The following is a sort of a minimal list of reforms which I'd view as needed at this point....
Money System and Financial Reforms
The money and banking system which was set up in 1913, along with the income tax and IRS which was set up to pay interest on debt while using debt as a primary basis for money, has reached the end of its useful lifespan. Glass-Steagal should be implemented immediately, the so-called "Super Priority" of derivative counterparties hould be abolished immediately, and a major effort should be made to devise a rational system of money for the United States. The Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the income tax should be abolished, and the power to coin money itself should be reclaimed by congress. No rational government should ever borrow money into existence.
Political Reforms
The first item of meaningful political reform HAS TO BE runoff elections or instant runoff elections for all public offices. Nobody should ever fear to vote his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold any public office with less than 50% of the vote.
There should be a None-Of-Above choice on all ballots for public office and if that choice ever wins, then the other candidates should be barred for life from holding ANY public office and the parties sponsoring them should be barred for at least ten years from sponsoring candidates for that particular office. The penalty for running dead wood for public offices should be severe.
There should also be some mechanism to prevent utterly unqualified people from holding high offices. Certainly a candidate for president or vice president, or for US Senator or member of the House of Representatives should need to obtain the same basic and simple secret level security clearance which anybody would need to be a guard at the gate of any military base in our land. That isn't asking for much but it would have spared us from the last two democrat presidents.
Another item on such a list would be a provision that when a president is impeached and removed, his VP goes out the door with him and the office is either vacant until the next election or an emergency election is held to fill the office for the remainder of the current term. Granted removing a president should be difficult but it should not be impossible and if we couldn't remove Slick, we'd not have been able to remove Hitler or Nero either.
Another item on such a voters' bill of rights should be something which would eliminate voting fraud for all time.
Our entire voting system is fubar and needs to be replaced and a fraud-proof system would not be that hard to devise; it would involve biometrics and p2p networking and the idea that ANYBODY could do his own vote tally and that all tallies should match. It also should involve the idea that a person could have total assurance that his vote did not disappear or get counted for the other guy. What I'd envision would be keeping my vote on MY computer with a fingerprint reader like you see on all govt computers i.e. a record of my contact info and a biometric reading and a national database to check biometrics for me and everybody else, and a p2p network to allow ANYBODY to do his own tally by calling for votes the same way you'd ask or a copy of "you aint nothing but a hound dog" on Kazaa, and all tallies should produce the same number within statistical limits.
We should consider the possibility that, when an election is within one percentage point, we send both people to congress with half of a vote each.
There is also a question as to the extent the people should be voting on some issues directly since we now have the technology to allow that, while the founding fathers did not. You could get some of these social issues settled once and for all and out of politics, and you could limit the scope for corruption and bribery by letting the people themselves settle at least some kinds of issues.
Drugs
The "War on Drugs" and the Prison/Industrial Complex should be ended immediately, along with "No-Knock Raids".
The "war on drugs" leads to
It is that final item which some would use as a pretext to eviscerate the second amendment, which is the link pin of the entire bill of rights. Consider the following from the former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Bush administration no less:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ican-drug-war/
The problem here clearly is not guns and it is clearly a problem of economics. The drugs one of these idiots would use in a day under rational circumstances would cost a dollar; that would simply present no scope for crime or criminals. Under present circumstances that dollar's worth of drugs is costing the user $300 a day and since that guy is dealing with a 10% fence, he's having to commit $3000 worth of crime to buy that dollar's worth of drugs. In other words, a dollar's worth of chemicals has been converted into $3000 worth of crime, times the number of those idiots out there, times 365 days per year, all through the magic of stupid laws. No nation on Earth could afford that forever.
A rational set of drug laws would:
Legalize marijuana and all its derivatives and anything else demonstrably no more harmful than booze on the same basis as booze.
Declare that heroine, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances would never be legally sold on the streets, but that those addicted could shoot up at government centers for the fifty-cent cost of producing the stuff, i.e. take every dime out of that business for criminals.
Provide a lifetime in prison for selling LSD, PCP, and/or other Jeckyl/Hyde formulas.
Same for anybody selling any kind of drugs to kids.
Do all of that, and the drug problem and 70% of all urban crime will vanish within two years. That would be an optimal solution; but you could simply legalize it all and still be vastly better off than we are now. 150 Years ago, there were no drug laws in America and there were no overwhelming drug problems. How bright do you really need to be to figure that one out?
Medical Reform:
The country does need medical reform, but not Obungacare.
The size of obungacare indicates to me that it is about power and not about health care. Likewise Mark Steyn notes that the job of director or head of public health has become the biggest govt. job in European countries which have public health care i.e. it would be a step upwards from PM or President or King or Grand Duke or anything else to head of health care. In other words, European health care is ultimate bureaucracy.
If I had the power to I would institute a sort of a basic health care reform which would be overwhelmingly simple and which would resemble the thing we're reading about in no way, shape, or manner. Key points would be:
1. Elimination of lawsuits against doctors and other medical providers. There would be a general fund to compensate victims of malpractice for actual damage and a non-inbred system for weeding out those guilty of malpractice. The non-inbred system would be a tribunal composed not just of oher doctors, but of plumbers, electricians, engineers, and everybody else as well.
2. Elimination of the artificial exclusivity of the medical system. In other words our medical schools could easily produce two or three times the number of doctors they do with no noticeable drop off in quality.
3. Elimination of the factors which drive the cost of medicines towards unaffordability. That would include both lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and government agencies which force costs into the billions to develop any new drug. There should be no suing a pharmaceutical for any drug which has passed FDA approval and somewhere between thalidamide and what we have now, there should be a happy medium.
4. Elimination of the outmoded WW-II notion of triage in favor of a system which took some rational account of who pays for the system and who doesn't. The horror stories I keep reading about the middle-class guy with an injured child having to fill out forms for three hours while an endless procession of illegal immigrants just walks in and are seen, would end, as would any possibility of that child waiting three hours for treatment while people were being seen for heroin overdoses or other lifestyle issues.
All of those things would fall under the heading of what TR called "trust busting". There would also be some system for caring the truly indigent, but the need and cost would be far less than at present.
By far the biggest item is that first one. I don't know the exact numbers but if you add every cost involved in our present out-of-control lawyering, it has to be a major fraction if not more than half of our medical costs. The trial lawyers' guild being one of the two major pillars of financial support for the democrat party is the basic reason nobody is saying anything about that part of the problem.
Other than that, you almost have to have seen some of the problems close up to have any sort of a feel for them.
Item 2, this is what I saw in grad school some time ago, although I do not have any reason to think much has changed. In the school I attended, there appeared to be sixty or seventy first year med students walking around and all but one or two of them would have made perfectly good doctors, they were all very bright and highly motivated. The only way the school should have lost any of those kids was either they discovered they couldn't deal with the sight of blood in real life or six months later they changed their minds and went off to Hollywood to become actors or actresses; the school should never have lost more than ten percent of them. But they knew from day one that they were keeping 35% of that class.
That system says that you know several things about the guy working on your body: You know he's a survivor, and that's highly unlikely to be from being better qualified than 65% of the other students; You know he hasn't had enough sleep (he's doing his work and the work of that missing 65%); You know he's probably doing some sort of drugs to deal with the lack of sleep... One of my first steps as "health Tsar" or whatever would be to tell the medical schools that henceforth if they ever drop more than15% of an incoming class, they'll lose their accreditation.
Item 3. My father walks into a pharmacy in Switzerland with a bottle of pills he normally pays $50 for in Fla. and asks the pharmacist if he can fill it. "Why certainly sir!", fills the bottle of pills and says "That will be $3.50." Seeing that my father was standing there in a state of shock, the man says "Gee, I'm sorry, Mr. V., you see, we have socialized medicine in Switzerland and if you were a Swiss citizen and paid into the systemn, why I could sell you this bottle of pills for $1.50 but, since you're foreign and do not pay into the system I have to charge you the full price, certainly you can appreciate that."
The guy thought my father was in shock because he was charging him too MUCH... Clearly whatever needs to be done with drugs amounts to trust busting, and not extracting more money from the American people.
Item 4. A caller to the Chris Plant show (D.C./WMAL) the other morning, an ER nurse, noted that much of the costs which her hospital had to absorb, as do most hospitals, was the problem of people with no resources using the ER as their first and only point of contact to the medical profession. She said that there were gang members who were constantly coming in for repairs from bullet holes and knife damage and drug problems, that they could not legally turn any of those people away, and that there was zero possibility of ever collecting any money from any of them, and that the costs of that were gigantic.
Clearly throwing money at that problems is not going to help anything either. Again if I'm the "Medicine Tsar", those guys would be cared for, but not at the ER or at least not the part of the ER where normal people go, and they would not be first in line. Mostly they'd be dealing with medical students who needed the practice patching up knife and bullet damage.
Immigration
As in the case of the "War on Drugs(TM)", the only real solution is to take the profit out of it and in this case the profit is measured in votes.
We need a law and possibly a constitutional amendment requiring a person to be a US citizen for 18 years before they ever vote in a US election. That would not be difficult to justify; I had to be a US citizen for eighteen years before I ever voted in a US election and I don't see any immigrant group which appears better or more deserving of rights than I am.
Education
Notice I didn’t mention public education/indoctrination in that one since to my thinking public schools need to be abolished and not reformed.
Money System and Financial Reforms
The money and banking system which was set up in 1913, along with the income tax and IRS which was set up to pay interest on debt while using debt as a primary basis for money, has reached the end of its useful lifespan. Glass-Steagal should be implemented immediately, the so-called "Super Priority" of derivative counterparties hould be abolished immediately, and a major effort should be made to devise a rational system of money for the United States. The Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the income tax should be abolished, and the power to coin money itself should be reclaimed by congress. No rational government should ever borrow money into existence.
Political Reforms
The first item of meaningful political reform HAS TO BE runoff elections or instant runoff elections for all public offices. Nobody should ever fear to vote his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold any public office with less than 50% of the vote.
There should be a None-Of-Above choice on all ballots for public office and if that choice ever wins, then the other candidates should be barred for life from holding ANY public office and the parties sponsoring them should be barred for at least ten years from sponsoring candidates for that particular office. The penalty for running dead wood for public offices should be severe.
There should also be some mechanism to prevent utterly unqualified people from holding high offices. Certainly a candidate for president or vice president, or for US Senator or member of the House of Representatives should need to obtain the same basic and simple secret level security clearance which anybody would need to be a guard at the gate of any military base in our land. That isn't asking for much but it would have spared us from the last two democrat presidents.
Another item on such a list would be a provision that when a president is impeached and removed, his VP goes out the door with him and the office is either vacant until the next election or an emergency election is held to fill the office for the remainder of the current term. Granted removing a president should be difficult but it should not be impossible and if we couldn't remove Slick, we'd not have been able to remove Hitler or Nero either.
Another item on such a voters' bill of rights should be something which would eliminate voting fraud for all time.
Our entire voting system is fubar and needs to be replaced and a fraud-proof system would not be that hard to devise; it would involve biometrics and p2p networking and the idea that ANYBODY could do his own vote tally and that all tallies should match. It also should involve the idea that a person could have total assurance that his vote did not disappear or get counted for the other guy. What I'd envision would be keeping my vote on MY computer with a fingerprint reader like you see on all govt computers i.e. a record of my contact info and a biometric reading and a national database to check biometrics for me and everybody else, and a p2p network to allow ANYBODY to do his own tally by calling for votes the same way you'd ask or a copy of "you aint nothing but a hound dog" on Kazaa, and all tallies should produce the same number within statistical limits.
We should consider the possibility that, when an election is within one percentage point, we send both people to congress with half of a vote each.
There is also a question as to the extent the people should be voting on some issues directly since we now have the technology to allow that, while the founding fathers did not. You could get some of these social issues settled once and for all and out of politics, and you could limit the scope for corruption and bribery by letting the people themselves settle at least some kinds of issues.
Drugs
The "War on Drugs" and the Prison/Industrial Complex should be ended immediately, along with "No-Knock Raids".
The "war on drugs" leads to
- "No-knock" raids, which are a clear violation of the fourth amendment and of the common law principle of a man's home being his "castle". In fact technically a homeowner who were to shoot and kill one or more government agents in the process of conducting a "no knock" raid would be entirely within his or her rights.
- The incarceration of large numbers of people who would otherwise never have had contact with prison systems. For many this amounts to a career training program for serious crime.
- Gang wars, drive-by shootings and the like.
- Corruption, the rise of drug cartels, and outright civil wars in other nations which supply drugs to the illegal drug enterprises here.
It is that final item which some would use as a pretext to eviscerate the second amendment, which is the link pin of the entire bill of rights. Consider the following from the former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Bush administration no less:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ican-drug-war/
Quote:
The former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection called Monday for the U.S. to reinstitute the ban on assault weapons and take other measures to rein in the war between Mexico and its drug cartels, saying the violence has the potential to bring down legitimate rule in that country. Former CBP Commissioner Robert C. Bonner also called for the United States to more aggressively investigate U.S. gun sellers and tighten security along its side of the border, describing the situation as "critical" to the safety of people in both countries, whether they live near the border or not. Mexico, for its part, needs to reduce official corruption and organize its forces along the lines the U.S. does, such as a specialized border patrol and a customs agency with a broader mandate than monitoring trade, Mr. Bonner said in an exchange of e-mails. "Border security is especially important to breaking the power and influence of the Mexican-based trafficking organizations," Mr. Bonner said. "Despite vigorous efforts by both governments, huge volumes of illegal drugs still cross from Mexico..." |
The problem here clearly is not guns and it is clearly a problem of economics. The drugs one of these idiots would use in a day under rational circumstances would cost a dollar; that would simply present no scope for crime or criminals. Under present circumstances that dollar's worth of drugs is costing the user $300 a day and since that guy is dealing with a 10% fence, he's having to commit $3000 worth of crime to buy that dollar's worth of drugs. In other words, a dollar's worth of chemicals has been converted into $3000 worth of crime, times the number of those idiots out there, times 365 days per year, all through the magic of stupid laws. No nation on Earth could afford that forever.
A rational set of drug laws would:
Legalize marijuana and all its derivatives and anything else demonstrably no more harmful than booze on the same basis as booze.
Declare that heroine, crack cocaine, and other highly addictive substances would never be legally sold on the streets, but that those addicted could shoot up at government centers for the fifty-cent cost of producing the stuff, i.e. take every dime out of that business for criminals.
Provide a lifetime in prison for selling LSD, PCP, and/or other Jeckyl/Hyde formulas.
Same for anybody selling any kind of drugs to kids.
Do all of that, and the drug problem and 70% of all urban crime will vanish within two years. That would be an optimal solution; but you could simply legalize it all and still be vastly better off than we are now. 150 Years ago, there were no drug laws in America and there were no overwhelming drug problems. How bright do you really need to be to figure that one out?
Medical Reform:
The country does need medical reform, but not Obungacare.
The size of obungacare indicates to me that it is about power and not about health care. Likewise Mark Steyn notes that the job of director or head of public health has become the biggest govt. job in European countries which have public health care i.e. it would be a step upwards from PM or President or King or Grand Duke or anything else to head of health care. In other words, European health care is ultimate bureaucracy.
If I had the power to I would institute a sort of a basic health care reform which would be overwhelmingly simple and which would resemble the thing we're reading about in no way, shape, or manner. Key points would be:
1. Elimination of lawsuits against doctors and other medical providers. There would be a general fund to compensate victims of malpractice for actual damage and a non-inbred system for weeding out those guilty of malpractice. The non-inbred system would be a tribunal composed not just of oher doctors, but of plumbers, electricians, engineers, and everybody else as well.
2. Elimination of the artificial exclusivity of the medical system. In other words our medical schools could easily produce two or three times the number of doctors they do with no noticeable drop off in quality.
3. Elimination of the factors which drive the cost of medicines towards unaffordability. That would include both lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and government agencies which force costs into the billions to develop any new drug. There should be no suing a pharmaceutical for any drug which has passed FDA approval and somewhere between thalidamide and what we have now, there should be a happy medium.
4. Elimination of the outmoded WW-II notion of triage in favor of a system which took some rational account of who pays for the system and who doesn't. The horror stories I keep reading about the middle-class guy with an injured child having to fill out forms for three hours while an endless procession of illegal immigrants just walks in and are seen, would end, as would any possibility of that child waiting three hours for treatment while people were being seen for heroin overdoses or other lifestyle issues.
All of those things would fall under the heading of what TR called "trust busting". There would also be some system for caring the truly indigent, but the need and cost would be far less than at present.
By far the biggest item is that first one. I don't know the exact numbers but if you add every cost involved in our present out-of-control lawyering, it has to be a major fraction if not more than half of our medical costs. The trial lawyers' guild being one of the two major pillars of financial support for the democrat party is the basic reason nobody is saying anything about that part of the problem.
Other than that, you almost have to have seen some of the problems close up to have any sort of a feel for them.
Item 2, this is what I saw in grad school some time ago, although I do not have any reason to think much has changed. In the school I attended, there appeared to be sixty or seventy first year med students walking around and all but one or two of them would have made perfectly good doctors, they were all very bright and highly motivated. The only way the school should have lost any of those kids was either they discovered they couldn't deal with the sight of blood in real life or six months later they changed their minds and went off to Hollywood to become actors or actresses; the school should never have lost more than ten percent of them. But they knew from day one that they were keeping 35% of that class.
That system says that you know several things about the guy working on your body: You know he's a survivor, and that's highly unlikely to be from being better qualified than 65% of the other students; You know he hasn't had enough sleep (he's doing his work and the work of that missing 65%); You know he's probably doing some sort of drugs to deal with the lack of sleep... One of my first steps as "health Tsar" or whatever would be to tell the medical schools that henceforth if they ever drop more than15% of an incoming class, they'll lose their accreditation.
Item 3. My father walks into a pharmacy in Switzerland with a bottle of pills he normally pays $50 for in Fla. and asks the pharmacist if he can fill it. "Why certainly sir!", fills the bottle of pills and says "That will be $3.50." Seeing that my father was standing there in a state of shock, the man says "Gee, I'm sorry, Mr. V., you see, we have socialized medicine in Switzerland and if you were a Swiss citizen and paid into the systemn, why I could sell you this bottle of pills for $1.50 but, since you're foreign and do not pay into the system I have to charge you the full price, certainly you can appreciate that."
The guy thought my father was in shock because he was charging him too MUCH... Clearly whatever needs to be done with drugs amounts to trust busting, and not extracting more money from the American people.
Item 4. A caller to the Chris Plant show (D.C./WMAL) the other morning, an ER nurse, noted that much of the costs which her hospital had to absorb, as do most hospitals, was the problem of people with no resources using the ER as their first and only point of contact to the medical profession. She said that there were gang members who were constantly coming in for repairs from bullet holes and knife damage and drug problems, that they could not legally turn any of those people away, and that there was zero possibility of ever collecting any money from any of them, and that the costs of that were gigantic.
Clearly throwing money at that problems is not going to help anything either. Again if I'm the "Medicine Tsar", those guys would be cared for, but not at the ER or at least not the part of the ER where normal people go, and they would not be first in line. Mostly they'd be dealing with medical students who needed the practice patching up knife and bullet damage.
Immigration
As in the case of the "War on Drugs(TM)", the only real solution is to take the profit out of it and in this case the profit is measured in votes.
We need a law and possibly a constitutional amendment requiring a person to be a US citizen for 18 years before they ever vote in a US election. That would not be difficult to justify; I had to be a US citizen for eighteen years before I ever voted in a US election and I don't see any immigrant group which appears better or more deserving of rights than I am.
Education
Notice I didn’t mention public education/indoctrination in that one since to my thinking public schools need to be abolished and not reformed.
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