End The FUP; Start The FUN

Originally Posted At Forbes.com
By Lawrence A. Hunter, Ph.D.
April 27, 2012

It is time for the Republican Party to change its moniker from the Grand Old Party (GOP) to the Fixing-the-Unfixable Party (FUP).  Whether its attempting to enact “tax reform” to salvage the redistributive income tax and preserve the thugocratic IRS enforcer of the administrative state, or resurrecting RHINOcare to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare, or tightening up the Fed’s statutory mandate to make central banking safe for democracy and prosperity, or launching self-righteous investigations of the empire’s various atrocities and outrages, the FUP thinks it can fix the unfixable with politics.  A little tinker here, a little fiddle there and, voilà, right-headed politics and the democratic process will fix what ails us and set the world right again.

But wait, you say, isn’t the FUP acronym taken?  Isn’t the Democrat Party already the FUP party, in the very real meaning of the term? Touché, so it is.  We have, in fact, two FUP parties—different strokes for different folks—FUP-Blue and FUP-Red, both designed to keep politics in control of our lives and the people under the heel of government.

Democrats we can call the Fomenting Unrest Party (FUP-Blue) as it goes about the nasty business of stirring up race resentment and inciting class warfare through identity politics and redistribution, all calculated to expand the administrative welfare-police state to shrink-wrap all of human existence.  Quite simply, the raison d'être of FUP-Blue is to foul things up, which it does extraordinarily well, so the people come to clamor and vote for political solutions to fix things up. 

Enter the FUP-Red party, whose life’s aim is to fix up the foul up.  Alas, all it succeeds in doing with its Rube Goldberg fix-up, however, is fouling up the foul up even more, fomenting more discontent and inflicting more hurt as its geniuses attempt to convert the sinking ship into a flying ark. 

As the Marine Band plays God Bless America on the slanting deck, FUP-Red gets itself into a purple rage and rampages about upsetting the life boats (e.g., cutting Social Security).  The last thing FUP-Red can tolerate is people preferring the lifeboats and FUP-Blue to FUP-Red and its vision of a Rube Goldberg Nation intricately designed by its best and brightest think-tank engineers.  One can just hear the speechifying of FUP-Red politicians reminiscent of President Lucifer Gorgonzola Butts, Senator Boob McNutt and Justice Lala Palooza:  “Why, all right-thinking Americans know in their guts lifeboats is no damn way to get across an ocean. Come, let us soar together in the FUP-Red Flying Ark.”

Politics, red or blue, is not the answer to what ails us.  Freedom is.

An income tax is unfit for a free people, and it should be repealed, not “reformed.” 

Central banking and fiat money are failed experiments in centralized, crony-control capitalism, and the Federal Reserve System is a monstrous public-private cartel of banksters and bureaucrats that corrupts and debases private enterprise and free markets. It cannot be reformed; it must be ended and replaced, if not with free money, then at the very least with an independent currency board (preferably one based on gold).

The only way to ensure adequate health care at reasonable prices is to allow medical care and health insurance to be provided by free markets, the same way other necessities of life have been provided cheap and in plenty since the beginning of the republic, be it food, shelter, clothing or transportation.

Finally, politics cannot fix Social Security by means testing it and making an already horrible deal for workers worse.  And, politicians sure can’t gain public support for allowing young workers to opt out of the program by punching more holes (with the Chained CPI) in the already-leaking Social Security lifeboats in which they have stranded older workers and current retirees.  Bailout Social Security for the old ones, not banks for banksters. Free the young from Social Security’s manacles; don’t imprison them in a means-tested, fixer-upper welfare program.

A vacuous politics produces vacuous slogans, be it Obama’s “Hope and Change”/“Change You Can Believe In” or Romney’s “Believe in America”/“Keep America America.”  But it takes a real political FUBAR such as the one currently in the making to generate the slogan most fitting for FUP-Red as they steer us toward the looming iceberg: “Scuttle the Life Boats; Full Speed Ahead.”  That slogan is neither a strategy for political victory nor a prescription for fixing the unfixable.

Instead, give freedom a chance.  Here’s the sketch of a Framework for Freedom: 1) Repeal the welfare-police state, all of it, including the tax system, the labyrinth of regulations, the standing army and the Fed; 2) eliminate sovereign immunity, scale back and de-militarize police forces and hold all officials to the same standards and requirements to which ordinary citizens must adhere; 3) replace all government officials once a cycle with a random selection from the tax rolls (a kinder, gentler Hunger Games), and require a large super-majority legislative vote to enact any new law or regulation; and 4) reserve elections for comprehensive ballot referenda permitting voters to repeal anything their fellow citizen-officials enacted/promulgated into law in previous cycles.  Call it a Blueprint for the Freedom Unlimited Nation (FUN).

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