The Solution: Repairing Our Broken Political System

By Michael Stockdell

Our current political system puts too much power in the hands of the few, often producing ineffective results. The Solution proposes a plan that restricts the size and scope of the federal government while increasing the direct influence of the people. The goal is to make government simpler with full public accountability.

The book is divi

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Oct 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643679075

Michael Stockdell

After graduating from the University of Virginia with a Bachelor's degree in English, Mr. Stockdell began a career in systems work, which at the time included manual as well as computerized processes. After three years in Federal government employ, during which time he wrote what was considered to be the best systems report ever created in the Department of Agriculture, he took a job as a Systems Analyst for an internal computer department. For the next twenty-five years he was involved in a variety of jobs in high tech, both in business and engineering/ scientific computing. He was responsible for an integrated Order Entry System, which included Billing, Shipping, Inventory Control, Sales Analysis, and Accounts Receivable, which led to the company becoming first in its industry in order-delivery cycle. He was a Management Consultant for a (then) Big Eight accounting firm and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation's Management Consulting program. In the late 1980s he became Executive Vice President of Paralex, a startup Parallel supercomputer company. This is the origin of this book.

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The Solution

Copyright © 2019 by Michael Stockdell. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-64367-908-2 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64367-907-5 (Digital)

09.10.19

Contents

Why Have I Written This Book (And Why Should You Read It)

PART I: Why Big Government Frequently, Mostly Doesn’t Work

My Time as a Civil Servant

The Social Security Disaster

The Terrible Affordable Care Act

How About a Social Contract: Communism and Social Democracy

Note about Postmodernism

A Repudiation of Keynesian Stimulus

Why Big Government Doesn’t Work in Many Cases

(1) The Larger the Program, the More Unmanageable it is. The larger the program, the less clear are its provisions. In the case of the recent health care legislation, no one, not even the Congresspersons who passed it, understood all its provisions. To repeat what Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic speaker of the House famously said, We must pass the bill to know what’s in it. This is insanity—and an abdication of responsibility. And that was before the writing of the many thousands of pages of regulations that were required for the program to work. This has provided the opportunity for the executive branch to make of the legislation what it will and years later, to interpret it in a way not intended by the drafters of the original legislation but which they believe is in the best interest of the country—or the pressure groups they favor. This has inevitably met with resistance from the general public, which of course, is powerless to do anything about it.

(2) The Political Process. The problem with the political process as practiced in the United States is that it is subject to whatever manipulation those in power think they can get away with. The most widely publicized, though certainly not the most costly of these manipulations, is pork barrel spending. Such spending occurs when laws are passed that earmark federal funds to a particular state or congressional district for some defined purpose, such as a bridge or a public building, sometimes with a congressman’s name on it. Often earmarks are hidden in legislation that has nothing to do with the earmarks themselves.

(3) The Distance of Rule Makers from the People Served. But even if, by some magic wand, you could neutralize the political process and you only have one faction to contend with, even if you could appoint some other body such as an independent (an impossibility) commission to devise your program, big government solutions would still fail. This is partly because congressmen, regulators, and program administrators are far away both geographically and culturally from the people who must live with the programs. No matter how brilliant the deviser of the rules and how lengthy and comprehensive they are, there will always be individual situations (or hundreds or thousands) which will not be dealt with adequately. When the program leaves the theoretical and becomes an implemented system, the program administrators will be forced to select winners and losers, destroying even the illusion of fairness.

(4) The Nature of Federal Civil Service Employees. Big complex programs require especially competent, highly motivated employees to manage and staff them. It is my experience in both business and government that any organization that depends on unusually competent and motivated employees just to perform its basic mission is doomed to failure because in any organization, the majority of employees will be average or below. And even if a program could be devised in which only some of the employees need to be extraordinarily talented, many of the few highly capable employees will remain with the agency for only a short time… Many of the best employees will leave the government after the first flush of devising and implementing a program. Others will leave because they are possessors of special very marketable skills. Some will leave because their government experience did not work out the way they expected it to.

(5) The Nature of Political Appointees. Not all public employees are career civil servants. In addition to the White House staff (which will be discussed under a later head), there is a comparatively small, though not insignificant, group of political appointees found mostly in the top ranks of cabinet departments and affiliated agencies and the independent agencies. Special cases such as ambassadors are also a part of this class. These employees are governed by a different pay scale and a different set of rules from the rank-and-file. All serve at the pleasure of the President; many must be confirmed by the Senate. However, not all are, strictly speaking, political appointees. Occasionally, career civil servants with special talents or experience are appointed to these jobs. Not that it matters much; such persons must never oppose the policies of the administration they serve. Most often, such career employees either head or have a high function in agencies that are less vital to the public interest or are ambassadors appointed to the more difficult posts, where a specific cultural background is essential. In spite of these exceptions, I will refer to all this class of government employee as politicals.

(6) The Growing Influence of the White House Staff. Because of the difficulty of accomplishing anything through the existing administrative and political process, ambitious presidents have increasingly chosen to split the administrative and the policy-making functions of government, the former being housed in the traditional cabinet departments and independent agencies, the latter being centered in the so-called White House staff.

(7) The Lack of a Profit Motive in Government Administration. Government agencies are responsible only for the money they spend. Since this money is appropriated by Congress and the unified budget has assured that few programs can be tied to any specific revenue source, money is seen as infinitely expandable. Some in high places regard the people’s money as the government’s to tax at whatever rate is necessary to support desirable programs. This creates a culture within agencies of spending every dime they can lay their hands on.

(8) The Disincentive to Manage to a Balanced National Budget. Some public debt is a good thing. Our monetary system depends on treasury bills and other instruments of federal indebtedness. In cases of national emergencies such as natural disasters or war, we must spend what we need to. But for as long as I can remember, budget deficits have occurred every year no matter the state of the economy or the presence of a national emergency.

(9) The Role of Politics in Overspending. Modern politics encourages deficit spending. This has happened in three ways:

(10) The Tendency to Seek Multiple Goals in a Single Program. This fallacy shows just how inept the Congress is at anything like business management.

A Note about Liberalism versus Progressivism

PART II: Why Has Big Government Emerged ?

Necessary Federal Functions

Who Likes Big Government

Reasons People Support Big Government

High-Minded Beliefs

Ideological Beliefs

Self-Serving Beliefs

PART III: What Can Be Done to Restore Limited Government

Recommended Constitutional Amendments Making It Easier to Amend the Constitution

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Term Limits

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with the Amendment

Campaign Finance Reform

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Balance the Budget

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Presidential Elections by Direct Popular Vote

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Congressional Advice and Consent Reform

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Referendum and Recall

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Direct Election of the Attorney General

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Restrictions on Executive Orders

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Retention of Federal Documents

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Congressional Review of Regulations

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Periodic Program Review

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Elimination of Unfunded Mandates to States

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

Limits on the Ability to Change the Constitution

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with this Amendment

Right of States to Enforce Federal Laws

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

The Commerce Clause

The Amendment

Discussion

Possible Problems with This Amendment

Establishment of an Administrative Branch of Government

The Amendment

Discussion

Potential Problems with This Amendment

PART IV: Policy Recommendations

Social Security and Medicare

Social Security

Disability

Medicare

Health Care

Social Policy

Abortion

Gay Rights

Affirmative Action

The Death Penalty and Other Criminal Justice Issues

The Consequences of Income Inequality

Women’s Income Deficit

Income/Wealth Inequality

Housing

Education

Other Policy Matters

Climate Change

Gun Control

Infrastructure

Immigration

Civil Service Reform

National Security and Islamic Terrorism

Taxation

Religion and Culture

Conclusion

Why Have I Written This Book (And Why Should You Read It)

I’m angry, really angry. And frustrated. It’s all about the way the federal government is run.

And you are angry too. That is, the two-thirds of you who believe no one in Washington listens to you and a like number who doesn’t trust your government or who believes it works in the best interest of special interests instead of yours. (All of which contentions are borne up by recent polls and in articles in the Wall Street Journal.) That’s why Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton fits and why Donald Trump with no discernible program won the ensuing election. And why shut- down-the-government Ted Cruz did well (as of mid-February, 2016). That’s why I’m here. I’m a peculiar bird who is a little bit on the right, a little bit on the left. I’m a freethinker.

I made a pact with myself when I was in college majoring in English literature. I would not go to graduate school because to do so meant I would be limited to a specialty. I didn’t want to become the world’s greatest authority on, say, minor English Renaissance poets. But I wanted to learn all right. Everything. And not just learn everything; I wanted to understand it all too.

You’ll say that’s impossible. Nobody, at least since Denis Diderot in eighteenth-century France has pretended to know everything. And I did limit myself in some ways: I had no interest in cooking or auto mechanics or interior design. But anything that resembled an intellectual discipline was my bailiwick.

And of course, there was the matter of getting into graduate school. I was, at best, a mediocre student. I spent most of my time at the university writing prolifically—a novel-and-a-half, a dozen or so short stories, and hundreds of poems. I was considered a pretty decent writer, green as hell, but with enough promise that I was recruited for the early Hollins College Writing Program. But I knew that literary writing would be a long and rocky row to hoe and opted for lifelong learning and a conventional job.

During the fifty years after college, I read approximately one hundred books per year. (And I’m a slow reader.) That adds up to about five thousand books. And that doesn’t include the one thousand five hundred or so books I had read from age eight—when I began reading adult books—to twenty-two or the many thousands of magazine articles.

I was aided in my quest for knowledge by two personal characteristics. One is a cataloguing memory. I read or am told a piece of material that interests me (and almost everything does), and latch it onto an existing memory, which in turn is contained within a class of memories. And I am able to retrieve almost all of it. I have never met my equal in this. The second is a system in which I am able to use this prodigious memory to think very deeply about things. I am often astounded when people who are supposedly intellectuals are unable to tie together even material in their own specialty. But there it is.

My intellectual quest has consequences; however, not all to my favor. Since I have learned and understood so much, my knowledge is very broad without being particularly deep. And with all those years of reading, I have no idea where a specific piece of information has come my way. This is why there are no scholarly citations or bibliographies in this work.

Of course, there is an advantage to you, my readers, of this lack of conventional scholarship. My vision is very broad and on a wide variety of subjects. Thus, I can see truths that would require several lifetimes to acquire the ordinary way.

* * *

How then do I put my way of reasoning to use?

I have a confession to make: I am a Christian—of the Episcopalian variety. In some intellectual circles, this makes me hopelessly naïve; probably obscurantist; and superstitious to boot. Christianity is passé, they believe—or at best, an excuse for social activism. Most of the intellectual class believes in a secular democracy devoid of any notion of God. Some on the left give lip service to a religious belief but then reject any policy that has the slightest taint of religion and actively espouse policies that are harmful to religious interests.

This disregard for established religion is based on the notion that the only explanations we need to know in life can be learned through science. In the social realm, this has led to the rise of Meme Theory. For the uninitiated, Meme Theory is the notion that all human existence is controlled by social memes that evolve and change according to Darwinian evolutionary precepts. Our experience of consciousness is just an illusion as is the notion of free will. All the creations of man, all the developments of civilization are just memes.

This has many consequences on the way social scientists and much of the political class look at the world. Suffice it to say that without Meme Theory, Social Darwinism, as it is conceived of today (not the discredited Herbert Spencer survival of the fittest version), would have no scientific basis. Nor would the more radical, absolute equality versions of social justice have a scientifically grounded theoretical basis.

Under Meme Theory, Edison’s inventions are a consequence of accumulated memes that just happened to have translated themselves into concrete reality at the time and place they did. They would have occurred about that same time and probably very near Menlo Park, even if Edison had never existed. Thus, Edison is no more deserving of consideration than the guy who swept the floors at Menlo Park. At some level, all human beings are absolutely equal, and it is merely being born at the right time and place that allows you to have great accomplishments while another falls to the lowest rung of society. There is no justification for great economic or social disparity—and if it occurs through the normal course of a free society, then it must be corrected, presumably through government activism.

Trouble is, Meme Theory cannot currently be proven experimentally and, I believe, never will be. And a theory that cannot be proven experimentally is not scientifically valid. You’ll forgive me then if I found my social contract on my brand of religious faith.

I was not always a particularly religious person. For thirty years I didn’t attend church. Then about ten years ago, I went through a personal crisis so horrific that I was briefly hospitalized. The only way I could climb out of the deep hole I had dug for myself was to acknowledge that there was a higher power. In the midst of my crisis, a disembodied voice spoke to me. Now I can’t prove it was the Christian God, and I suspect if I was born in another time and place, that disembodied voice might have been interpreted as Allah or Yahweh or Ahura Mazda or Vishnu. Or a psychotic break.

No matter. From this experience, I became convinced that belief in something beyond oneself is essential to easing our way through this vale of tears.

Why then did I turn to the Episcopal Church? Well, I was brought up as an Episcopalian, and that certainly helped. But there were other reasons. Anglicanism seemed to fit who I am. In addition to the Holy Trinity, the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and regular prayer and communal worship, many of us also subscribe to the gentler teachings of Jesus, e.g., responsibility for the poor, turning the other cheek, loving thy neighbor.

But the modern world intrudes on everything, and in recent years, Episcopalians have become a rowdy lot, wrangling endlessly about the core mission of the church, some threatening to splinter the church out of the passion of their doctrinal convictions.

On one side of the Episcopal community are the quasi-evangelicals who oppose virtually all but the most conservative position on the social and political issues of the day. On the other side are the left Episcopalians who are all about social justice, sometimes to the exclusion of orthodox Christian teachings.

I try to be open-minded, and so the relative openness of the Episcopal Church delighted me. After all, reason is one of the legs of three-legged stool that formed the core of the faith (the other two being scripture and tradition) as stated by the sixteenth-century theologian, Richard Hooker.

Reason lies at the very core of my being, and it is through reason that I relate to God. All my life I have sought to form a philosophy without an ideology, to devise a belief system that is flexible enough that it can change with new information. I constantly challenge all my convictions, except of course, for my religious beliefs. Along the way, I have developed techniques to neutralize the influence of the place of my birth, the character of my rearing, and my life experiences. I won’t claim to have been entirely successful in my quest for objectivity. I am a human being after all, and human intellect is impossible without some sense of self and some rootedness in received ideas. And an inner life always distorts reality. But my struggle for intellectual honesty has been well worth the effort.

It has been supported by a value system that I gradually developed over the years. I believe the safety net should be reserved for the truly needy. Where economically feasible, it should address root causes rather than merely serving as a conduit for aid to the needy. At the same time, efficiency should not be substituted for compassion.

Government should not expand social goals beyond basic fairness, however. Government programs should be designed so that there is accountability for expenditures and tangible, measurable measures of success. Where possible, a funding source should be identified for every program—and those funds should be made available only for that program.

We must take care of our knitting in this country before we involve ourselves abroad. To do this, we must make ourselves as self-sufficient as possible, including in energy. We must maintain a strong military capable of providing support to our allies. We must not negotiate or make treaties with those who declare themselves our enemies.

Most important, for purposes of this book, is the conviction that we need a political structure different from the one we have today. Federal programs should be simplified by splitting them into organizational elements that have a limited set of goals. Except in the case of national emergency, no taxpayer money should be spent unless there are matching revenues. Funding sources for programs must be available only for that program and may not be used for other purposes. We must use the tax code only to raise revenue and not to provide benefits for special interests. Nor should we use the tax code to manipulate people into actions that meet theoretically desirable social goals. Finally, the government should not attempt to regulate any activity of individuals, organizations, or corporations unless some grave national interest is at stake.

I have always tried to be aware of the views of those who don’t agree with me. My magazine subscriptions (The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books) all take a progressive slant, ranging from mildly left to radically so. On the other hand, I sometimes watch Fox News to hear a simplified version of a contrarian position. But I refuse to be a knee-jerk anything.

Nor do I reject the seemingly anti-religious conclusions of science. I find Darwinism to be a satisfying account of the descent of the human animal from extinct species. I find Superstring theory to be a plausible description of the fundamental building blocks of the universe. There will someday soon, I am quite sure, be proposed a grand unified theory of science which will do away with the biblical version of creation once and for all. And it will prove it mathematically, even if it is impossible as yet to prove experimentally.

How do I reconcile these convictions with my belief in a personal God? In two ways: (1) Science begins with the assumption that there is no God. The universe and the life within it were created spontaneously according to laws which we are striving to uncover. If science does not begin with this premise, metaphysics inevitably crawls into the equation, and a science based on mathematics and experimentation cannot tolerate metaphysics.

As Ockham’s razor states: Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. Or, to put it another way: the simplest answer is always the most likely. This is the presumption underlying all scientific inquiry. If there are theories that violate this rule, they must be rejected, and an alternative path must be selected, which means that scientific explanations are a never-ending quest for simplicity, whereas the world around us is infinitely complex.

(2) Science is a discourse created by man. Just as the results of an experiment are distorted by the terms of the experiment (one way of expressing Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), scientific discourse is influenced by the prejudices of the persons conducting it. An example of how this works is Darwinism. Darwin was an English country gentleman who believed in progress and hierarchy. Man is the apex of biological creation, and European civilization is the apex of man’s achievements. To modern biological theorists, man and all his creations is just an accidental aberration along the path of natural selection. When man becomes extinct, as we inevitably must, all reason and all human creations will disappear with us. A conventional, uncreative animal will probably replace us.

But I believe science and religion are just two different ways of viewing the same reality, one mainly subjective and internal—and I am convinced that my subjectivity, my consciousness if you will, is as real as the stars in the sky—the other, mainly objective and based on external observations.

* * *

So what does this have to do with the essay that follows, which is mainly an analysis of contemporary politics? Well, when you refer to politics, you’re also talking about the kind of society we wish to live in. And if you’re reading one person’s idea (namely mine) of a decent society, you’d want to know a little about who that person is, wouldn’t you? Furthermore, my attitude toward science and religion is another way to express the source of my political and cultural beliefs.

There’s also the peculiarity of this book. While I honor education and learning, I have found that the intellect that perceives itself to be entirely objective is guilty of self-deception. Reason must tap into the inner world to serve as a check against the biases which creep into almost any theoretical formulation. This is especially true in the social sciences because experiments that prove a hypothesis are rarely possible. Dependent variables tend to multiply astronomically. Too often, papers which are bolstered by facts and statistical analyses pay little attention to deeper consequences and implications. And since the world is much more complex than we want to think, the facts chosen are usually winnowed down to justify a position.

In truth, most of what are called facts in the political arena are merely constructs turned into ideologies. And ideologies are always wrong. The world changes, and any answer which believes itself the be- all and end-all forever is bound to find itself out of date as soon as it is promulgated. And it becomes more dated as the generations pass. In the good society, therefore, it is not political ideologies which ought to rule; but it is a social organization in which the rulers are as unobtrusive as possible. Authoritarianism, no matter how well intentioned, is not only restrictive of freedom; it is inefficient as well.

Further, I will make no attempt to be all inclusive in my policy recommendations. That would take forever. I’m sure there are areas of importance to someone to which I will give short shrift or omit entirely. Furthermore, in being as broad as I plan to be, I will run the risk of being accused of not having thought things through. I assure you that there is not an idea here that is not the product of years of thought, reading, and analysis.

* * *

But why write this book? After all, there are plenty of political gurus out there just dying to have someone buy into their ideas. And there is no lack of policy statements by political candidates. Even before my religious conversion, I had begun to think deeply about the big issues. Nevertheless, The Solution came about accidentally when I had a bolt of lightning on one subject, namely, Social Security.

Around the turn of the millennium, I began to write a memoir intended to discuss my career in the computer industry. But the more I wrote, the more I found it was the ideas that interested me not the events of my life. Believing in cause and effect, I began to ask why things were the way they were. When I came up with a satisfactory conclusion, I found I was wondering why that was the case. Sometimes, there were multiple whys in that. What emerged was a seven-hundred-page book of very dense philosophy in which, among other things, I devised my method of reasoning. I tried finding a literary agent for the book, but it was far too long, diffuse, and yes, difficult to garner any interest. At that point, I gave up on writing entirely.

Then during the 2008 election, I began to listen to Barack Obama with great interest. Oprah Winfrey organized a rally for him in Columbia, South Carolina. Thousands attended. I thought to myself, Wouldn’t this be a great thing, the first African- American president? And then I began to hear the mostly young and minority audience chant, O-ba-ma, O-ba- ma, and it sent a frisson down my spine. It reminded me of the Nuremburg rallies in Hitler’s Germany. There seemed no substance in anything Senator Obama said that day, mostly hope and change and some of the usual social engineering language. Never, during the campaign, did I hear much more than inspiring words.

I’d lived through this before. I was an early Eugene McCarthy fan, again stimulated more by a dislike of the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson’s preacher-authority personality than any policy.

Yes, I knew that Senator Obama’s policies would result in some sort of income redistribution plan. The tax receipts obtained from the rich would go into the general fund to be used any way the federal government desired. Despite my belief that nobody deserves an income of more than $5 million per year, I didn’t feel comfortable with Senator Obama’s vague promises. Still, I thought, I ought to at least give him a chance.

But at the Democratic convention when he appeared between those pillars with all the fireworks, I thought to myself, "At first he wanted to be president. Then he seemed to want to be emperor. Now he’s aiming to be Zeus." It was a joke but a disappointment too.

Even given the enthusiasm for Senator Obama, the Republican candidate, John McCain, had a comfortable lead in the polls as late as September. And then the economy collapsed. Not only did Obama eke out a narrow victory, he also won huge majorities in the House and Senate.

It was obvious he regarded his accidental victory as a mandate for his kind of change. Three accomplishments defined his first term: the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obama Care), the Dodd-Frank regulations, and the various economic stimulus programs. All three were economic disasters. As Obama said later, The shovel- ready jobs weren’t as shovel-ready as we thought. The minuscule and temporary tax cuts weren’t big enough to have any affect. And the remainder of the stimulus did little good either. The regulations of Dodd-Frank were too onerous and often directed at the wrong people. And we all know what a disaster ACA was.

As a consequence of the widely hated health care law and the slow economic recovery, the Democratic party lost the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms and experienced a shrinking majority in the Senate. They might have lost the Senate that year had not the Republicans put up several really awful candidates, notably in Delaware and Nevada.

Despite the widespread dissatisfaction with Washington in general and his programs in particular, Obama won reelection in 2012 by a fairly convincing margin. The feckless campaign of the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, unable to tap into the growing anti-establishment mood in the country, was more than enough to win Obama the laurels. Despite his victory, I had become extremely disenchanted with Obama and the Democratic party. I was particularly frustrated by the ends-justifies-the-means use of any tactic to pass desired legislation, especially the Health Care Act and the often naïve and America-hating foreign policy. Out of my growing frustration with Washington, already shared by many, I began this book in 2011. I hoped to pull something together in advance of the 2012 election. Published or not, the effort would mean I had at least tried to do something. Unfortunately, my ideas then were still unformed, and I just couldn’t finish this book quickly enough for 2012.

After 2012, I became severely depressed believing I had something important to say, but just couldn’t say it. I was too ambitious, probably. Then came the 2014 election, another electoral disaster for the Democratic Party. But rather than being chastened by the repudiation of his policies, President Obama doubled down, deciding to implement his program through aggressive use of executive orders. He was apparently convinced, all history and contemporary evidence to the contrary, that his vision of fundamental social and political change was the right one. As for me, the cultural implications of these policies and the huge power assumed by the federal government meant abandoning much of the spirit of the Constitution. So in late 2014, I took the book out of the closet and started again.

Fortunately for me, my vision had cleared in the intervening years. This was helped along by my 2013 reading of The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek. This was a book I had long been aware of but hadn’t paid much attention to. In that book, Professor Hayek describes how an overly intrusive central government builds dependence eventually leading to a totalitarian state. Although I mention his name only once or twice in The Solution, Hayek’s influence is scattered throughout the book.

And then the bolt out of the blue, I had been thinking about Social Security for most of my life. And I’d certainly heard enough about the Social Security crisis or lack of one to know something was amiss. Then President Obama implemented the payroll tax holiday. And I thought to myself, "This is insanity. If we’ve got a crisis, this will make it worse." For months I thought about little except Social Security. When I put it all together, I was shocked what I found. From there, I began to look at the bigger picture. Is the whole government suffering from the same mismanagement as Social Security?

Also helping me focus my ideas was the huge damage being inflicted on American optimism by the negative tone of the administration. I wondered why anybody would want to buy into this negativism. I suspect many on the left just like the term liberal and will go along with any idea proposed by the Democratic Party without thinking much about it. Others are committed postmodern socialists. But the disarray apparent in the only alternative party, the Republican Party, unable to settle on a consistent vision of its own, and overly focused on unpopular social policies certainly aided the president’s cause. It became clear to me, as it has to many of you, that the entire political system was broken. As this book progressed, I became more than frustrated. I became angry.

Increasingly, you and I have become convinced that the American political system does not work for us. Some believe the