> Chapter 12
"LET'S FIX
(By Alan B. Jones. Pub. 1994 by ABJ Press,
Let's briefly review the strategy we outlined in our introduction. We
observed that corrective actions aimed at fixing our many problems would
invariably be misdirected or insufficient unless we understood reasonably well
how those problems originated. We have therefore attempted to demonstrate in
the preceding chapters that a secret war has been declared against us by
certain monied elites, aimed at weakening us and
ultimately bringing us under their dominion. It is our belief, however, that
once enough of us recognize our peril, we will be successful in undertaking the
drastic actions required to restore our national independence and substantially
eliminate our several problems, down to and including their roots.
In Let's Fix
LFA Chapter 2 (Currency Stability) deals with
abolishing the Federal Reserve System and returning our banking system to a
gold-backed system essentially free of federal government involvement,
including prohibiting the banks from holding government bonds as
"assets." G. Edward Griffin has clearly shown in our current Chapter
5 that: (1) the Federal Reserve System was conspiratorially created exactly by
agents of the elites who are seeking to dominate us, (2) the system is nothing
but a banking cartel acting for the benefit of those elites in concert with
similar central banks in other countries, and (3) the system's main purpose is
to enable the financing of government deficits such as to produce both the
inflation which has destroyed our incentive to save and the monstrous national
debt which today's and tomorrow's taxpayers must labor to pay off. Even if our
generation is successful in forcing current congresses to live within balanced
budgets, the Fed must be abolished in
order to emphasize to future generations how strongly we have come to feel
about never again permitting the central government to pay for whatever it
wants with fiat "money" which it can create at will.
LFA Chapter 3 (Balanced Budgets) proposes
measures which will facilitate the creation of balanced budgets, but will in
addition absolutely prevent the federal government from running an ultimate
deficit. Our purpose, of course, is to force politicians to be fiscally
responsible, that seldom being their natural inclination, and not at all what
the elites desire. The centerpiece of the proposal is a constitutional
amendment requiring that any residual unbalance at the end of a fiscal year
between receipts and expenditures (including budgeted debt retirement) be
either paid to or billed to the several states in proportion to their
populations. It might help to time these checks or bills sent to the states so
as to be highly visible during congressional elections.
LFA Chapter 4 (The Tax Load) addresses the
core issue facing our citizen taxpayers who see an ever-increasing percentage
of the fruits of their labor being expropriated by various levels of government
and spent on non-productive activities - what the
LFA Chapter 5 (The Income Tax) deals with the
abomination which is our federal income tax. It is to be abolished, along with
the IRS and the whole tax preparation industry, and the 16th Amendment
repealed, to prevent the income tax from easily reappearing. In its place we
propose a federal consumption tax on the sale of services and goods-for-use.
Gone will be taxes on personal income and corporate profits, and thus also on
interest, dividends, and capital gains. With inflation halted (LFA Chapters 2 and 3), savings and gross capital formation
should balloon, the economic stagnation brought on by regressive economic
policies should stop, employment and general economic growth should blossom,
and our country should enjoy renewed economic strength (rather than further
elite-engendered weakness) throughout the world. We urge that state income
taxes also be abolished and replaced by similar sales taxes on consumption. The
states should collect the federal sales taxes and forward them to the Treasury,
one check per state per fiscal quarter. Many more of the details are discussed
in LFA Chapter 5.
This change is extremely important, and will strike at the root of the
elites' attack on our American society. Our free society is seen by them as the
only entity on earth still capable of growing strong enough economically and
socially to challenge their program for dominating the earth. They are
therefore attacking our ability to grow economically, their tools being waste
forced upon us (by war, drugs, welfare, environmentalism, etc.) and the taxation of our free economy's engine of
growth. We have thus been conned into taxing our incomes, which are the
rewards we pay ourselves for our productive successes. We propose to reverse
this perverse policy of penalizing production, and henceforth tax consumption
rather than productive enterprise. Note that this will impose taxes on the spending of accumulated or inherited
wealth, and will correspondingly reduce taxes on those working to earn incomes
through productive labor.
LFA Chapter 6 (Social Security and Pensions)
proposes an actuarially sound alternative to the existing Social Security
system, which is now generally recognized to be nothing more or less than a
pyramid scheme, a Ponzi game, illegal when practiced
privately. Attractive at first, with many payers per payee, it has finally
reversed, and taxes are becoming prohibitive on today's fewer
number of workers supporting our retired payees. The system weakens the
society by reducing individual responsibility and increasing dependence on Big
Brother. The LFA replacement will phase out Social
Security and all other governmental pension systems, making government
employees subject to the same private pension systems as other citizens, and
grossly reducing the federal government's budget.
The replacement is a private policy containing certain common minimum
provisions. A worker will be required to purchase at least the minimum policy
from the company of his choice. The policy shall be capable of being
"rolled over" to another company, at the worker's option. The minimum
policy shall provide a minimum retirement income, protecting society from large
numbers of indigent retirees. Larger premiums may be paid at the worker's
option to yield larger retirement income, or income for a non-working spouse.
The "phase-in" process will take a number of years, and is discussed
at length in LFA. The accumulated funds, however,
belong to the policy owner, are earmarked for his future use, and are beyond
the reach of the U.S. Treasury or Congress. These funds will add mightily to
the capital accumulations available to fuel our free-enterprise capitalist
economy, and should provide a major boost to our country's economic strength
and our society's well-being.
LFA Chapter 7 (Medicare and Medical Issues)
takes on our medical care system. It was working pretty well until Medicare
came along, at which time large segments of our society began receiving
benefits which no private entity had
to find the money to pay for. Only government had to pay, and it doesn't care
to economize, since infinite tax resources are always available, or the money
can be created if necessary. Furthermore, the more money that is spent, the
larger the bureaucracy that is justified to handle it.
LFA's hard-nosed message: There is no free lunch! The job is to wean ourselves off of the
government teat to which we have been seduced, get the government out of the
medical care business, and return to a viable, long-term, lower cost system in
which the great majority of our citizens accept personal responsibility for
paying for their own medical care, including premiums for private insurance
covering at least those large expenses which cannot otherwise be afforded. To
protect society from large numbers of medically indigent, workers will be
required to purchase at least minimum basic policies. The policies will be
actuarially sound, will belong to individuals, and will travel with them wherever
employed. They will contain annuity elements to enable continuation of coverage
during periods of unemployment and to build up funds adequate for the larger
medical expenses statistically expected after retirement. Welfare recipients
may be granted minimum basic policies, as state welfare agencies may find
appropriate.
Many other details are covered in LFA Chapter
7, with special attention given to the FDA, the AMA, and malpractice litigation
issues. The primary results to be expected, however, are (1) a huge intractable
item will be removed from the federal budget, (2) individuals will regain a
substantial measure of independence from Big Brother government, and (3)
medical costs will stop their upward spiral as consumers realize that they must
pay for their medical purchases, as they do for any other service, and as they
return to shopping for the lowest cost treatments adequate to their needs. That
is, the waste associated with
accepting marginally useful expensive services that someone else has to pay for
will be severely reduced, to the ultimate benefit of us all.
LFA Chapter 8 (The Four-Graybeard Criteria)
digresses long enough to present a philosophical foundation for "good
law" to which we have tried to adhere. We briefly present these thoughts
here to whet the appetite and encourage further study. First is the Tenth
Amendment to the Constitution, which expressed the intent of our founders that
the states yield to the federal government those powers and only those powers that were listed in the Constitution. Second
is Frederic Bastiat, who says that man's fatal flaw
is to satisfy his desires with the least pain, including the possible use of
plunder, especially legal plunder. The test for legal plunder is to ask whether
a given law takes away something belonging to one person and gives it to
someone else to whom it did not belong. Third is Albert Jay Nock, who declares
that a corrupt government does not seek to abolish crime, but rather to
maintain a monopoly over it. His test for a good law is to ask whether it tends
to increase or decrease the government's capacity to exploit its citizens.
Fourth and last is Ayn Rand, who declares that the
only legitimate function of government is to protect individuals from attempts
by others to violate their individual natural rights (to life, liberty, and
property) by force. The test for a good law is therefore to ask whether it
prevents or punishes the infringement by physical force of an individual's
inalienable rights.
How we wish these several criteria might be carved in stone within the
halls of Congress!
LFA Chapter 9 (Welfare) addresses welfare.
This money hog is so blatant that most people have caught on. Since LBJ declared his War on Poverty, we have spent, i.e., wasted, about $5 trillion on federal welfare,
an amount about equal to our present national debt. About the same number of
citizens are in "poverty" now as were in 1964. As this is written
(1996), Congress has just managed to pass a law sending block grants to the
states to administer these programs with somewhat more freedom than before.
What is needed, of course, is to remove welfare from the federal budget, reduce
federal taxes by that amount, and announce to the states that they may keep any
or all parts of the program that they wish provided they pay for it, and
otherwise take on the total responsibility for welfare within their own states.
As we all know by now, the federal welfare system has produced generational
cycles of dependence on government, with single-parent families producing male
juveniles headed for gangs, crime, and jail, and females headed for
prostitution and the next generation of single-parent families. The LFA proposal will eliminate this monster of waste and
societal damage which the Iron Mountain folks specifically recommended, will
vastly reduce the federal budget, and will put the responsibility for welfare
all the way back to the county level, where it might be effectively monitored
and locally paid for.
LFA Chapter 10 (Bailout Surprises) proposes in
one fell swoop to eliminate another host of unwise, unconstitutional, and
fiscally unsound government programs capable of causing major taxpayer pain,
including the federal deposit insurance program that has recently caused
taxpayer losses on the order of $500 billion (the S&L
bailout). We propose, simply, that essentially all federal insurance, price guarantee, loan, and loan guarantee
programs be abolished, over an appropriate transitional time period, but while
always honoring existing contracts. Bank loan guarantees, mortgage guarantees,
farm loans and price supports. small business loans, and myriad other similar
programs will be a thing of the past. Such programs inevitably produce
widespread economic waste, i.e., they
transfer their losses to taxpayers, precisely as a result of government being
conned (or bribed) into assuming responsibility for the rightful obligations of
various private individuals. groups, or companies.
LFA Chapter 11 (Drugs) seeks to deal with the
issue at the prime focus of the EIR's Dope, Inc. which we reviewed above. The
program of addicting Americans to narcotic drugs is clearly the mother of all
efforts to produce waste. perhaps second only to a good, healthy war. We
needn't go again into the monstrous social and economic costs, as they are now well
known. We labeled the proposed LFA solution
"legalization," but are now led to alter that to "medicalization," to conform more closely to labels
coming into more common public use. In a word, we would continue to prohibit
the illicit importation and sale of narcotic drugs, but would enable the
low-cost sale of such drugs by state or state-licensed agencies to medically
certified addicts, as may be provided by state law. This is our effort to
eliminate the repeat "hooked addict" market, which will take the bulk
of the profit out of the illicit trade, and essentially eliminate drug-pushing
as a viable occupation.
Two other major areas may be attacked, as suggested by the EIR. One is money laundering, though we believe that as
street distribution declines following drug "medicalization,"
fewer dollars will require laundering, making detection that much more
difficult. Special attention should be given, however, to "private
international banking" adjuncts to domestic banks, as described by the EIR, and laws aimed at preventing illicit funds from being
deposited should be strengthened.
The last major area to be attacked, if we really wish to get serious,
involves an attack on the overall drug system, utilizing laws presently on the
books against criminal syndicalism. We should bring to clear public attention
the roles being played by the Golden Triangle countries, Afghanistan, Communist
China, the Hong Kong heroin labs, the HongShang, the RIIA and CFR, Mexico, the Call
Cartel, the Bronfmans, the U.S. mobs in their employ,
the "rogue" British financial institutions controlling these
elements, and their American subsidiaries. Americans suspected of being
involved in the syndicate, whether overtly engaged in banking, government
(e.g., the CIA), or local crime, should be publicly charged and tried. Without
such public exposure, the American public is unlikely to rouse itself
sufficiently to even support the "medicalization"
program discussed above.
We will next discuss LFA Chapter 13
(Education), and then back up to Chapter 12. As William Mcllhany
described in his The Tax-Exempt Foundations, the secret minutes of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace requested the Rockefeller Foundation to take
on the "responsibility" for controlling education regarding domestic
matters, while Carnegie would do the same for international matters. They so
agreed. The education was to produce socialization, which would in turn enable
a "comfortable merger" into a whole which could readily be controlled
by the elites at the top. "Comfortable merging" required the prior
"dumbing down" of American society, and
socialization required suppression of individual initiative and responsibility.
We see such suppression and dumbing down both being
advanced in our public schools, and frozen there by the monopolistic
straitjacket of labor law supportive of the personnel and programs of America's
biggest labor union, the National Education Association.
The LFA Chapter 13 solution is to empower
parents with state vouchers, presentable to any school of the parents' choice,
which, if the school agrees to accept the student, will be presented by the
school to the state in payment or partial payment for the tuition charges for
that child. The state is to be denied authority to interfere with the educational
policies, methods, materials, or teacher qualifications of such voucher
schools, except perhaps to deny voucher schools the right to hire convicted
felons as teachers. New schools of various kinds should sprout like weeds,
particularly in our crime-ridden city slums. Public schools will lose revenue
as their enrollments drop, and they can be expected to either reform in a hurry
or go out of business. Good teachers can be expected to drift into the
rejuvenated private schooling system with little difficulty. It took a long
time for the elites to capture the public schools as effectively as they have,
and it will take a similarly long time to rebuild an honest system. As it
gradually takes hold, however, with no centralized "authority" running
it, we can expect to look forward to a strengthened national backbone and an
enhanced ability of our body politic to uncover relevant historical truths,
learn from them, and further strengthen and improve the societal heritage to be
passed on to our children.
LFA Chapter 12 (Crime) examines "how to
avoid growing criminals." Frederic Bastiat, as
we noted a few paragraphs earlier, assigned the source of crime to man's fatal
flaw of seeking to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain, including,
for example, stealing instead of earning. While it seems that human society
will always include some residual number of predators, it should certainly
strive to reduce that number to a tolerable minimum. We have instead, in recent
years, built up three major industries which have been exactly
counterproductive in that regard, namely, the welfare, drug, and public
education industries.
Our proposed solutions are to tear down those existing industries, and
rebuild them where appropriate, taking care to protect their impacted victims
in the process. Welfare will be managed locally, with welfare recipients given
incentives to help them shed their dependency and acquire skills leading to
self-sufficiency and self-esteem. Two-parent families will again become
"normal," with adult role models to help guide children toward
healthy adult lives. The drug scourge will be stopped, and the kingpins
identified, prosecuted, and incarcerated where possible. The greatest single
cause of societal waste operative today will thus be stopped, in the process
enabling us to substantially reduce our prison populations. Education reform
will enable new paths to be opened to young people as viable alternatives to
gangs and street crime. An additional supportive change would be to permit
states to lower or abolish the minimum wage for minors, to enable
employers to give them a temporary boost into the adult job market.
LFA Chapter 12 also contains several proposals
for reforms within the criminal justice system. It proposes: enabling adult
court access to juvenile crime records, escalating sentences steeply for repeat
offenses, repealing parole board authority to reduce sentences, mandating
restitution for valuatable losses in criminal
sentences, and enabling convicts to work during incarceration to help pay
restitution, incarceration costs, and any other debts.
LFA Chapter 14 (Liability Litigation) concerns
our growing litigiousness. In this arena, one special interest group (trial
lawyers) has acquired a cash cow for its members by creating law which encourages
anyone to sue any deep pocket in sight for any alleged slight, shortcoming, or
injury, at no cost to oneself. Juries can impose arbitrarily large judgments,
frequently in proportion to the thespian abilities of the trial lawyer, and a
percentage of which the lawyer will take as his fee. Doctors and other medical
personnel and institutions are thus forced to pay huge premiums for malpractice
insurance, we all are forced into purchasing huge automobile liability
coverage, companies fear class action judgments which can bankrupt them, etc.
It all amounts to another source of monstrous waste - Bastiatian
plunder - which must be paid for by taxpayers and other hard-working victims of
that plunder everywhere.
The LFA's proposed solution is to confine the
authority of juries in liability suits to establishing the percentage of fault
among all the litigants, including the appellants, with percentages assigned as
appropriate for "no one" (e.g., "acts of God") or
"unknown" or "non-litigant(s)." Monetary losses will be
determined by accountants and appraisers selected by the litigants or appointed
by the court, and shall exclude "pain and suffering" and punitive
fines. Awards in liability suits will then be taken as the percent fault of
each defendant times that professionally determined monetary loss.
LFA Chapter 15 (Abortion) involves an issue
which is tearing our society apart and getting in the way of electing
legislators equipped to help solve our many other problems. The issue arose
from our Supreme Court's decision (Roe vs Wade) to
tell the states what they could and could not do with respect to abortion. The
Constitution, however, does not give either the
Supreme Court, the Congress, or any other element of the federal government the
power to legislate or adjudicate with respect to the medical procedure of
abortion. (The Supreme Court, of course, should refrain from legislating on any matter.) The LFA's proposed fix is
simply for the Congress to exercise its constitutional authority to enact a
resolution denying the Supreme Court jurisdiction over suits concerning
abortion, such matters being reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment. The
issue would then properly go back to the individual states, which can be
expected to legislate as each sees fit.
LFA Chapter 16 (AIDS) considers what to do
about the "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome." The second sentence
in that chapter reads, "It is a disease which present scientific knowledge
attributes to a virus commonly labeled the HIV, which stands for Human Immunodeficiency
Virus." Since those words were written in 1994, new scientific knowledge
has come into existence which directly challenges the HIV hypothesis. Evidence
has been presented that AIDS is instead a set of opportunistic diseases
contracted as a result of a person's immune system being weakened by the
long-term use of drugs. Its only tie to homosexuality is that drug use by
homosexuals is common to heighten their sexual response. (See Inventing the AIDS Virus by Dr. Peter H.
Duesberg, pub. 1996 by Regnery
Publishing, Inc.,
This development seems unlikely to gain common public currency in the
immediate future, as federal health agencies and private researchers on the
public dole seem determined to bury it. This public corruption seems a small
matter compared to our other major aggravations, but the publication of Duesberg's research is sufficient for us to warn readers
off of the severe corrective actions to the AIDS "epidemic" which we
wrote into LFA Chapter 16. Congressional hearings on
the matter should clearly be held.
LFA Chapter 17 (Illegal Immigration) addresses
a problem of growing concern. There are perhaps two major aspects to this
problem which are damaging to our society. First, large numbers of illegals flowing across our borders are unlikely to be
assimilated into our society, not having had to go through the legally required
processes of learning our language and the basics of our society's political
institutions. They remain, instead, fodder for revolutionary demagogues.
Second, the illegals have found it easy to apply for
and receive public assistance benefits without having their illegal status
challenged. They therefore continue to come, drawn by readily available
taxpayer-supplied benefits. A third specific problem is that pregnant women
illegally enter the U.S. just before their babies are due and present
themselves to hospitals to have their babies, who then become legal U.S.
citizens, enabling the later entry of the baby's whole family. LFA proposals to correct these matters include (1)
authorizing agencies delivering taxpayer-financed services to deny those
services to anyone who cannot tender proof of citizenship or of permanent
resident status, (2) authorizing such local agencies, including law enforcement
agencies, to assist in identifying, apprehending, holding, and delivering such
illegal immigrants to the INS for deportation proceedings, and (3) enacting a
constitutional amendment denying citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to
non-citizen parents.
LFA Chapter 18 (Foreign Policy) gets back to
the heart of the several programs created by the elites to subdue and control
us and all the other countries of the world that are to come under their
dominion. The best-known instruments of control which they are using are the
United Nations, the International Mone¬tary Fund, the
World Bank, and most recently the NAFTA and GATT control organizations, in
particular the World Trade Organization. The LFA
proposed that we opt out of the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank, and we would
presently extend that to rescinding our membership in NAFTA and GATT and the
WTO. The defense of Europe should be left to Europeans, and
The LFA dealt sparsely with trade issues, and
corrective actions should be beefed up. (1) As we attempt to separate our
country from the financial power of the European banking families, we can
expect our new gold-backed dollar to come under attack. We must therefore be
meticulous in assuring that the gold conversion rate be set such as to avoid
disastrous gold loss upon presentation of accumulated stores of foreign dollars
and short-term claims on dollars. (2) Trade treaties between the
LFA Chapter 19 (Congress) seeks first to
generalize what Congress has done wrong to get us into so much trouble. (Even
though various of the elites' tax-free foundations may
have proposed bad legislation, Congress passed it.) Simply, they ignored the
Tenth Amendment and legislated on matters which the Constitution prohibited.
The Supreme Court, in all the years after having been packed by FDR, went
along. The LFA proposes two categories of corrective
actions - one dealing with reducing the corrupting motivations acting on our
legislators, and one with reducing the field of opportunity for exploitive
legislation.
In the first category we recommend term limits, adequate salaries and
maintenance while in office, equal and adequate election financing for both
incumbents and challengers, expulsion from office for receiving gifts or
failing to report proffered gifts from PACs or others, and criminalizing the
offering of gifts to legislators. LFA discusses these
several matters at length.
In the second category, since the Tenth Amendment was so easy to ignore,
we recommend that the Bill of Rights be beefed up by adding another amendment
specifically prohibiting the Congress from making any law respecting: (a) any
activity or project not impacting substantially equally the citizens of all the
states; (b) the health, education, welfare, feeding, housing, clothing, or
fiscal support of the citizens; (c) benefits granted to one entity at the
expense of a competing entity of the same kind; and (d) the economic regulation
of any business. Item a will return local projects to local jurisdictions and
halt the practice of logrolling. Item b will move great hunks of the federal
budget back to the states. Item c will remove from corruptible legislators the
ability to decide which enterprise will prosper and which will not. Item d will
free the country's farms and businesses from federal meddling.
These are measures aimed at clearing the decks for the really important
measures which Congress and the other branches of our federal government must
pursue if we are to regain and preserve for future generations our middle class
freedom and our national vitality. Most sorely needed is the public exposure,
by our own federal government, of the fact that an undeclared war has been
initiated against our free middle-class society, plus the identification of the
combatants and the various battlegrounds on which that war is being fought. Our
final contribution toward this last need is contained in our epilogue - a
remarkable 1974 article by novelist Taylor Caldwell who eloquently summarized
the problem and appealed to Americans to hear and to act. We can find no better
words to conclude our own presentation.