Starve the beast.
If every unit of civil government had to fund its operations without debt, the growth of the state would cease. It would reverse. The key to the growth of the state today is debt. Cut its ability to issue new debt, and you strangle it.
When the Tea Party can organize successful anti-bond campaigns, it will cease to be entertainment and start to be a political movement. It will send a message to the Establishment: the free ride is over.
Legendary Democrat House Speaker Tip O'Neill famously said this: "All government is local." The Tea Party has not come to grips with this yet.
To gain political power, the Tea Party must first decentralize. It must begin to affect local elections, especially bond elections. This is where the next generation of leaders must be trained.
Back in 2000, I called this the Dogcatcher Strategy. It begins with this statement: "I would not vote for him as dogcatcher." This is where to start a political career. Run against him.
The Tea Party needs to be in every county. There are over 3,000 of them.
It needs to monitor every local agency of government: city council, county commission, school board, and every other agency that has the legal authority to issue bonds. That is the key. Can it legally issue bonds? Monitor it.
This is not being done. It has never been done. It must be done.
A MODEL SITE
There is a site devoted to monitoring county government in Union County, New Jersey. Take a look: http://www.countywatchers.com. The site posts videos of meetings.
Here's what grabbed my attention. The room is almost empty. Somebody set up a simple video camera and has recorded what is being said at the podium. This is a very simple setup. You could do this with a cell phone.
To make it even better, the cell phone or pocket camera could have a microphone set up at the podium. I don't think anybody would object to that. Or there could be a simple inexpensive shotgun microphone attached to the pocket camcorder.
Here's my point. There is almost nobody in this room. This indicates how easily a well-organized small group could influence a local county commission. It does not take a large numbers to do this. It takes skill. It takes some direct-mail ability. It takes the development of an email list. It takes a website, such as the one on which the video is posted.
This would be an obvious Tea Party project. The organization would make certain that at every meeting, there would be somebody making a video. There would be no unit of government that did not have somebody monitoring it every time the organization met. The politicians would know that a video of the complete meeting would be posted on the Tea Party website for the county or ZIP Code within a day. There would be a permanent record of whatever was said at the meeting.
Similarly, every printed handout presented by anybody, as well as anything handed out or published by the local unit of government, would be posted on the watchdog site. If a piece of paper is made public to influence a decision by a government, that piece of paper is going to be turned into a PDF, and it will be posted and searchable on the website by the end of the week.
I see another way to get this information posted. This would be part of a homeschool curriculum in civics. There would be a course in local government. This would be organized by the local homeschool association.
At least two students would be assigned to each unit of local government. The homeschool association locally would create the course, and each academic year, a new group of students would be recruited. It would be best to have seniors running the operation, with juniors as apprentices. There would be continuity, year after year, for the projects. The Tea Party would work with the homeschool association to provide content for the site. It would use the students to do the grunt work, such as shooting the videos and converting any handouts into PDFs.
The indication that the Tea Party is toothless is seen here: the local Tea Party organizations do not set up anything like this at the local level. Until local politics becomes the focus of the Tea Party, nothing will be done. You need training in fighting government, and you cannot get this by opposing Congress. You cannot get it by opposing the state legislature. But you can get it by opposing activities of local civil government.
TRAINING FOR THE GREAT DEFAULT
We must not assume that creative people will do this systematically, on their own, in over 3000 counties in the United States. There must be a central site that produces training materials for local political activists who want to restrict the expansion of taxation and regulation in the community. This will not take care of itself. This has to be organized.
There has to be training in how to stop a bond issue. In every community the United States, we need well-trained people who know how to stop a bond issue from passing locally. If we can stop the bond issues from passing, we can stymie the expansion of local government.
This has to be done in preparation for the Great Default. When the federal government at last begins to default on its promises, it will not have the money to spend in local communities. The umbilical cord of federal spending will be cut. At that point, there would be a tremendous opportunity for people who oppose expanding the local power to implement their program. There will be confusion and chaos in local communities, because they have become dependent upon the federal government to supply the boondoggles. When the money stops flowing from Washington, there would be a political revolution locally. The stakes are high. Tea Party people need to prepare now for the inevitable day of reckoning in Washington, when the promises will have to be broken, because there is no more money to send.
Nobody is doing this nationally. There may be a few counties in which something like this is being done, but residents in the other 3000 counties never hear about it. Yet this is crucial. All politics is local. The place where you can make your stand against the expansion of civil government is locally. It is naïve to think that we can do anything nationally before we do a great deal locally.
The Tea Party has a swing vote in the House of Representatives, but it is not enough to stop John Boehner and the Establishment Republicans. But in every little local community, wherever there are empty seats at a county commission meeting or city Council, the Tea Party is in a position to begin to change the system.
CONCLUSION
We must start with this political slogan: "You can't beat something with nothing." This means that when at long last there is an organized political movement that wants to adopt a winning strategy to roll back civil government, it will have thousands of political laboratories to test its abilities. A dedicated minority can stop the expansion of the politicians in small counties. They can learn what works in these counties. They can learn what doesn't work. They can get experience. This is vital for any serious political movement that is dedicated to rolling back the state.
My strategy rests on this fact: nobody wants to do this. This is why a dedicated political minority locally can put a brake on the expansion of the state. You get leverage wherever there is no organized opposition.
This was the basis of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's strategy in the Pacific, beginning in 1943: "Hit 'em where they ain't." It involves the second half of his famous phrase: "Let 'em die on the vine." In political terms, this means cutting off their funding.
In three words: No on bonds.
If we could stop every bond issue, we could starve them out.
But first, we must set up a system to monitor every agency that has the authority to issue bonds. Until this is done, the Tea Party will remain a source of entertainment, not a source of political change.
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