First stop the lying

When Gorbachev set out to reform the Soviet Union one of the mottos he adopted was glasnost, “openness”. Or as he put it, “First we have to stop the lying.” He recognized that the problems with the Soviet system could not be solved unless or until people faced some unpleasant truths. We are in a similar position in the United States and the world today. Our way of life is threatened by our lies and our eagerness to believe them. There may not be easy solutions, or even any solutions at all, but without being brutally honest with one another, we have no chance.

Leave the details to us. Demanding a reform without providing the details is not asking someone to do something for us. It is asking for something to be done to us.

We know what to do. No they don’t. There is not a single person in a position of power anywhere who really understands our problems or knows how to solve them, and neither does anyone else. All we’ve got are guesses and hopes for luck.

Tricky titles. Beware of titles of legislation that promise much and are better designed to be counterproductive: Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that does not protect or care for patients and is not affordable. Patriot Act that isn’t. Jobs bills that destroy more jobs than they create.

Government needs taxes to pay its bills. No, it can always create money out of thin air to pay its bills. Taxes are to remove enough money from circulation to offset the money created so it doesn’t produce runaway inflation that would hurt investors.

Debt-based currency is good. No, it is recipe for disaster and the disaster is about to fall on us. Money not backed by something of stable value that cannot be created out of nothing has always let to disaster, through history. There may not be enough gold or silver for coins, but we could use units of energy to back our currencies.

The income tax, federal reserve notes, and entitlement spending are constitutional. No they’re not. They are nothing but a hoax, and people are gullible enough to fall for it.

Taxing the rich will be enough to avoid spending cuts. No it won’t. Even taxing not just 100% of the income of the rich, but 100% of their assets, would bring in nowhere near enough, and it would drive the money out of the country.

All we have to do is … Probably not. Simple remedies are almost certain not to work, and are more likely to backfire. If its simple, obvious, and easy, it is almost certainly a bad idea, and likely a disastrously bad idea. Public policy is not simple, obvious, or easy, any more than medicine or engineering. The simple solutions that work have probably already been in use for hundreds of years.

Electing X will save us. Not just one X, and electing better people is only part of what is needed. We need better people in public office, but there are not enough who know what to do to replace all the ones that need to be replaced. We need to cultivate a new crop, and it is very late to start. They need to institute fundamental structural and procedural reforms that are very complicated and subtle, reforms that almost no one grasps.

Spending cuts will save or create jobs immediately. No. They will help in the long run, but in the short term all of the alternatives are likely to make things worse. Our choices do not include keeping things as good as they are now. We had those choices 40 years ago but we don’t now. Our only choices now are between bad and worse.

Deregulation will save or create jobs immediately. Not much in the short term. We have to do it but jobs have gone off-shore because capital investment has, and there is no easy way to get it to come back unless conditions elsewhere get so bad that this country looks safer. The good news is those jobs are coming back. The bad news is that when they do they will be done by machines.

Reduced emissions and green energy will save jobs. We have to do it, but it won’t do much for jobs other than avoid losing even more of them. China alone is increasing its emissions far faster than we could ever reduce ours. Only something like solar collectors on the moon beaming power to Earth might work, and not enough people understand the merits of that.

The market will save us. It is likely to be better in the long term, but as long as financial institutions are too big they will fail in ways that hurt all of us. No amount of regulation will avoid that. They just have to be broken up into very small pieces, and that has to be done everywhere on Earth.

We can feed seven billion people. Yes, but probably not for much longer, and they won’t be able to pay for it, and neither can we. Things are going to get rough.

A good college degree will get you a good job. Get real.

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Constitution Society, 2900 W Anderson Ln, C-200-322, Austin, TX 78757. http://Constitution.org
[email protected] 512/299-5001 Blog: constitutionalism.blogspot.com Twitter: Lex_Rex

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Jon Roland for U.S. Senate Libertarian Jonroland.net lptexas.org lp.org

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