The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty To Government

2 0 1 6 I N I T I A T I V E
THE BLUEPRINT: RESTORING LIBERTY TO GOVERNMENT

Restoring Liberty to Government
Introduction
The basic purpose of this paper is to establish a way forward for the libertarian and
conservative movements in the coming years as those movements relate to the renewal
of American promise and the revitalization of American strength. Key to our success
will be a renewed commitment to and emphasis upon individual liberties and self-
determination. We must communicate our ideas to the individual voter in such a way
as to align our future with his own.
Our primary focus should be one of property. Individuals in this country resent the
profligate spending and corruption of Washington, D.C. and they are right to do so. We
must position our movements in such a way as to provide redress for individual griev-
ances against government excess. Chief among the individual grievances against gov-
ernment excess are the onerous taxes that individuals are assailed with on all sides.
At the gasoline pump, anywhere from .30 to .70 cents of each gallon of gasoline can be
nothing but pure tax. Income taxes, Social Security withholding, property taxes, sales
taxes, gift taxes, capital gains taxes, corporate income taxes that are passed on to indi-
viduals in the form of higher prices and lower wages, lodging taxes, toll taxes, licensing
taxes, the list goes on and on. By positioning ourselves and our cause against taxation
and government spending, and following through on our commitments with action, we
can build an electoral majority for years to come. However, we must link taxation to
property. We must sear into the minds of voters that their wages and earnings are their
wealth. Their home equity is their wealth. The interest on their savings accounts, and
the yield on their 401(k)s are their wealth, and their property. We must inculcate a deep
resentment towards government encroachments on individual wealth.
Educating and conditioning voters to react skeptically to government proposals which

require increased funding in the form of taxation in order to benefit specific demograph-
ics in society rather than the common interests of society must be our primary task. We
must condition individual voters to react to increased taxes in the same way that they
2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty
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would react to a theft or robbery. They must see government as an entity to be battled
at every turn, and they must come to understand that the chief responsibility of voters
is eternal vigilance against government expansion.
If we accomplish this, we can destroy liberalism and its appeal. Make no mistake about
it, the primary mission of libertarian and conservative causes is the extinction of leftism
as a politically viable theory around which to organize and rally. The future security of
these United States and our continued progress forward into the future depends on the
vanquishing of liberalism as a political ideal. For this to occur, we must define not only
our own theory, we must also dominate the dialogue to such a degree as to define liber-
alism in the context in which we choose to frame it. We must best the liberals by articu-
lating their cause with greater clarity and honesty than they themselves can muster.
At the core of liberalism is the idea that property rights are not sacrosanct; property
rights are instead flexible and negotiable. The many should be able to appropriate the
wealth of the few in order to fund their political initiatives and desires. The key to re-
framing the debate in our favor is to point out that we live in a republic, not a democ-
racy, and that the rights of individuals are sacred. Since rights include property con-
cerns, we can systematically delegitimize liberalism by reframing the conflict between
the right and the left as one of majoritarian tyranny against individual freedom founded
on constitutionally legitimate traditions and rooted in constitutionally based ideals.
Article I, Section VIII, Clause I of the Constitution says the following: “The Congress
shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the
debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United
States...(emphasis added)” This is antithetical to the various entitlements programs and
subsidies which benefit specific demographics to the detriment of others. Taxation is to
fund the mission of the government, which should consist of the common defense and
the general welfare of the United States; that is, what we all use and need as citizens in
the United States.
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As we consider what to define those two areas as, let us go back to consider what the
Founders had to say on these matters. We may consider the views of the man who
wrote the actual Constitution, Thomas Jefferson:
“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has ac-
quired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised
equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the
guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” —
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6, 1816
“A wise and frugal government… shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall
leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement,
and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of
good government.” — Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from
wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” — Thomas
Jefferson
“Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those
specifically enumerated.” — Thomas Jefferson
We may also consider any number of other sources, such as James Madison, who would
go on to become the fifth President:
“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare,’ I have always regarded them as
qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and un-
limited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which
there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” — James Madison in a
letter to James Robertson
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“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a
right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constitu-
ents.” — James Madison, 4 Annals of Congress 179, 1794
“[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified

objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is
no part of the legislative duty of the government.” — James Madison“I cannot
“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will pro-
mote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enu-
merated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions.” James Madison,
“Letter to Edmund Pendleton,” — James Madison, January 21, 1792, in The Papers of
James Madison, vol. 14, Robert A Rutland et. al., ed (Charlottesvile: University Press of
Virginia, 1984).
“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the
powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of
magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually
checked and restrained by the others.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 58, February
20, 1788
“There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual
and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
— James Madison, speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 16, 1788
We may also consider the words of John Adams: further take intaccount the following
from John Adams:
“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws
of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and
tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not com-
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mandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it
can be civilized or made free.” — John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Gov-
ernment of the United States of America, 1787
The prescient warnings of Benjamin Franklin also serve notice of the inherent danger in
allowing redistribution to become a normative standard:
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of
the republic.” — Benjamin Franklin
“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best
way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driv-
ing them out of it.” — Benjamin Franklin
“The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it
yourself.” — Benjamin Franklin
In short, the redistribution which is the goal of every leftist and liberal is antithetical to
the traditions and principles our nation was founded upon. There is no confusion on
this issue. What they wrote and said in their lifetimes was clear. Despite the best at-
tempts of leftists to obfuscate and muddle the discussion, their testimonies stand the
test of time to provide us guidance on the proper way forward. We must use this guid-
ance when considering the restructuring and reordering of our government and its es-
sential functions. We must go back to the wisdom of our fathers and the traditions they
bequeathed to us as heirs to the Republic they erected.
By stressing these facts, we can systematically delegitimize the entitlements, subsidies,

exemptions, and various other expenditures which run away from the constitutionally
defined mission of the Congress and the constitutional purpose of taxation. Key to our
cause is the redefinition of the focus and mission of government.
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Limiting the Focus and Mission of Government
Government should focus on four key areas: Infrastructure, Trade Policy, National De-
fense, and Enforcement and Administration. These are the core areas which benefit the
common defense and general welfare of every citizen.
We all use roads and bridges, and we benefit from strong levees and flood control sys-
tems to protect our property. It is only proper that we should all share in the cost of
their construction and maintenance. This is infrastructure, and we can sell it politically
to the American people. As we will see later on, investment in infrastructure will be key
to our long term goals in revitalizing American manufacturing.
We all benefit from strong trade policy, which renders goods cheap and readily accessi-
ble to the American consumer. Trade policy requires public investment in the form of
diplomacy, negotiation of trade agreements, and enforcement of those agreements. As it
is an area of common benefit and mutual concern, the American people can be sold
trade as a core focus and concern of the government which they ought to fund.
National Defense is an area which requires no explanation. The American people have
traditionally supported a strong military, and we will continue to develop our military
capability in order to ensure American interests and national security are promoted
throughout the world. The benefits are common to all Americans: increased security
from the threat of terror, and stability in commerce and trade which enable Americans
to maintain the world’s highest standard of living.
Enforcement and Administration are also critical areas which benefit the common inter-
ests of Americans. We can benefit from specific restructuring in this area, including the
elimination of various government agencies and departments. However, chief among
the reforms we must bring to enforcement and administration is the elimination of
fraud and corruption in our markets. We must fight for free and unfettered markets, as
opposed to free and unfettered corporations.
Financial transparency is critical to preventing fraud and achieving investor confidence

in our markets. XBRL reporting will contribute a great deal to this goal, and we must
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support this sort of innovation and development in the future by requiring companies
to honestly report their fiscal condition to investors in such easy to understand and dis-
sect formats. In this way, investors can detect fraud and punish it in the marketplace,
thereby rendering a result in days rather than the weeks, months, and years it would
take government agencies to achieve the same result.
It is critical, however, to punish fraudulent structuring of debt and the misleading of in-
vestors with a great deal of severity. Limited liability ought to be revoked in the event
that executives have committed a crime. The undue gains of shareholders ought to be
recoverable as well. Simply put, we should remove every incentive which exists that
promotes short term malfeasance by exempting shareholders and executives from the
repercussions of their failure to police the company and its financial disclosures ade-
quately.
Eliminating Agencies
Initially, we must assess which agencies of the federal government are extraneous by
considering their stated intent versus their actual record. The Department of Agricul-
ture; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fire-
arms; Health and Human Services; and various other agencies may be easily culled and
eliminated on this logic alone. Quite simply, they don’t work.
The stated intent of the Department of Agriculture was to save the family farm. We
now exist in an agricultural reality where the family farm is near extinct, replaced by
factory farming operations which have given rise to a food production system wherein
four major suppliers dominate the chicken, pork, and beef markets. The Department of
Agriculture has been reduced to a mere funnel for tax subsidies and dollars to be chan-
neled to large conglomerates and landowners who own arable land but do nothing with
that land which could justify their receiving tax dollars in support of agriculture.
Both the DEA and the ATF function at the federal level when their roles have tradition-
ally been reserved for states and localities. Moreover, we currently spend $28,000 yearly
incarcerating hundreds of thousands of non-violent drug offenders who were arrested
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for mere possession. In an environment where we are facing insolvency due to ideo-
logical crusades against this ill, that ill, or the other ill, it is perhaps best that we move
forward and begin considering decriminalization if not outright legalization of drugs at
the federal level. For those who doubt my logic, allow me to refer you to a book by
Reason magazine editor Jacob Sullum entitled Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use, in
which Mr. Sullum admirably refutes a host of myths about our drug policy with actual
facts.
We might move to prosecute those who injure others while under the influence of in-
toxicating substances in much the same way that we prosecute drunk drivers who kill
someone. Either way, the decision should fall to state and local governments, and out of
the realm of federal oversight and control. As such, I would support the abolition of the
DEA and the repeal of all federal drug laws.
Insofar as the ATF is concerned, I see no reason to have a federal agency dealing with
what have traditionally been state and local concerns. I support the repeal of all federal
gun laws, since so few of them are enforced with any regularity to begin with, and since
they only serve to perpetuate firearms laws already in existence at the state and local
levels. Tobacco is another issue best left to states who currently tax tobacco to no end in
order to fund whatever great idea they’ve hit upon during a given week or month. It’s
their tax law, so let them enforce it (Note: this mission is the purview of yet another
agency, which exists under the auspices of the Treasury Department as Bureau of Alco-
hol and Tobacco Tax and Trade). Not one area of the ATF’s focus is a legitimate federal
issue. These are matters best left to states and localities, who can determine according
to the preference of their citizens what they’d like insofar as regulation of alcohol, to-
bacco, and firearms are concerned.
Health and Human Services is another ignoble effort of the federal government to inject
itself into local and state concerns. As such, it has similar mixed results. I do support a
Centers for Disease Control at the federal level, and I regard this as critical to our na-
tional security. However, public health is best left to the states and localities which are
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equipped with proximity to the population so that they can know which issues require
redress.
The Department of Education has as its legacy greater expense with far less result over
its tenure. It should be abolished as an infringement upon state and local autonomy
over education. Moreover, it should be abolished as a means for national teacher’s un-
ions to prevent parental choice in education. Parents ought to be afforded great leeway
in determining the education of their own children, so long as basic academic standards
established by state and local school boards are met by whatever institution educates
the child in question. It is doubtful that parents will stay too long with an institution if
that institutions results are obviously inferior, so the idea that state interference is
needed is dubious at best.
Public education has taken on a coercive tinge, whereby the unions associated with it
have effectively lobbied legislatures to limit the options available to parents as though
the parents are not the ones paying for the schools with their own tax dollars! This is
antithetical to our identity as a nation of individuals seeking to erect individual liberty
as the ideal.
The National Endowment for the Arts is not an appropriate allocation of federal funds
nor does it constitute an appropriate function of the federal government. Patronage of
the arts should ideally be privately funded for any number of reasons, not the least of
which is the sticky area of forcing constituents to pay for art containing subject matter
or themes which may offend their moral and ethical sensibilities. For this and other
reasons, public money should not be appropriated at the federal level to pay for art.
The general measurement of whether or not we eliminate a government agency or pro-

gram ought to be Article I, Section 8, Clause I of the Constitution, which specifically lim-
its taxation to the purpose of paying the debts and providing for the common defense
and general welfare of the United States. As I pointed out in the opening, the Founders
left a wealth of testimony to indicate what the general welfare did and did not consti-
tute.
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Entitlement Reform and Elimination
Any serious discussion about curbing the mission and scope of government has to in-
clude entitlements. Simply put, entitlements in this country are nothing more than
wealth redistribution, and are therefore incompatible with the letter and the spirit of Ar-
ticle I, Section VIII, Clause I of the Constitution. We should position our argument as a
defense of the Constitution and the principles this country was founded upon.
Public sentiment will change when we begin to stress that the United States is a republic
where property rights are sacrosanct. This idea has its genesis in the Founder’s own be-
liefs and positions, as evidenced by the following quote:
“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws
of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and
tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not com-
mandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it
can be civilized or made free.” — John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Gov-
ernment of the United States of America, 1787
For the Founders, property was of paramount concern. They had fought a war against
the Crown to ensure that government would not have the right to make inroads against
individual ownership and control of property. What we must do in articulating our
case against entitlements is to equate property with wages and individual wealth. At
the state and local level, this will entail stressing the end of property taxes. Initially, we
may compromise and say that only residentially zoned property should be exempt from
such taxation, and we should promote the idea that such a decision ought to be settled
by a direct vote in the form of a referendum.
At the national level, we can attack entitlements on the same grounds. We may initially
soften our approach by allowing for a gradual phasing out of entitlements programs
like Social Security and Medicare, but we must be clear and focused on their total elimi-
nation. I would suggest a 20 year phase out to enable individuals to adapt to the com-
ing reality of a retirement that isn’t supplemented by Social Security. In the initial five
year period, we will retain the withholding tax in order to fund the entitlement, and we
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will gradually transition it to a general budgetary item for the remaining fifteen. This
will have the added benefit of putting a fiscal bind on future Congresses who may be
tempted to expand spending.
What we want to do is to make it absolutely impossible for future Congresses to expand

spending without raising or creating new taxes, and thus exposing themselves to politi-
cal repercussions come election time. The way that we manage the phase out of Social
Security and Medicare will enable us to accomplish this.
Essentially, we can eliminate Social Security over time and avoid the charge that we are
heartless and driven to turn seniors out with no other option. We can also point out
that many seniors who have come up in the past three decades have 401(k)s and Roth
IRAs which are potentially substantial sources of retirement income.
This point is critical to our ability to phase Social Security out in a manageable and effi-
cient way, as it highlights a crucial selling point: we will limit the pool of Social Security
recipients by putting a cap on eligibility for those who have external retirement income
in excess of a certain amount. If you have retirement income from savings, 401(k)s,
IRAs, annuities, or any other source, you will be rendered ineligible for Social Security
benefits if the annual payout from those other sources exceeds a certain dollar amount.
In this way we can cull the rolls of Social Security and make it more fiscally manageable
to phase it out over the 20 year period. We may even be able to accomplish our goal in
less time utilizing this and other approaches. We can portray those seniors who oppose
our efforts as greedy on the ground that their demographic has the lowest rates of pov-
erty in our society. The initial battle over entitlement elimination will be an absolute po-
litical bloodbath, as seniors have a powerful lobby in this country through AARP and
other organizations. We want to be positioned to deploy a message depicting those sen-
iors who oppose our initiatives and rollbacks of wealth redistribution as tyrannical and
even antithetical to American constitutional principles and traditions.
This is going to be a war of public perception on which the future course of our Repub-
lic will rest. Turning America away from socialist wealth redistribution (which is what
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entitlements ultimately are) will depend on a disciplined, organized, and focused effort.
When we do attempt to roll these particular reforms out, we will need to have battle
chests ready for deployment. Vast sums of money will be required in order to mount an
offensive campaign. It is advisable that we strike first on the public relations front by
attacking the senior citizens lobbying groups with a full on advertising blitz.
A successful approach will depend on portraying the entitlements as robbery from the
current generation of middle class and working families in order to enrich the already
wealthy generations of seniors who demand ever greater amounts of entitlements with-
out regard for the fiscal security of the country. Ideally, we will portray seniors as being
indifferent to the plight of the Treasury and the potential fiscal insolvency of the United
States. Another approach might include a portrayal of seniors back in the early days of
the Republic and the early 20th century, fighting selflessly for their country only to be
replaced by future generations of spoiled and entitled types who care little for the fiscal
effect their entitlements have on the plight of working families and the middle class.
Whatever we do, we must hit the seniors and their lobby first. We must blitz them and
overwhelm them, and we must coordinate public speeches, study findings, and press
releases in order to stun the public into cooperation. Defining them before they define
us will be critical to the successful implementation of entitlement repeal.
Another critical area of importance is the realization we must have that powerful inter-
ests within the financial community want Social Security restructured into a private in-
vestment account financed by tax withholdings. Chief among the advocates of this ap-
proach are men like Peter J. Peterson, and we must do everything we can to utterly ob-
viate the challenge he and his kind present to our goal of repealing entitlements. The
reality is that we are tasked with restoring constitutional limits to the federal govern-
ment by narrowing its scope and mission to fit the standard of Article I, Section VIII,
Clause I. There is no compromise to be reached with Peter J. Peterson or any other ad-
vocate of privatization where Social Security is concerned. If individuals want to take
their 7.5% and invest it of their on volition in hedge funds and stocks, that is their
choice to make as free individuals on their own. The federal government should not be
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involved in any way, shape, fashion, or form. Social Security and every other entitle-
ment must be eliminated entirely.
Today we are faced with an unsympathetic senior demographic that has an arrogant at-
titude towards the private property and earnings of other individuals. They genuinely
believe that it is their right to take that property and those earnings in order to fund
their golden years. They are wrong. If you communicate the reality of Social Security
to the general public, you will win their support for rolling back and repealing Social
Security.
If you articulate Social Security as a program that takes from working families and the
middle class in order to enrich a demographic which already has greater wealth than all
other demographics in our society, a demographic which has the lowest rates of poverty
in our society, you will win broad support for overturning Social Security. If you point
out that the reason insurance premiums are skyrocketing in this country is a universal
single payer healthcare program that underpays physicians who then pass on the un-
paid costs to their privately insured customers, you can generate consensus support for
overturning Medicare. If you point out that 5% of the patients in Medicare generate the
overwhelming majority of the costs, and ensure that those of us who possess private in-
surance will pay greater premiums and co-pays as well, you can generate outrage
which will sweep us forward in our campaign to eliminate Medicare.
It’s all about the presentation. The video footage of bellicose seniors screaming about
socialized medicines in order to preserve their own socialized single payer healthcare is
priceless. It is an asset to our cause. In it, you can see exactly the sort of image we are
going to portray as representative of seniors on Social Security and Medicare. For far
too long, seniors have had a monopoly on the debate. They’ve portrayed politicians
who sought to roll back or limit Medicare or Social Security as misers with no respect
for their elders. Who could respect the bellicose individuals we saw in town halls over
the fall of 2009? The screaming, yelling, whining, sniveling, entitled and arrogant indi-
viduals who stomped their feet and waved their hands like lunatics on the verge of a
violent meltdown in order to preserve their illegal and unconstitutional entitlements
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and wealth redistribution schemes so that they could steal from working families with
children in order to have more for themselves when their demographic already has
greater wealth than any other demographic are their own worst enemy. We can turn the
tide of public opinion simply by presenting them as they are in that footage: arrogant,
rude, and belligerent.
These are individuals who don’t care that their entitlements are responsible for nearly
bankrupting the country. They don’t care about robbing from the future to pay for the
denizens of the past who didn’t set aside enough to fund their own retirements, or who
did, but simply want more to add to their already substantial wealth even if it comes on
the backs of working and middle class families. The great wonder of entitlement reform
is that it hasn’t already happened.
We’re on the verge of overturning leftism’s great legacy in our society: a welfare state
where the specialized demographic can steal from the the general demographic in order
to sustain and enrich itself. We simply need to articulate with discipline, focus, and
consistency the message contained in the preceding paragraphs.
The logistics of this particular item will need to be worked out in further detail, but the
general aim of our agenda is quite clear: the orderly and total elimination of Social Secu-
rity as fact of American life. The twenty year phase out period will actually be some-
what longer as the mortality rate of Social Security recipients is inherently unpredict-
able. Given the fact that recipients of Social Security also utilize Medicare, we will have
to factor this is into our end plan. We could ultimately be looking at a sixty year wind
down to the program as the final recipients eventually expire due to illness and old age.
Tax Reform
"It is a singular advantage of taxes on articles of consumption that they contain in their
own nature a security against excess. They prescribe their own limit, which cannot be
exceeded without defeating the end purposed -- that is, an extension of the revenue."
--Alexander Hamilton
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“No pecuniary consideration is more urgent, than the regular redemption and discharge
of the public debt: on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of time more
valuable.”
George Washington, Message to the House of Representatives, December 3, 1793
Tax reform is an essential component of the right’s resurgence. We have a tax code
which is overlong, overcomplicated, and inefficient. It costs taxpayers a stunning $140
billion a year merely to maintain compliance. This represents an additional tax added
to the income tax, the excise taxes, the corporate income tax, the gift tax, the estate tax,
and a host of other taxes. The American government manages to collect more tax reve-
nue each year than any other country on Earth, and yet it still isn’t sufficient. We run
deficits with regularity.
As we roll back the mission and limit the scope of our government, it is also appropriate
that we roll back and eliminate our tax code. That’s right, we need to repeal our federal
tax code in its entirety and start over. No more corporate tax, no capital gains taxes, no
excise taxes, no income taxes, no gift taxes, nothing shall remain of the various and
sundry taxes we’ve all come to know and loathe.
We’re going to repeal every tax we currently have and erect a VAT (Value Added Tax) of
some 18.5%. Let’s consider that we produce over $14 trillion a year in GDP. 70% of
that is consumer spending (http://www.hoover.org/research/factsonpolicy/facts
/4931661.html).
Let’s say that we collect 18.5% of that 70% of GDP in a VAT, for a total of $1.813 trillion.
As you can see, the VAT has the potential to realize more than adequate revenues for the
government. However, in order to lessen the negative effects of taxation on areas criti-
cal to the well-being of individuals and families, we will exempt food and medical care
from the VAT. This will result in the omission of some 19% of the consumer spending
from taxation (Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gross domestic product data; Department
of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Expenditures in 2004” (April
15
2006)). The net result of this will be a $1.3209 trillion VAT revenue to the federal gov-
ernment.
In 2009, total tax revenues were some $2.105 trillion under the conventional tax struc-
ture currently in existence. Of course, you have to consider that we spent $782 billion
on the military alone. We spent $678 billion and $676 billion on Social Security and
Medicare & Medicaid, respectively (OMB 2011 Budget Summary Table S-3). Eliminat-
ing both entitlements programs and cutting military spending in half will produce a
savings of $1.735 trillion dollars. Essentially, you’d cut the federal budget by that much
from its total of $3.518 trillion in 2009. In essence, you’d halve the budget. Once you
consider how much entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid cost, you
begin to see that cutting those entitlements will have a substantial effect on reducing
government spending.
Once we go through the federal budget and begin paring programs and items which do
not meet the litmus test of Article I, Section VIII, Clause I of the Constitution, we will
begin to reap vast savings which will make our goal of switching to a VAT far more fea-
sible. Structural reforms to appropriations processes will render even greater savings.
However, on the initial run, we must take care to emphasize a key area of the utmost
importance to American security and prosperity: that of the national debt. Tax reform
must be critically focused on resolving the issue of the national debt.
Eliminating the 35% corporate income tax will greatly encourage business investment in
the United States, as will the elimination of capital gains taxes. Moreover, the elimina-
tion of the income tax code, combined with the replacement of a VAT built around an
invoice-based collection approach, we will further eliminate the need for vast bureauc-
racies to enforce tax regulations and law. The IRS in its current form will cease to exist.
Compliance costs will also decrease drastically with a simplified tax code, resulting in
greater efficiency to private enterprise. Much of the cost will be borne by businesses
who must document their own compliance in the form of invoice based collections.
However, even with this as the case, businesses will be spared a great deal of ineffi-
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ciency and difficulty. Imagine what we could do in our economy with an extra $140 bil-
lion to spend on actual goods or capital investment, money which would be recouped
from a simplified tax code which doesn’t require an army of lawyers and accountants to
navigate.
Initially, we will keep Social Security withholding in place as we begin the process of
paring down eligibility in order to limit Social Security disbursements to only those in-
dividuals whose entire livelihoods are supported by their Social Security benefits. This
will be the norm for five years, after which we will totally shift the bulk or the whole of
funding the remaining recipients of Social Security to the general budget and the VAT.
We will eliminate capital gains taxes in order to encourage reinvestment, and in order to
spur savings and investment by ordinary Americans seeking to build their retirements.
There will be no further penalties on retirement or savings, as both are conducive to the
commercial interests of the nation and it is therefore counterproductive to tax them.
Corporations will still face a minimized tax burden in the form of the VAT, but the real-
ity is the cost of their compliance will be greatly reduced and the overall cost of the tax
itself will be cut. We want to encourage corporations to come to the United States as a
tax shelter. Given our history of losing money on the corporate income tax due to the
fact that we often give more in abatements, exemptions, and deductions to corporations
than we actually collect in receipts, the VAT represents a far more efficient and produc-
tive way to deal with our corporate taxation issues. Ultimately, I would favor a zero
corporate income tax rate worked into the VAT over time to achieve our goal of making
U.S. markets attractive to foreign investment and compatible with domestic business
interests.
The fact remains that corporations do not pay the corporate income tax. They merely
pass it on to consumers in the form of higher prices and to their laborers in the form of
lower wages. It is an asinine tax that hurts the working and middle classes while re-
quiring great contortions on the part of corporations seeking to extract benefits from the
tax system. These benefits often represent a market distortion, as any concessions ex-
17
tracted from a government by one corporation represent a competitive advantage
against its rivals. The federal government shouldn’t be playing favorites in taxation.
Our tax code is currently nothing more than just that: a means for corporations to en-
hance their bottom line by demonstrating an aptitude at gaining concessions and
abatements from elected officials who insert said items into the tax code. This is anti-
thetical to free market economics, where the government stays out of market issues and
allows consumers to make the decision as to which product succeeds or fails based on
the product’s relevance to their life. When the government bestows favorable tax
treatment on one corporation as opposed to its competitor, it essentially interferes with
this balance and creates incentives for the consumer to choose whichever company has
already been chosen by the government. Reforming the tax code with a VAT will ulti-
mately help us to end these government manipulations of the market and its conditions.
Infrastructure Concerns and Opportunities
We have an internal crisis in this country. Our infrastructure is corroding. While we

have been off entertaining dreams of empire and sowing pseudo democracies halfway
around the world, our own roads and bridges have decayed. Fully half of the roads and
bridges in this country are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
Privatization advocates blindly advocate selling off publicly funded and built infra-
structure like roads and bridges to private corporations, who then own the infrastruc-
ture and charge the public a toll which pays for its upkeep while generating a profit for
the corporation. There are two critical distinctions to draw here: first, the public paid
for the building of the road; second, the the government wouldn’t be in liquidity crunch
where infrastructure upkeep was concerned if it merely stayed within the constitutional
limits on its role and authority. The reason that federal, state, and local governments so
often become indebted and ultimately financially overextended is that they take on
roles and missions that are beyond the constitutional and statutory limits placed upon
their power. It is not that they do not have a sufficient tax base to draw from, or that
private corporations do a much better job of administering infrastructure.
18
In point of fact, private contractors and corporations are responsible for a great many of
the infrastructure projects built in this country. We’ve seen the obvious quality of their
workmanship: the levees and canals of New Orleans, combined with the MRGO chan-
nel, which stands as a monument to engineering incompetence and oversight, led to the
submerging of 80% of the city of New Orleans in the aftermath of a mere Category 2
hurricane. Our roads do not have the same lifespan as the roads in Europe, precisely
because the mission of European roadbuilders is different than that of U.S. contractors.
U.S. contractors seek to build a road (or for that matter, any other public works project)
to the minimum specifications permitted, using the cheapest possible materials, in order
to drive their profit margins upward.
There’s only one problem with this approach: it’s more expensive over time, as upkeep
costs rise with the price of patching the shoddily constructed roads, dams, levees,
bridges, and other infrastructure concerns. Moreover, as evidenced by the loss of hu-
man life in Katrina, along with the collapsing bridges and so forth, it is unsafe.
Infrastructure is a general welfare concern. We all use infrastructure and we all rely on
it. Therefore, infrastructure design, construction, and maintenance is an appropriate
function of the government. We have the Corps of Engineers, whose sole purpose is to
handle our nation’s infrastructure concerns. There’s only one problem: the Corps is
largely riddled with incestuous relationships between its officers and the private con-
tractors it does business with. The legacy of this has been flawed and malfunctioning
infrastructure, and ultimately these entanglements have resulted in the preventable loss
of American lives.
Privatization is the problem, not the solution. The reason we are in the situation we are
currently in as a nation has a great deal to do with privatization, both of the legitimate
roles of government and the unconstitutional roles of government such as entitlements.
What most Americans do not realize is that something on the order of 3 out of every 4
workers doing the work of the federal government are now private contractors. What’s
more, they cost on average $40,000 more than their public sector counterparts annually.
19
Far from saving money, privatization has ensured that we will spend ever greater
amounts of money in perpetuity.
Furthermore, we have the spectacle of defense contractors like Northrop Grumman

administering entitlements programs like Aid for Families with Dependent Children.
Lest you believe that the expansions of entitlements programs have anything to do with
a real altruism on the part of the federal government towards the poor, the elderly, and
the disabled, consider if you will the fact that private corporations and contractors re-
tain armies of lobbyists to beat back any attempt to cut spending on the entitlements
and programs they administer for the federal government. It is not that we can’t cut
spending because our government is dominated by socialists and leftists; instead, it is
that our corporations have realized that they can generate vast revenue streams for
themselves through government programs. The greatest fans of socialism and govern-
ment overreach today occupy corporate boardrooms.
Any revitalized rightist movement will need to recognize this and resolve to take action
to break these links between government and business, neither of which should exist to
facilitate the other. The government’s chief duty towards business is the enforcement of
contracts and the prevention and prosecution of fraud. It is not to line the pockets of
private corporations with taxpayer dollars and taxpayer financed deficit spending for
ever expanding projects and programs.
Business has no duty towards government whatsoever, other than the observation of
the laws regarding contracts and fraud. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Merchants have
no country. The mere spot that they stand on does not constitute so strong an attach-
ment as that from which they draw their gains.” We must recognize reality. Our goals
for infrastructure are fundamentally incompatible for the goals contractors have for that
same infrastructure. So long as you link the legitimate function of government to the
profit motivations of corporations and contractors, corruption, graft, and shoddy
workmanship will be the result.
Furthermore, by severing this incestuous relationship between government and busi-

ness, we will position ourselves to benefit in an electoral sense. The Democrats and the
20
leftists in this country will be outflanked, for they are in no way inhospitable to busi-
ness. There is a myth about leftism that we must dispense with; namely that it is hostile
and antithetical to the concerns and motivations of business. If businesses find that they
can appropriate leftist movements through their financial support, they will find leftists
eager to receiver whatever corporate largesse businesses and their lobbyists are willing
to shower them with. The great flaw of leftism is that it denies human nature in order
to assume that utopia is possible, and nowhere do we see this more clearly than in the
leftist who has been assimilated into the great intercourse between government and
corporations.
If we take an oppositional position to this, we will effectively expose the Democrats and
the left in this country for what they are: advocates of corporatocracy and opponents of
republican ideals. Moreover, we will render them as hypocrites even to their true be-
lievers, who will be confronted with the reality that today’s Democratic Party is almost
entirely funded and underwritten by financial and corporate interests. In short, the
electorate won’t believe in them, and their true grassroots ideologues won’t support
them. They will be reduced to shambles and disarray. The resulting vacuum will en-
able us to push through reforms that would otherwise be politically impossible to
achieve, because the left will be too disorganized to offer an effective resistance to our
agenda.
Infrastructure offers us the chance not only to rebuild our country, but also to strategi-
cally undermine our opponents on the left. Opportunities must be maximized at the
earliest, so when we execute our reform of infrastructure, we must do so as a united
front in order to efficiently eviscerate the left on this issue.
We must do so by first establishing a historical basis for the legitimate exercise of federal
power towards the end of infrastructure revitalization and development. This will be
rather easy, as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had a dialogue in 1784 con-
cerning the canal system which Jefferson would go on to erect with the planning and
assistance of his Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin (Hagerty, J.E., McClelland C.P. and
Huntington, C.C., History of the Ohio Canals, Their construction, cost, use and partial
21
abandonment, Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, Columbus, OH 1905;).
The initial dialogue indicated Washington’s clear preference, as a March 1784 letter
would indicate: ““not a moment ought to be lost in commencing this business
(http://www.candocanal.org/articles/washington.html).”
This idea would eventually become the Ohio and Erie Canal (as well as several other
canals), and it would prove vital to Washington’s vision for a canal and road system
that would connect all of American and enable the efficient transport of commercial
goods. The project was initially unsuccessful at the national level due to the opposition
of President Madison and the commencement of the War of 1812, but Gallatin and oth-
ers encouraged Ohio to take up the construction and development of the canal system.
Washington’s views on the role of infrastructure in enabling commerce were unmistak-

able. He built a rough road himself, and initially attempted to construct a canal of his
own in order to reach the west with goods. In a letter to Jonathan Boucher, Washington
noted the following in regards to the Potomac Canal:
“. . . Mr Ballendine to shew you the Plan also; as he has met with
pretty considerable incouragement on this side the Potowmack,and has got
Letters (as he says) from Lord Dunmore to Mr Brinley, & other’s, from whom
he expects the Insight necessary to enable him to be instrumental in carrying
into execution the present attempt of extending the Navigation of Potomack
from Tidewater upwards, as far as Fort Cumberland . . .
. . . because, I think the opening of the Potomack will at once fix the
Trade of the Western Country (at least till it may be conducted through the
Mississippi, by New Orleans) through that Channel and end, in amazing
advantages to these two Colonies . . . “
-Letter to Jonathan Boucher, May 5, 1772

22
The simple truth is that our Founders recognized that America’s prosperity and inde-
pendence depended largely on her ability to efficiently transact commerce, and that the
transportation of goods and people was vital to that interest. Article I, Section VIII,
Clause VII clearly establishes the role of the federal government in establishing both
post offices and post roads, while Clause XVII of that same Section and Article call for
“the erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful buildings;”
wherever the seat of the United States government was located.
There is a constitutional and historical precedent for establishing federal involvement,

funding, and oversight of infrastructure in this country. We must understand that in
order to correct the mistakes of the past, we must curb and even eliminate the corrupt-
ing influence of private contractors who seek as their primary end greater profit rather
than the construction of a solid infrastructure and who further seek to lure public offi-
cials and employees to their employment as an incentive to get said officials and em-
ployees to lessen their standards of workmanship. This has been an increasing problem
within the Army Corp of Engineers, whose employees are often assured employment
with contractors upon their departure from public employment so long as they establish
cooperation with the contractors which may not align with the public interest.
As both a political and practical concern, we can position ourselves to profit. By revital-
izing America’s infrastructure, we will combat corruption and ensure that American in-
frastructure is conducive to the long term security interests of our nation and its citi-
zens. The public perception of our efforts will be favorable, and we will ensure contin-
ued electoral dominance by gaining the public favor and trust by our exercise of public
funds as a stewards of the public interest.
We can establish the historical basis for our approach to infrastructure, and we can also
establish a strategic basis for our approach towards the involvement and input of pri-
vate contractors. There is nothing wrong with utilizing private contractors, so long as
the federal government remains the dominant partner and retains the ability to force the
contractors to meet maximum standards of quality and workmanship for the projects
being undertaken. However, there must a be a strict policing of any potential conflicts
23
of interest. Practically speaking, we may require that contractors agree to suspend lob-
bying efforts and refrain from the purchase of political advertising or the support of po-
litical candidates in order to receive access to federal contracts.
Infrastructure Revitalization: A Way to Renew Manufacturing
As we move forward in this country on the matter of infrastructure, while we must in-
sist that infrastructure is ultimately a proper role for the government to oversee and im-
plement, the reality of infrastructure products is that they require vast raw and proc-
essed materials. This reality presents us with a strategic opportunity to bring American
manufacturing back to prominence.
As we are spending taxpayer dollars for infrastructure revitalization, we must orient the
expenditure towards the support and enhancement of domestic manufacturing. All
great modern empires or nations undergo three distinct phases of existence: Agrarian,
Industrial, and Financial. The latter of these three is usually the twilight of the empire
or nation which allows its financial sector to surpass its manufacturing sector in impor-
tance. We have reached that phase, but through a concerted effort, we can bring back
our manufacturing capacity and prolong our exceptionalism.
As we revitalize our infrastructure by rebuilding America’s dams, levees, bridges,

roads, and other implements, we will renew our manufacturing sector in the process. In
doing so, we will be ensuring that opportunities for Americans remain for generations
to come. Furthermore, combined with our tax reforms, the ultimate end of which is to
render America a tax shelter for the world’s businesses and manufacturers in order to
attract their commerce and operations to our markets, our infrastructure renewal will
ensure that our ability to transport goods safely, efficiently, and cheaply remains as-
sured.
Infrastructure revitalization also ties in with national security concerns, as we will be

modernizing our nation’s airports and the air traffic control system as well to ensure
24
that future terror attacks can be detected and thwarted with a minimal loss of civilian
lives. Our ports will be modernized to ensure an efficient flow of exports and imports,
with an emphasis on security in order to combat smuggling and customs evasion. This
will be vital to our overall program of corporate reform, which will be detailed in a sub-
sequent section.
National Security & Intelligence
“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I
do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as
the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be
disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct
they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.” - George Wash-
ington, charge to the Northern Expeditionary Force, Sept. 14, 1775
“‘Treat them [prisoners of war] with humanity, and let them have no reason to complain
of our copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortu-
nate brethren who have fallen into their hands.”-George Washington, charge to the
troops under his command.
“The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any
improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity.”
George Washington, letter to Gouverneur Morris, December 22, 1795
Perhaps no other area of our overall program will require more diligence than that of
national security, with particular regard to intelligence. Simply put, our intelligence
community lacks professionalism and institutional discipline. In large part, this has
been the fault of authors of various policy memos and protocols who sought to legiti-
mize behaviors which were clear violations of the letter and spirit of various laws.
In particular, our intelligence community’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques

stands as a notable example. Torture is seductive. Our greatest inclination when we are
25
wronged is to seek vengeance and reciprocity. The clear distinction we must erect be-
tween ourselves and the left is one of clarity. I write of the left to speak of those descen-
dants of Marxist and Trotskyite thought, the neoconservatives, who ultimately are nei-
ther new nor conservative. Theirs is an old leftist approach, whereby ends ultimately
justify means.
It is incompatible with conservative and libertarian positions, both of which are rooted
in a deep skepticism of human nature and a superior moral and ethical sense. We be-
lieve in the rule of law so much that we actually believe it should be observed in the ac-
tions of officials and employees of the federal government. It’s a novel idea in these
times, but one that is necessary to restore our government’s credibility and rescue our
intelligence community from itself.
It ought to be evident to any true conservative and libertarian just how depraved the
reasoning of a leftist is when he hears John Yoo, former attorney for the Justice Depart-
ment under the Bush Administration, articulate powers for the President which include
the power to order an infant’s testicles crushed in order to compel a parent to give inter-
rogators information about terrorist activity. Mind you, the parent is a suspect. He
hasn’t been arraigned, he likely hasn’t even been charged with wrongdoing if the pat-
tern of Yoo and his allies in the intelligence community is any indication. He certainly
hasn’t been tried and convicted of any wrongdoing. In short, we had an official of the
Justice Department actually advocate for the sexual mutilation of an infant on the
grounds that his parent might have information relevant to U.S. national security.
You cannot reason with such individuals. You should not even bother. Their reasoning
is so obviously bankrupt as to be beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. If you were
sitting across a table from the Devil, would you try to enjoin him to your cause as a
Christian? People who advocate for this sort of activity, even theoretically, are obvi-
ously of a deficient and defective mindset. We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, their
origins are on the left. Dismissal is the only acceptable course. A debate is not required.
Our Founders were men of moral clarity, as the above quotes by George Washington
indicates quite clearly. Let’s consider what John Adams had to say on the matter: “I
26
know of no policy, God is my witness, but this: Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the
best Policy. Blasphemy, Cruelty and Villainy have prevailed and may again. But they
won’t prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are em-
ployed, the less they succeed.”
The more they are employed, the less they succeed. Somehow, that sentence embodies
exactly what is wrong with our interrogation techniques and our defense strategy. You
can call torture by another name, justify it by hypothetical situations, but the true end of
torture comes from the acknowledgement of the facts: it doesn’t work. The initial
claims by Bush Administration officials that torture had produced credible, actionable
intelligence have been demolished. What did produce actionable intelligence were the
interrogation techniques which involved trade-offs between interrogators who treated
detainees and prisoners of war with a basic level of humanity.
Torture ultimately has nothing to do with national security, or even the attainment of
credible information. The primary motive of the torturer is to make himself feel better
by inflicting pain on another human being for perceived and real wrongs. This is be-
cause torturers are sadists. Human beings who entertain these sorts of impulses are
mentally unfit for service in our intelligence community. Our Founding Fathers indi-
cated that they should be punished severely, up to and including capital punishment if
their actions merited it.
Ultimately, the fact that the Geneva Conventions prohibit torture is irrelevant. We don’t
need a statute or a treaty to tell us that this sort of behavior and conduct is deeply im-
moral. We have a moral capacity to discern between the right and wrong in any given
situation. It is ingrained within us by our Maker. We do, however, exist in a society
with traditions and laws which tell us clearly that such behaviors are despicable. Our
own Founders discouraged such actions strongly. To engage in them is to betray the
very principles and ideals that our country is founded upon, and conservatism derives
its chief inspiration from tradition. Libertarian thought also derives its inspiration from
the traditions of our forefathers, but it places a greater emphasis on the rule of law and
principles which explicitly discourage forcible coercion as state policy.
27
For us to correct our national security and intelligence apparatuses, we must acknowl-
edge just how horribly those apparatuses betrayed the foundations of the Republic with
their actions. We must further deal with the reality that those responsible for the ex-
cesses of the Bush Administration must be held accountable for their actions. President
Bush issued a blanket pardon at the end of his presidency which would absolve mem-
bers of his administration for their actions, but the fact remains that those individuals
violated international law and could be prosecuted at the Hague. This is not only ap-
propriate; it is necessary to maintain the credibility of the the United States. We are not
a lawless society, as the following quote by George Washington would confirm: “The
executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any im-
proper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity (Letter to Gouverneur Morris,
December 22, 1795).”
It is time for Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Dick Cheney, and various other men and women of
the Bush Administration and those who carried out the actual torture to be held to an
account before a court of law for their actions. I do not personally subscribe with en-
thusiasm to the surrender of U.S. sovereignty on these and other matters, but the reality
of the situation, given the blanket pardon issued by President Bush, requires that we go
to international courts to achieve a measure of justice for the wrongs committed by
these individuals. The United States cannot and should not sanction torture or the per-
version of its laws in furtherance and legitimization of torture.
Our own Founders would be appalled to see what the principles of the Republic they
founded had been reduced to by men who swore oaths to uphold the Constitution and
the rule of law. Those who excerpt sections of the Federalist Papers in order to twist
U.S. traditions and the Constitution itself so that they can construct a legal justification
for acts that are clearly illegal are guilty of betraying the core principles and convictions
of our Founders. For those of us who truly believe in patriotism, such acts are tanta-
mount to blasphemy against the Republic and slander against the forefathers who shed
their blood and risked their lives to erect a system of laws to limit abuses by such indi-
viduals against the law and the Republic.
28
However, such disregard for the law is ingrained as an institutional reality within the
CIA and other federal agencies. According to the CIA’s own disclosures, in the course
of a given year, its agents and officers violate U.S. and international law over 100,000
times on average (IC21: Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, p. 205). This is an
agency that over the course of its history has administered drugs to individuals without
their knowledge, has conducted various psychiatric experiments which violated medi-
cal ethics and led to grave personal injury for the subjects of those experiments, and all
of this with dubious justifications based on some cloudy and subjective view of national
security. The CIA has funded all manner of quackery, from remote viewing experiments
to extrasensory perception studies, and all of this was done on the taxpayer’s dime.
Simply put, the CIA is lawless and unprofessional, and is in dire need of restructuring
and reform if not total abolition. It has a record of utter contempt for the law, for pro-
fessional standards, and its history is a testimony to the danger of giving a federal
agency wide leeway with minimal oversight. Let us consider the 90s as one decade in
the CIA’s history: we had the first attack on the World Trade Center, which the CIA nei-
ther knew of beforehand nor prevented; we also had the bombing of the Chinese em-
bassy in Belgrade, which was an operation ordered and overseen by the CIA; we had
two African embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and we further had the attack
on the U.S.S. Stark. Over the course of the CIA’s history, there is ample evidence that it
neither generates actionable intelligence of value nor prevents attacks on U.S. interests
with any great regularity.
What the CIA does accomplish is this: it consumes vast sums of money to mount ex-
periments, studies, and operations that are of dubious value to U.S. national security.
Usually those actions are in flagrant violation of the law and involve violating the rights
of U.S. citizens on some level. Breaking and entering, warrantless wiretapping, abduc-
tions, assaults, murders, harassment and intimidation of law-abiding citizens who
haven’t been charged with any crime but have merely fallen under the suspicion of CIA
personnel, all of these are the rule rather than the exception for the CIA. Where it not
for the fact that the CIA was a government agency, you’d think it was an extremely
well-funded and well-equipped criminal syndicate given its record of behavior.
29
Time and time again the CIA emerges from whatever breach of national security it
failed to prevent intact and with even greater funding than before only to fail again at
its task of preventing attacks on American citizens and interests. Its agents who are
linked to intelligence failures are not reprimanded, demoted, or terminated. In many
cases, they are actually promoted and go on to lengthy careers marked by more of the
same incompetence and unprofessionalism which should have led to their disciplining
and termination in its first manifestation.
If the argument is that the CIA saves American lives, then the record is such that we can
clearly show that it does not prevent attacks that were foreseeable and should have
been prevented. We’ve had not one but two attacks on the World Trade Center. We’ve
had multiple breaches of security and outright violations of U.S. military and interna-
tional law by CIA personnel. We’ve had multiple embassies bombed, resulting in the
loss of American lives. We’ve had one embarrassing incident and disclosure after an-
other related to the actions of the CIA.
The CIA has been fortunate to have many of its detractors resort to unsubstantiated
claims and unprovable allegations against its employees. Chief among these claims are
allegations that the CIA either engaged in or turned a blind eye to drug smuggling op-
erations used to fund the Nicaraguan contras. Another claim is that 9/11 was a false
flag operation conducted by the CIA.
Regardless of what you believe where these allegations are concerned, you cannot deny
that they’ve ultimately served the CIA’s interest, as it has been able to dismiss other
provable allegations by lumping them in with the crackpot theories of the fringe. How-
ever, those crackpot allegations in no way excuse what we can prove and what we do
know about the CIA’s track record; namely, that the CIA failed to prevent not one but
two attacks on the World Trade Center in under a decade, and hat its director declared
the intelligence reports of Iraq’s WMD program to be a “slam dunk.” Moreover, the
CIA escaped and eluded serious consequence for all of these instances and ultimately
even managed to expand its power in the long term.
30
We’ve given the CIA and other intelligence agencies vast new powers under the Patriot
Acts, only to see them fail to detect the obvious. The shootings at Fort Hood are the
most obvious issue, although to be fair, we must consider that the issues were largely
domestic and therefore largely under the purview of the FBI. However, the reality of
situation is that Major Nidal Malik Hasan attended the Dar Al-Hirjah in Falls Church,
Virginia in 2001 at the same time as Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hani Hanjour, who would go
on to infamy at two of the hijackers on September 11th. The imam of the mosque was
Anwar al-Awlaki, who is now a regional commander for al-Qaeda. In the months lead-
ing up to the Fort Hood shootings, Hasan and al-Awlaki corresponded via email. In
short, we had a U.S. Army psychiatrist corresponding with a suspected regional com-
mander for al-Qaeda who was also a radical imam who presided over a mosque at-
tended by two 9/11 hijackers.
In a security environment where small children are on no-fly lists as potential terrorists,
and they have to endure searches in order to board a plane, we are expected to believe
that no one the CIA or the FBI could have or should have prevented the Fort Hood
shootings. This strains credulity; moreover, when ABC News can access the 18 emails
and reveal that Hasan asked al-Awlaki whether or not jihad was appropriate (Ross,
Brian, and Schwartz, Rhonda, "Major Hasan's E-Mail: 'I Can't Wait to Join You' in After-
life; American Official Says Accused Shooter Asked Radical Cleric When Is Jihad Ap-
propriate?," ABC News, November 19, 2009), there can be no excuse for the failure of
the CIA and the FBI to engage in the necessary and authorized interagency cooperation
necessary to prevent this sort of event from happening. We established the Department
of Homeland Security and the a Directorate of National Intelligence in order to facilitate
intelligence sharing among government agencies so that these sorts of events could be
prevented. The return on our investment has been less than what we’d hoped for.
We may further consider that al-Awlaki has admitted to contact with the Christmas Day
bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020504028.html), although al-Awlaki denies hav-
ing given Abdulmutallab a fatwa or order authorizing the attack. However, al-Awlaki
has documented contacts and links with the perpetrators of the London subway bomb-
31
ings, the members of a plot to blow up the parliament building in Ottawa, Canada, the
six individuals responsible for a plot to attack Fort Dix, New Jersey. Given this history,
how is it that an active member of the military could be corresponding with al-Awlaki
and not raise sufficient suspicion which would have resulted in his removal from active
duty in order to prevent potential terrorist attacks? Clearly, our intelligence apparatus
isn’t producing the results we’ve invested great sums of money to see, not to mention
the wide legal latitude given to the CIA and other agencies by Congress to achieve re-
sults.
What have we learned? We have learned our intelligence agencies can stop a grand-
mother or a child from getting on a plane in the name of national security, but that they
cannot with any great certainty prevent an actual terrorist from getting on board a flight
bound for the U.S. where they will eventually attempt to detonate explosives in order to
kill 289 people. The problem isn’t power. The CIA and other agencies have wide lee-
way to do whatever is necessary to protect us from the threat of terrorism. They can
suspend civil liberties, engage in warrantless wiretaps, break foreign and domestic laws
with impunity, and still, none of this is enough.
The answer is always an even greater concession by civil libertarians, a greater invest-
ment in national security in the form of increased appropriations, and a wider latitude
to break the law in the name of national security. And yet, these attacks keep coming,
undetected and unprevented by a security and intelligence apparatus that has the entire
economic might and will of the world’s mightiest country behind it. After the fires of
public fear have cooled, and we look objectively at the result of our concessions to the
CIA and the expansions of the national security and intelligence apparatus which oc-
curred with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Director of
National Intelligence, we can measure what we’ve achieved with such methods, and
clearly see that these methods have failed on virtually every count. We might consider
the words of George Washington: “It is on great occasions only, and after time has been
given for cool and deliberate reflection, that the real voice of the people can be known
(George Washington, letter to Edward Carrington, May 1, 1796).”
32
The real voice of the people is on the verge of being revealed. We are about to repudiate
the unwarranted expansion of the intelligence community’s powers and the failures
thereof to produce a safer and more secure America. We are on the cusp of declaring
the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan for what they are: inappropriate commitments and
allocations of American resources to tasks which are inappropriate to the focus of na-
tional security.
To say that it is the job of our military services to go about building countries and sow-
ing democracies is to surrender to the utopian impulse of liberalism. That is, it is to ac-
knowledge the efficacy of government action to produce utopias of democracies and
freedom. No one wants to acknowledge the troubling truth about the Middle East;
namely, that its current geopolitical realities represent the majoritarian sentiment of its
residents.
It is not that Saudi Arabians, Syrians, Jordanians, Iraqis, and the assorted other Arabic
citizens of various nations are not free to rise up and institute their preferred system of
government. In effect, the problem with the Middle East is not a lack of democracy; it is
instead an excess of democracy. To understand why this is the case, you must under-
stand the dominant ideology of region, which is Islam. Islam and the left have a rather
interesting relationship. On the one hand, the left decries Islam’s treatment of women
and homosexuals, but makes a theoretical distinction of the sort which enables them to
deny in their hearts that the “real” or “true” Islam permits such encroachments on indi-
vidual identity and freedom. On the other hand, the left upholds the communitarian
ideal at the heart of Islam which makes the resources the common source of benefit to
the people. At the end of the day, the chief employer in every Middle Eastern country is
the government. Private enterprise does not exist without the permission of the gov-
ernment, and the natural resources are owned by the government and administered by
its officials (usually a monarchical family).
And like every other socialist endeavor, corruption and consolidation of wealth in the
concentrated hands of the few is the end result. While the majority of Saudis are con-
tent with scraps from the aristocracy’s table because of what they believe, the truth is
33
that their lot in life is the result of their consent to such an arrangement. It is majoritar-
ian sentiment and consent which enables the Saudi royals to act as they do. The Wah-
habists are a reflection on some level of what the majority (or at least a significant por-
tion) of Saudis believe and seek to practice. It is not that they need guarantees of indi-
vidual liberty; as a practical matter, the Saudis are exercising their freedom to act and to
choose the ideology which suits their personal beliefs.
The idea that we will ride into the region atop whited steeds and give them freedom is
laughable. They already have it, and their lot in life is due to the choices they have
made. No regime exists without the consent of its governed. The consent may be co-
erced, manufactured, or manipulated, but the reality is that it is still consent.
The problem in the Middle East is not the lack of democracy and freedom; it is instead
that democracy reflects the reality of the majority of its residents. The de-Baathification
of Iraqi government and security forces currently underway is the majoritarian will of
the Iraqi people, the vast majority of whom happen to be Shiites who remember with
fresh resentment and hot anger the way the Baathists treated them under the rule of
Saddam Hussein. Do we see Shiites rioting in the streets of Baghdad over this in-
fringement on the individual rights of Sunnis and Baathists, as it is their practical and
natural right to do in the face of government tyranny against the paper guarantees of
individual rights supposedly contained within the Iraqi constitution? No, we do not.
Riding into the Middle East is not about sowing democracy. It is simply about overrid-
ing the brand of democracy currently in place, a democracy which consolidates power
in the hands of whatever despot has managed to achieve the practical consent of the
people. It is about rooting up the democracy which currently exists in order to sow a
different type of democracy whereby U.S. corporations and private interests can take
the place of the former despot and gain access to vast natural resources. Pretending
otherwise is self-delusion.
It is not a liberal statement of faith to say that the Iraqi war was about oil. It was and
still is about oil. At the end of the day it is about preserving the same socialist experi-
ment whereby most Iraqis are subsidized by the government, but the lion’s share of
34
their nation’s wealth goes to those who hold real power. Do we not know that Saddam
Hussein consumed that wealth for his own ends? What would make us think our cor-
porations would not covet his place in the organization of Iraqi society? Do we really
think that they are that altruistic and committed to capitalism after witnessing the way
they demand tax abatements and subsidies from whatever government they engage in
commerce with? At the end of the day, the most committed socialists in America reside
in corporate boardrooms and hold the lion’s share of the wealth, as 10% of the U.S.
population holds 80% of the overall national wealth and 90% of the publicly traded
stock.
In such an environment, therefore, we must understand that our defense and intelli-
gence apparatus is a mere extension of the will of a socialist cadre that has already ap-
propriated power and taken the government for its own ends. We must dispense with
the notion that America is free, capitalist, and a republic in anything other than name.
America is socialist, and has been socialist for nearly eight decades.
The results are telling enough: like those socialist democracies in the Middle East, the
government claims vast powers for itself to confiscate the natural resources of the na-
tion which it governs, along with the personal wealth of individuals in order to redis-
tribute that wealth as it sees fit. And in the end, the result is not a deracinated wealthy
class, but an aristocracy of wealth that is ever more consolidated and concentrated than
ever before.
What you must understand about our efforts in intelligence and national security is this:
we are not fighting to restore democracy in the United States. We are fighting tooth and
nail against democracy, for democracy in antithetical to our national identity as a consti-
tutional republic where majorities and governments are limited by the explicit stipula-
tions of the Constitution and the guarantees of individual rights contained within the
amendments to that document. Socialists love democracy. Majorities can be misled.
Their consent can be obtained through fear or through the maintenance of the very
worst traits of human nature: greed, covetousness, and hatred.
35
Before you look at the current regime in power and assert that we are fighting against
creeping socialism, you must realize that socialism has already arrived. The reason our
society doesn’t work is that socialism has already been entrenched. Anti-trust exemp-
tions exist in blatant opposition to capitalism and free markets, yet they are the hall-
mark of our healthcare system.
The intelligence agencies and our defense apparatus are an extension of socialism. They
are made up of men and women who are well-intentioned and earnest, but at the end of
the day, these men and women are servants of a system that exists in defiance of the
very republican ideals and constitutional principles this nation was founded upon. The
reason that the CIA doesn’t work to prevent security breaches with any regularity is
that it isn’t set up to defend. It is set up instead to promote the interests of the cadre of
elitists who hold our government in their grasp throughout the world.
The primary mission of the CIA is not, nor has it ever been, the prevention of attacks
against Americans. It is the advancement of the commercial interests of committed so-
cialists within our government and businesses throughout the world, the replacement
of existing forms of democracy with new forms that are more conducive to the interests
of our corporate power structure and its ownership in that 10% who have managed to
concentrate the country’s wealth in their hands over the eight decades they’ve held and
deployed power to their own ends.
This is not a paranoid conspiracy theory, nor is it an attack on capital. For the United
States to ever have hope of surviving into the future, we will have to restore free market
principles to our economy, and limitations to our government. The following quote will
provide some clarification as to what I mean:
"A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed.
It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat.
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over genera-
tions, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving
lunatic."-Dresden James.
36
My point is that we do not exist in a Republic any longer, and we haven’t existed in a
Republic as a practical matter for some time. Our mission as conservatives and liber-
tarians is to educate the masses to this preposterous truth without coming across as rav-
ing lunatics. Make no mistake about it, they will be upset. They will doubt, they will
protest, they will deny, and ultimately, if we are effective, they will come to accept the
preposterous truth as their reality and do one of two things: either they will resign
themselves to tyranny and passive servitude to our existing regime; or they will rise up
in determined outrage to restore the Republic and demolish the current regime.
We must resolve to take back our military, and our intelligence apparatus to restore
them to a defensive emphasis, and we must educate future generations of soldiers that
they are never to act as mercenaries for their government and confuse that with patriot-
ism. They are not auxiliaries to the commercial interests which currently have a hold on
our government. They are servants to the Constitution and defenders of the Republic,
and they answer to that document before they answer to generals and even majorities.
They are to defend individual liberties, and not the nation or its government. The two
should not be confused, for they are very often in opposition to each other.
Certain encouraging trends have emerged from within our defense and intelligence ap-
paratuses. We have seen the emergence of Oath Keepers, which the mainstream media
as a corporate owned and operated auxiliary condemns as an extremist and even trea-
sonous lot. These groups are growing, and they are a sign that our hopes of restoring
liberty are not in vain. They are not traitors. They are the very defenders of liberty and
they have awakened of their own volition to honestly acknowledge what this nation has
become, and they are determined to stand in force against the abuses of a government
which has betrayed the core principles and ideals of the Republic.
It is time to awaken the civilians of this country, and to mobilize them along the same
lines. If we cannot win at the ballot box owing to the tyranny of majorities who would
overthrow the Constitution and elect a government which would seek to erode the very
liberties they exist to uphold and advance, well, then, the government has outlived its
usefulness, and the majority has set itself in opposition to the Constitution and is there-
37
fore illegitimate. You cannot use individual liberties in order to overthrow those very
liberties. The vote does not exist to enable a deceived and drunken majority to erode
private property, free speech, the right to bear arms, and the right to be free in one’s
home and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The elements that have emerged from within our national defense and intelligence ap-
paratus to speak out against the government are correct to do so, but they must also be
made aware of the need to speak out against majoritarian tyranny which seeks to in-
voke individual liberty in order to destroy that very liberty. If necessary, they will need
to come to terms with the idea that they will be called upon to fight the majoritarian ty-
rants in order to save the Republic and the guarantees of individual liberty which give
us our national identity and the exceptionalism thereof.
38
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2 0 1 6 I N I T I A T I V E

THE BLUEPRINT: RESTORING LIBERTY TO GOVERNMENT

Educating and conditioning voters to react skeptically to government proposals which

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

“[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified

By stressing these facts, we can systematically delegitimize the entitlements, subsidies,

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

Financial transparency is critical to preventing fraud and achieving investor confidence

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

The general measurement of whether or not we eliminate a government agency or pro-

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

What we want to do is to make it absolutely impossible for future Congresses to expand

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

George Washington, Message to the House of Representatives, December 3, 1793

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

Infrastructure Concerns and Opportunities

We have an internal crisis in this country. Our infrastructure is corroding. While we

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

Furthermore, we have the spectacle of defense contractors like Northrop Grumman

Furthermore, by severing this incestuous relationship between government and busi-

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

Washington’s views on the role of infrastructure in enabling commerce were unmistak-

“. . . Mr Ballendine to shew you the Plan also; as he has met with

pretty considerable incouragement on this side the Potowmack,and has got

he expects the Insight necessary to enable him to be instrumental in carrying

into execution the present attempt of extending the Navigation of Potomack

from Tidewater upwards, as far as Fort Cumberland . . .

Mississippi, by New Orleans) through that Channel and end, in amazing

advantages to these two Colonies . . . “

-Letter to Jonathan Boucher, May 5, 1772

There is a constitutional and historical precedent for establishing federal involvement,

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

Infrastructure Revitalization: A Way to Renew Manufacturing

As we revitalize our infrastructure by rebuilding America’s dams, levees, bridges,

Infrastructure revitalization also ties in with national security concerns, as we will be

National Security & Intelligence

George Washington, letter to Gouverneur Morris, December 22, 1795

In particular, our intelligence community’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

2016 Initiative The Blueprint: Restoring Liberty

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