Now I’m going Buck&#153

I’ve made numerous suggestions throughout these pages, but here is a summary to accompany my bitching:

1. Fix the tax code. The flat tax is essential to prevent the continuing madness that is our anti-free market tax system.
2. Cut pork barrel spending. We don’t need bridges that don’t leave a state and only serve 50 residents. Make it harder to insert pork into future appropriations bills. Hold their representatives accountable for their wastefulness.
3. End agricultural subsidies for favored products. If the market needs/wants 700 trillion pounds of corn, dairy, meat, and soybeans, let the market dictate that and decide how to pay for it. Central planners deciding what we need only leads to inefficiencies and abuses.
4. Repeal the prescription drug benefit.
5. Reform Social Security with private accounts (since mandatory social security contributions aren’t going away – the real answer).
6. End bailouts of businesses when they make mistakes. If Southwest can run its business profitably, so can US Air and Delta and American and every other behemoth struggling to understand capitalism. Also, stop subsidizing Amtrak on routes that lose money. If no one uses them, that’s the market saying that it doesn’t want the service. Making it acceptable to fail and stay in business only encourages risky, irresponsible behavior. It’s why FDR hated the idea of deposit insurance. It only encouraged the banks to be irresponsible with customers’ money because the government would bail them out.
7. Implement better management oversight of government agencies. Institute legitimate cost controls. Contracts should not be paid until funds are budgeted and verified available. Once funds are spent, budgets should be reduced.
8. Get the government out of flood insurance and pension guarantees and every other nonsensical abandonment of free-market policies. If there is risk involved, the private economy will figure out how to properly incentivize responsible behavior. Etc., etc. from #6.
9. Return education, housing, etc. to the state and local governments. Make the citizens who benefit responsible for paying for those benefits.
10. Repeal drug laws for low- and moderate-level drugs. Spend the crime fighting dollars on crimes with victims.

Should I go on?

When I post something that is bitching, I don’t do it because I want to score points or I’m devoid of any solutions. I bitch because I see hypocrisy in supporting everything the president or Congress or whoever says without any acknowledgement that something negative might exist. I bitch because we deserve better leaders and we can have them, but the first action is showing that the ones we have are incompetent or unwilling to fix this mess.

I’ve supported the Left in the past because I know the Right is fucking things up, which does not mean I believe the Left is better. But the Left is not in control of the government now. If they were spending us into oblivion or taxing the economy into recession or expanding the federal government as a matter of political giveaway or paternalism, I’d say so, as well.

For what it’s worth, I think they will do the same in 2006 or 2008 or whenever they return to power. but I’m not pointing out their nonsense because it’s so hysterical and lacking in leadership and common sense that it speaks for itself. That’s why I’ve advocated for having a viable third-party candidate in 2008. I want someone who will force the federal government to do what it should (national defense, legal system) and stop doing what it shouldn’t (education, censorship, general paternalism). It may not be spelled out every time I post, but there are enough statements and obvious inferences that I don’t feel the need to list them every time I bitch about some idiot politician or partisan hack.

And I’ll keep doing the same.