The Art of Depolitics

  • Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
    --Novelist Frank Herbert, "quoting" Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual in Children of Dune, 1976, p. 190.
     
  • Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
    --Justice Louis D. Brandeis
     
  • Politicization can be defined as that now pervasive tendency for making all questions political questions, all issues political issues, all values political values, and all decisions political decisions.... Politicization thus takes the manifest form of increasing the power of the state, of increasing political power as against all other forms of power in society, of increasing the power of the politicians and the bureaucrats as against the power of individuals, private institutions, and voluntary associations.... Today the individual...is constantly aware of the state, over which he can exercise little or no control even though it makes more and more decisions about his life.
    --English historian Ronald M. Hartwell quoted in The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration, Fairfax, VA: Future of Freedom Foundation, 1995, p. xii
     
  • A couple of immortal philosophers quote another immortal philosopher in a comment on the state of politics in the USA.
     
  • "War is the continuation of politics." In this sense war is politics and war itself is a political action; since ancient times there has never been a war that did not have a political character.... It can therefore be said that politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
    --Mao Tsetung, "On Protracted War" (May 1938)
     
  • The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control -- "indoctrination," we might say -- exercised through the mass media. One of the devices used to achieve this narrowness of perspective is the reliance on professional credentials. The universities and academic disciplines have, in the past, been successful in safeguarding conformist attitudes and interpretations, so that by and large a reliance on "professional expertise" will ensure that views and analyses that depart from orthodoxy will rarely be expressed.
    --Linguist Noam Chomsky, "Language and Responsibility," Pantheon Books, NY: 1977, p. 8.

    If the table below looks scrambled, look at this version.

The Depolitical Way

Problem

Political "Final Solution"

Result of "Final Solution"

Depolitical Coaching

Mission

Customers

Health care is expensive

Forcibly take money from people who have earned it by working productively, then give it to those who have not earned it in payment of their overinflated medical expenses.

Focus on sickness and quick fixes to sickness instead of individual responsibility for health. Inflated health costs for those not receiving subsidized care because subsidized caregivers have no incentive to reduce costs when the bottomless government till is paying.

Depoliticize health care by taking legal sanction away from monopoly health care providers, allowing prices to settle to their truly affordable market value. Completely privatize medical charity. Unlink medical insurance from employers and give it back to employees so they will not lose insurance when unemployed or self-employed.

#1 Encourage health, #2 fix sickness (in that order).

Everybody, not just sick people.

Children need to be acculturated in self-government and voluntary cooperation.

Forcibly take money from people who have earned it by working productively, then lavishly spend it on government monopoly indoctrination centers provided free to those whose short-sightedness has produced children without forethought for providing acculturation.

Parents do not take responsibility for their children's growth into self-government because they leave this to government monopoly indoctrination centers whose greatest incentive is to encourage government dependence.

Depoliticize education by privatizing it completely. Private scholarships will properly educate those whose parents do not have the money to pay for their children's acculturation and education. Private schools will provide an abundance of choices rather than the current monochromatic monopoly.

Enlightening prospective adults in the way the world really works: A successful life is: #1 self governing; #2 voluntary cooperation with others for benefit of all.

Parents, not bureaucrats or labor monopoly unionized teachers.

People exist who cannot or will not keep themselves alive by cooperating with fellow citizens

Forcibly take money from people who have earned it by working productively, then give it away to those unwilling or unable to encourage the cooperation of family or private charity in the project of keeping themselves alive.

Dehumanization of those whose self-valuation is destroyed by dependence on others for their livelihood. Increasing unwillingness of disabled or unacculturated persons to choose independence as a way of life.

Depoliticize charity by privatizing it totally. The General Welfare clause in the U.S. Constitution is violated every time the Federal government gives money towards a person's specific welfare.

Making the choice for independence and cooperation the goal of all, even the disabled and unacculturated.

Citizens whose feeling of love for others exceeds that of love for themselves.

Some people's lives need chemical adjustment

Either forbid or highly regulate chemical adjustment of citizens lives.

This is Your Government on Drugs

Depoliticize eating by decriminializing the ingestion of any substance. Abolish the FDA. No government (except a Nazi government) should ever have the ability to force a person's bodily choices.

Promoting intelligent choice in eating habits through persuasion, not force.

Everybody, not just those with the spurned lifestyles of the poor and the infamous.

To learn more about Libertarians and the way they think, check out the Future of Freedom Foundation

 

W. Earl Allen's home page: http://www.allmax.com/wea