American Manifesto Part One: Introduction

Part Two – Or –Facts

(This blog is only ideas.  Do your own research.  Question everything.)
(Links: Pt 2: Democracy, Pt 3: Health Care, Pt 4: Prejudice, Pt 5: Education, Pt 6: Debt, Pt 7: Prisons
Pt 8: Income Taxes

American Manifesto Part One: Introduction

A government with unlimited resources could not provide us all with utopian lives.  How can we expect a limited one to provide the same?  There are certain functions in humanity which are collective goods.  Others are individual assets.

Our basic humanity unites us in need for health and security.  These goods are measured in absolutes.  One either is or is not healthy or secure.  Either you need to see a doctor, a policeman, or a soldier to defend your home or you do not.

Therefore once the average person achieves good health or lives in a secure environment the idea of paying more money for more health or security is not marginally beneficial to the individual nor is purchasing half of good-health or security at a median price.  There is also both a high level of empathy attached to the absolute necessity for each citizen to have these goods as well as a collective net drain on all of society when sections do not have them. 

We are forced to internalize the costs as a country of the externality of any individual’s poor health and security through increased crime rates, medical costs, and inefficient additional security measures for the “secure” when the base needs of the “unsecure” population are not being met effectively.

Every human being needs daily food to survive.  Food has a measure of quality and choice.  A government can not feed its population.  No government has and none will.  We can assist in times of emergency, but not in perpetuity.

Once a man burdens another to provide his daily bread he has taken on the role of the child.  Either he will be thankful and resilient to re-empower himself to earn his own bread the next day as an adult or he will grow entitled and blame another for why he is incapable of standing on his own and remain the child.  In America the systems we have created tolerate pro-longed childhood, victimization, and the non-recognition of the externalities the choices of the childish create for the rest of the American family.

Tolerating this kind of childish behavior is like people in a life boat throwing our oars overboard to fit more people.  What we can do is accomplish the things government can do for all of us in an outstanding manner and provide a base level in the areas where government is limited.  We should not patronize the American people by promising things that can never be delivered or worse knowingly participate in duplicity to garner political power.

Education is the vehicle in which we farm our daily meal.  Each person needs an honest opportunity for an education to expand their role in society into full actualization.  By harnessing our inner strengths to support ourselves through an avenue that maximizes what we can do that others can not, we exchange our education for our meal.  All the government can do is provide the platform for us to stand on to see and choose to execute the work necessary to extract that inner strength and inherent genetic intelligence into a meaningful pursuit.

The government is incapable of mandating work ethic, but the government can suppress work ethic by guarantying to take the by-product of the work of others to continually provide for the daily bread of the voluntary non-working while constantly installing the mind-set of victimhood to sustain a voting block. 

Politicians have tried to create class warfare based on racial stereotypes, income discrepancies, religion, and gender.  When are we going to acknowledge our communalities?  When will we see that the underbelly of health, security, food and education could care less what race, gender, religion, or income stream a person is from?  Without a base level of these goods for each of us, we all fail.  We will all bleed and die as individuals.

What do we do to end cycles where these basic needs of health, security, food and education have not been met?  What do we do when generations of people feel left out in the cold, feel angry and are searching for someone to blame?  People are encouraged to feel victimized and blame socialized mechanisms of either racial, gender, cultural, or other historical measures of prejudice as the counterweight to what is holding a person static in a state of dissatisfaction.

The answer is honesty.  We need to be honest that blame is just quicksand to tread in ether for decades or for mere minutes until we realize blame has no point in the road to the solution.  There is no severable man or a group of men or women who are responsible.  We are all culpable and duty bound.  The solution is in the synthesis of designing systematic infrastructures that account for the full spectrum of humanity comprising our society.

Blame is the easy answer from pulpits senators use to distract the path to individual progress.  It is much easier to hold a church or a state house captive to a speaker’s every word when he tells people what they want to hear, that there is a fault and it is somebody else’s.  That is comforting like a bad parent to a child.

Is the honest answer that we are on our own to rise above and if not we will subsist in misery?  What about our base needs?  America is so detached because we fund and pursue the paths of distraction.  America spins our wheels on false goals trying to provide an impossible utopia rather than holding ourselves and our government responsible for providing base needs. 

This distraction leads to easily obtained political power, because at its root it is faith driven, rhetoric driven and segregated from mathematics and science (facts).  Faith is a much more easily defended opiate to beguile the masses like a Piper’s music rather than a scientist’s conclusion requiring empirical evidential matter to garner a modicum of support.  One requires the consumer’s study, his scrutiny, the other his compliant submission.

With faith, a politician can veil a fact in what one feels in one’s gut when what one sees in the bubble of one’s strata of constituents is a myopic farce compared to the reality of the other forty-nine percent of society.  This type of partitioned policy tends to exacerbate the inefficacies and inefficiencies extrapolating out from the minority population because the mishandling of their needs from government creates additional costs to the greater system as a whole.

The government should do what it can in an exceptional way and leave the rest to us.  We can not legislate to a lobbyist based on campaign contributions and expect the collective goods to be prioritized and addressed in an efficient manner.  By spending our resources to meet the needs of those that paid to get each legislator elected we create an additional inherent tax on our selves to fund an inefficient process that incentivizes selfish greedy behavior.

We need to call bullshit when the government is stepping over the lines.  We need a good fuck you when the largest corporation in America, our government, is putting out poor products and services to satisfy our base needs.  We need to re-invent the systems that solve those needs in groundswell of our collective entwined mutuality.   

That includes changing the structure of the system that perpetuates us re-electing the individuals to office who are blocking that progress regardless of party affiliation, particularly when the politicians disproportionately profit from the expansion of the current system. 

Politicians should not be elected based on what party he or she is in or by being able to outspend his or her opponents.  Spouting out more rhetoric is not victory.  Politicians should be challenged to assert beliefs and measured on post-election accomplishments.  Politicians should be required to study, to expand their classroom knowledge in the arenas of macroeconomics, law, science, medicine, and education, particularly those that are placed on committees through web-based learning assets while in office.  The current system rewards subsistence and tenure not the hard decisions that lead to collective results or the effort to expand one’s arenas of expertise based on merit rather than longevity. 

We need to move away from the polarization of political victories as absolutes for those who either pay more into the tax system than they take out and those who take more out than they put in.  In all economies these base dynamics of employer versus employee are symbiotic.  When we mandate lines in the sand of these dynamics which one side can not cross, it tends to either stagnate the relationship from evolving into its natural evolution or it prevents one side from taking the relationship to a stage where neither can feasibly exist in perpetuity.  We have to be careful to only utilize governmental intervention in the later of these options.  It is government’s role to only implement these lines when absolutely necessary and to monitor the dynamics in their current stage to remove them when the body of the economy can exist on its own.

When we utilize politics rather than an objective reality to make these decisions both symbiotic elements of the system will fail regardless of the affiliation of the elected leader implementing the new regulation.  We need to decide what those lines are and hopefully the next seven items will help prosper discussion about what those lines should be and which ones should be removed. 

Macro economics works in paradigm-shifting business cycles not election cycles.  We live in a global economy.  We need to adapt America accordingly.  The average American teenager attending high school today sees an unprecedented paradigm shift in the daily technologies utilized to facilitate communication in our social lives and to galvanize the productive power of our work product in our careers.  Because of these shifts this generation of Americans is fundamentally more accepting of change and welcomes change as an expected daily component of reality rather than an opponent being forced upon a historical expectation of what would always be. 

Generation X expects to change jobs, to rely on ourselves rather than our employer.  We realize the necessity of being life-time learners and the challenges of accepting the hardships of sunk learning costs into obsolete methods of accomplishing tasks in the new economies. 

We see the fallacies of the self-esteem movement, of everyone gets a cookie in life.  On the weakest side of our generation we have kids raised to be machines of consumption fostered by this massive encouragement of prolonged adolescence.  This malaise was created from a toxic mixture of suburban-guilt brooding in an over-reaction to worry about being too hard on America’s kids.  This cotton-candy-laced parental parachute that any kid can be anything he or she dreams to be shreds to pieces when a kid faces his first hard gust of wind. 

Having so much given to America’s children without having to work for it has encouraged us to covet and demand.  Like Gollum from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings we have spent too many hours obsessing on what we feel owed rather than what we have earned.  We put our selves in debt financially, emotionally, and environmentally to cast aside self-sufficiency for self-entitlement that in other countries would lead to starvation and homelessness. 

Our systems of distributing healthcare, imprisonment, food distribution, energy, and addressing poverty have been guided by short-term greed rather than long-term social good.  We are present-focused, rather than future-focused.  The negative externalities of those decisions are beginning to close in on us through interest on our national debt like a bulging turkey neck and swollen ankles with an anorexic-looking middle.  The debt is consuming the dollars we need to address our current needs, diminishing supplies of fossil fuels threatening to parch the thirst of the body of our economy, and deteriorating our middle class in economic famine.  Our middle class is our only hope of pulling out of this downward spiral through consistent prudent consumer spending.  The future of the middle class is Generation X.

This cookie-cutter rainbow-sprinkle mold for our kids has morphed our education system around idealism rather than tangible aptitude to utilize acquired skills in a functional framework that leads to self-sufficiency.  Educators focus on self-actualization to complete the social definition of what it means to be educated with a bachelor’s degree.  The mathematical percentile ranking of classroom groups on standardized test scores measures the quality of schools.  Yet schools operate in a vacuum devoid of organized properly-funded mutual federal assistance with realistic images of tomorrow’s human economic interrelationships. 

We have been taught to demand extravagances uncorrelated to the prevention of famine or homelessness, while ignoring core competencies in practical skill-based educational systems to avoid famine and homelessness.  We relish a degree over the skills that accreditation has conferred. 

Americans too often fantasize about one day becoming rich, as the dog at the track catching the metallic rabbit.  We allocate innate individual responsibilities to lottery tickets, angels, the social security office, and damage to our societal infrastructure outside the corporate umbrella. 

Corporations garner profit from activities in our Earth’s environment and the social rungs creating poorer health, economic dependence and diminished self sufficiency in our compartmentalized global society.  A domestic corporation can exploit America’s trade deficit, while benefiting form the platform of our taxpayer’s government to hock its wears.  This disparity of externalized costs is only possible through a false fixation on a mythical upward mobility.

We see that no one we know ever becomes wealthy, therefore we move in two directions, anger and fantasy.  Becoming rich must be magic (the lottery ticket, angels) or a scam (social security, corporate greed.)  The lack of math, logic, science and unbiased press fosters an environment ripe for rhetoric and sensationalized story-boarded to perpetuate pre-formed conclusions.

Our disconnected Generation X and the Millennials demand change.  Half of us want to lead.  The other half feels abandoned from putting faith in such a smiley-faced educational process that will not level with students about the reality we see in an honest manner. 

We do not want the assumptions of our parents that everything is going to work out no matter what, to trust the system for our retirement, to trust our employer to treat us well, to trust our parent’s marriages for an example of true love, to trust that it is not more about money that public good, because we do not.  We want a system where we do not need to and are willing to hear the raw-sad truths.  We would rather the truth than listen to the Republicans and the Democrats bicker behind the sheetrock every night like a soon-to-be divorced mom and dad telling us everything is wonderful at breakfast.

Across the board we want to put the burden back on ourselves, to make our own choices, to say the same things in public as we do in private, and to quit the hero worship of public figures.  We believe in the power and necessity of change and our own culpability for not changing.  We want economic policy based on math and facts not rhetoric and hysteria.  We protest the fascists inventing monsters to distract the populace.  The paradigm of the internet is both the grand fact-checker and grand beguiler based on manner of use.

We recognize the first step to progress is a digital infrastructure for the American people to proxy vote to advise our elected officials.  Polarization is paralyzing us into apathetic starvation.  We must stop choosing not to choose and live in the ethical minefield of culpability.  Like Napster did to the music industry; creating web-based centralized infrastructures to facilitate the majority of governmental functions will evolve our democracy to its purest form and comingle productive function with economic efficiency in a user-driven avalanche.  First proxy voting, then health care, education, subsidizations; keep reading.

We do not ingest the cake of earlier generations, but have the 1960’s organized in our stomach acids, which were built on each previous generation’s contributions to human time.  We have choices.  We can continue to naively eat the lotus flowers and foretell the future in beautiful candy-coated horrid lies.  We can attempt to grip the future’s slick-scales like wrestling a trout barehanded, uncertain of if we will eat or starve or if any one every taught us how to catch a God-damned fish ourselves.  We can gorge apathy donuts, smoke shit-on-me cigarettes and drink bitch-about-it coffee in our sloth-like socially-accepted addictions to be paid to not work or we can do and be future-focused.

We know there are multiple ways to solve most problems.  There are always multiple people who could get us there.  We recognize our own expendability and thus we see it in everybody else.  There is no political messiah.  There are only implemented ideas and programs that either work or do not.  It is our role to evaluate and act upon what is not working and change the process as we change our selves, open and willing to accept that we are part of the problem and we will be part of the solution.  We are our government.  There is only one people.