If you’re like me, you’re tired
of watching America head downhill, especially when it means the erosion of our
culture, wealth, faith, and the steamrolling of our rights and liberties. And
if you’re like me, you want to do something about it as soon as possible.
But you also probably know
better than to believe that the problems thrust upon us will be fixed by a
change of administrator in Washington, though many seem to be falling for this
illusion. These days, altering the seating arrangement in Congress every so
many years is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We’ve seen
the great Pennsylvania Avenue parade before, dozens of times, and each time the
wars continue, the welfare increases, government balloons in size, and debt
goes through the roof (until they raise the ceiling again, of course).
Isn’t it time we focused on something besides the same old failed
“solution”?
We need solutions that work, and it’s time to get serious, even if it
means starting small, planning long, and making sacrifices.
You’re probably talking to all
kinds of people—regular folks, as well as pastors, teachers, politicians, and
many other leaders in society—often asking the question, “What can we do?” I
have heard that question myself many times, especially in response to the
worldview taught here at American Vision. Sounds great, but what is to be
done? It was my goal, therefore, to sit down and begin a training project,
privately funded, to be promoted and given away free online, that provides
simple and clear answers to that question. My project, called “Restoring America One County at a Time,” is
that attempt.
We cover ten major topics,
beginning with education, welfare, and local government. We emphasize the
things we can do right now; and these are the things that must be done first
if we are to make any further progress in this battle. This is the heart and
soul of the project: recovering local sovereignty and local freedom.
Everything else that follows in restoring America is either based on the same
principles already covered, or they require much more progress to be made
before they become viable to accomplish.
So, since what we covered
first is so fundamental, vital, and so ready for the taking, I want to
provide it as an overview of the big picture for you. Here’s a
“2-minute” version below. (If you wish to move on to the detailed look already,
visit my Restoring America master page.
Education
First, education is the easiest thing to recover, and the most
vital. Anyone who actually cares that their children be taught Christian
faith and liberty, who cares about the foundations and principles
of liberty, and/or who decries the principles of socialism (taxing some
people to pay for services to others), among other things, is under a moral
obligation to provide for their children’s education privately. You’ve got to
pull your kids out of public schools. This is how American was originally
founded, operated, and it is part of what made America great to begin with. It
is time to recover this vision and discipline.
This is quick and easy to do in
most states; but it is able to be done in all. In fact, there are no laws in
any state mandating that you subject your children to public schooling.
This is purely a personal decision—a willing subjugation on the part of the
parent—with only economic and lifestyle motivations involved. Every Christian,
especially, should pull their children out immediately. Christian children need
Christian education. Every church should support homeschooling parents, help
with materials and supplemental instruction, and open its own school as well,
especially for poorer members. Morally and biblically speaking, there’s really
no good reason not to do these things. Only if you let convenience and money
trump morality would you continue to support public schooling.
There are still goals to be
worked for after making this initial momentous step. We must have in view a
world in which tax-funded schooling does not exist, and we must plan and work
toward that vision. We should hope to get the State (civil government) out
of education entirely. We should at the very least work for tax-exemptions
for those who educate at home or otherwise privately. This is only just.
If every professed Bible-believing Christian 1) took responsibility for
their own children, and 2) then organized to demand an end to school taxes, the
public school system could be defunct within a matter of weeks, and certainly
would be within a year. But then again, who cares if they exist in general or
not, as long as we obtain the right to opt-out of all taxation that
funds the system.
How people react to this first
topic of the project to make America great again will show how willing
they are to work and sacrifice for freedom in general. If we won’t take back
that freedom which lies right in front of us, if we refuse to sacrifice where
it’s easiest (although still a sacrifice), then we’re saying on a personal and
local level at least, “I want my socialism.” Balking at this point is an
admission of complicity in the plunder, or complacency in general. Both reasons
would indicate that people are not yet ready to be free. At this point, we’ll
see whether the TEA-party is really ready for a party.
Welfare and Social Security
Secondly, centralized State welfare is a failure. In
fact, it is a scheme designed to redistribute wealth and enslave us as beggars
to the central powers. The answer is individually-funded “retirement” and
insurance, family-based welfare for old age, and church or voluntary community
solutions for the truly poor and for those few instances which exceed
individual or family capacity (true charity cases). A free society will also
include at least an option to abstain from the State-run system.
Every church, instead of
spending 80% of its income on new building programs and pastor’s salaries,
should have a large fund designated for the care of members who are truly
biblical widows and orphans. Voluntary communities could do the same, but these
would essentially operate as small, private insurance groups (although, don’t
dare call it “insurance” or the government and a tribe of lawyers and lobbyists
will slaughter you to the gods of the insurance industry in a court of
admiralty).
There are some private
solutions already successfully at work in this regard. Classically, the Amish
and some Mennonite communities have maintained exemption from the Social
Security system since they had a private system in place and had religious
convictions against it. The same is true of more recent health-care sharing
programs like Samaritan Ministries, which obtained exemption from teh central
government’s healthcare tyranny for the same reasons.
There is nothing, ultimately,
that should limit exemptions to just those groups. Anyone with a
religious or any other conviction against it should be free to leave the
system. You shouldn’t have to live an Amish lifestyle (though, the country life
is a good life!), and you shouldn’t have to prove anything to the government,
in order to be free from its ridiculous tyrannies.
The main things we can do here are, first, to create and implement
a personal plan in which you provide for yourself and your family first. This
means saving at least 25% of your income from as early as possible. If this is
currently impossible, then you need to make cuts in your budget until it is.
Maintaining a high level of consumption while not saving money, and meanwhile
depending on future government taxation of others so that you can quit working
at 65, is immoral. For those who profess to believe in freedom, dependence on
such coercion-based handouts is self-contradictory. By rather positioning
yourself to fund yourself in old age and emergency, you do many great things:
1) you recover individual responsibility, 2) exemplify it for others, 3) you
further delegitimize the government system, and 4) you expose the government
scheme as unnecessary, and in fact, counterproductive.
There are yet further goals at
which to aim. Even while you position yourself as responsible and
self-sufficient, the government is still taxing you for Social Security
benefits. The goal is to stop this coercive redistribution of wealth entirely,
or at least provide an opt-out. The first step is to become self-funded despite
the taxation. The second step is to organize a demand for exemption for those
who desire it. Obtain this, and you will have freedom from the system, and it
will soon disappear altogether. Even if it does not, if it is not allowed to
tax (or is prevented by state and local governments) for this purpose, then the
option of freedom is on the table for all who would choose it (and of course,
who would thereby be agreeing to live with the consequences of freedom as
well).
“County Rights”
Third, we have got to refocus
our political efforts locally. We need much less attention on national
elections which tend only to give new rascals the old jobs, and the old rascals
huge pensions. We need to plan locally, take back control locally, reject
handouts and grants from above, and reject the interference and regulation from
higher governments (which often comes attached to the handouts). We need to
clean up the socialism and corruption in our own backyards before we
pretend to save anything at the national level.
In fact, it can’t happen the
other way around. The system itself has grown into a tyrannical bureaucracy. It
is theoretically and practically impossible to restore freedom by simply
replacing the President and his bureaucrats. The only way to restore freedom is
to dismantle the machine, delegitimize it, and/or remove yourself from its
path. It is highly unlikely that the vast machine will be dismantled, for the
people most in position to do so are also the ones most self-interested in
maintaining it. The only way to restore freedom today is to reassert local
sovereignty, and this begins with establishing local integrity and freedom, and
then moving on to relearn what American local resistance is all about.
For starters, we need to
learn about local politics: the people, places, systems, etc. We are way
too familiar with national figures, and way too ignorant of locals. Learn about
them: names, backgrounds, beliefs, public salaries and pensions, everything.
Then, especially, delve into the public finances of your town or county. This
knowledge is public, and the financial officer of your locality can provide it
for you. Find out how much is taxed, borrowed, paid, on whose authority, and
why. You can then better inform and organize for local elections and much more.
Then, start a website
documenting everything you’ve learned. Make everything plain and public—very
plain, and very public. Find a list of local business owners and make
them aware of your work. They are the people who pay the lion’s share of
property taxes; they will be happy to see someone tracking it for them,
especially if there is corruption or waste. Make everything public. It is not
even out of the question to film or otherwise record public meetings, and make
that available online also.
Much more. . . .
There is much, much more to
cover. We talk about markets, courts, defense, money, and more. We also discuss
the need to restore the pulpits of America to positions of
prominence, knowledge, and leadership in local political ethics and law—the way the American pulpits used to be! The
positions covered are bold, but they represent the way America used to be, and
especially the way God’s Word directs us to live. If we want the type of
freedom America once had—indeed, even greater freedom—then we have to be honest
about things: state it plainly, set goals, and work toward them, even when it
seems difficult, uphill, and unpopular. Freedom can be restored in America, one
county at a time. If you really want to make America great again, then
direct your attention to the hard truths of how it used to be, what the Bible
says, how we really lost it, and the hard truth of what it will really take to
get it back—sacrifice on our part, and a multi-generation vision of family and
church responsibility.
