save
and what to leave behind comes closest to my lists above. If those candidates fail
to win election, I fear that the flood will be wide, deep, and long.