How to Use a Homeschool Course in Local Government to Launch Your Political Career
At some point, political power is going to shift back to local units of civil government: city, county, and school boards.
There is no question that this is going to happen. Because of the Great Default, Washington's checks will begin to bounce. The unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare will unquestionably bankrupt the federal government. In an attempt to keep these two sacred cows alive, revenue-sharing is going to disappear. Then, at some point, payments for Social Security and Medicare will be cut back dramatically.
At that point, there will be an enormous and unprecedented shift of political power back to local units of civil government. Some voters are going to demand that local taxes be used to subsidize them, and other voters are going to go into resistance mode. At that point, there is going to be an enormous political fight, and it is going to hinge on this issue: intergenerational politics. The oldsters are going to want their piece of the pie, and young families are going to demand their piece of the pie. There is going to be a much smaller pie, with much smaller pieces.
Your mission, should you accept it, is to shrink both the pie and the pieces.
I suggest that, if you have any political ambitions at all, or if you have any ambitions of retaining a larger percentage of your pre-tax income, especially related to property taxes, you begin to consider the possibility of either running for office or being in a position to control who does run for office.
I suggest a strategy. It is a multi-year strategy, but any long-term political strategy had better be multi-year.
HOMESCHOOLING
My strategy begins with homeschooling. It begins with a course in local government. You may want to teach it to your own teenage children. Then volunteer to teach it for a local homeschool cooperative group.
Here's what you want to have on your agenda. You want to train up local people who have some knowledge of the details of local government agencies. To do this, you need initial information. You also need an initial core of people who will volunteer their time to begin to learn how the good old boys at the local level have rigged local politics to line their pockets. Rest assured, this is exactly what they have done. And, because nobody pays much attention to local politics, they have probably done it since the end of World War II. They and their heirs, either genetic or spiritual, have rigged the local politics to do very well for themselves.
Your goal, I hope, is to expose the system so that it doesn't line anybody's pockets, other than local taxpayers, who are going to keep a larger share of their income if your political plans are successful.
Teach a course that covers county government, city government, and the local school board. There are other local organizations that have bond-issuing power, and which are almost invisible. Eventually, you will have to possess knowledge about how they operate, too, but initially you want to limit this to city government, county government, and the local school board.
Teach a course on how local government works. You are probably going to have to teach yourself initially. There are not many materials out there on this crucially important topic.
The next thing you will need are volunteers to monitor all three agencies of government: city, county, and school board. This will be part of the course assignment. Homeschool students who want to pass your course are going to have to become knowledgeable about how local civil governments actually operate. To do this, you're going to have to have at least one volunteer, and preferably two, to go to every meeting and take notes. Furthermore, they will collect any handouts that are offered to the public.
You will need three teams: county, city, and school board.
WEBSITES
Your next step is to set up websites that monitor these institutions. There should be one website for each of the units of government.
I recommend using the free software made available on WordPress.org. You will pay something like $10 a year to reserve each URL (Godaddy, Enom), and you will pay maybe $4 a month to host all of the websites you put up. There are dozens of web host companies that do this for something in the range of $4 or $5 a month. To evaluate them, start here.
You will be the owner of each of the sites. The students will do the grunt work. What you want from the students is a summary of each meeting, to be posted within 48 hours after each meeting. It will summarize what went on, who said what, and so forth. If there were any handouts, a PDF of each of the handouts will be posted on the site.
Meeting by meeting, at least one of your homeschool students will monitor what is going on. It will be almost impossible, politically speaking, for the good old boys to close the meetings to the students. The students will be coming in the name of education. They will be coming in the name of a course requirement for a civics class. How can they be blocked? I don't think it's possible.
So, there will be a local website, from this time on, that monitors everything publicly that is being done by each of the local units of government. Furthermore, if a few students get really interested, they can dig a lot deeper than just attending local meetings. They can find out who is going to be benefited. In other words, they can follow the money.
Each year, a new student or group of students pursues the groundwork laid by the previous group. You have continuity, because you have control of the websites. The students post on the websites, but you are the source of continuity.
Over time, you can advertise the existence of these sites in the local weekly newspaper. Most communities have a weekly newspaper. You may even be able to get one of the students, or even more of the students, to start a column in the local newspaper. The column is free, and the student can use the article to summarize what has been going on in the unit of government that he is monitoring. He can also post a bit.ly short link directing readers to a more detailed article that he has written for the website.
YOUR POSITIONING
Over time, you will get a very good sense of who is doing what, and for how much of the public's money. You will become perhaps the most well-informed nonmember of the good old boys club in your community. You will know where the money is going.
This will make you extremely dangerous to the good old boys. That will be your edge if you ever decide to run locally, or if you decide to be the equivalent of a king-maker behind the throne. They may invite you in. Resist.
I recommend that you do whatever possible to build a political mailing list. This can eventually become a political mailing list. Probably you need one mailing list for all of the local agencies of government. Then, on a weekly basis, you send out something. It doesn't matter what you send out. The idea is simple: to create name identification for yourself. You can link back to any article that has been published on any of the sites. You want cross-fertilization. You want people to know of the existence of the other sites. A common email letter will do this. I can recommend the use of this program: Sendy. Use it with Amazon SES to maintain your mailing list inexpensively.
Note: if you incorporate, you will not be able to use it free of charge for your own campaign. But beware: you may get sued at some point if you own the list personally. Count the cost.
CONCLUSION
This project will probably take a decade to pull off. That's why it is doable. Nobody else is going to do it. Nobody else has the grunt workers to do the work. But if you teach a course in local government to a group of homeschool cooperative members, you can mobilize a group of young people who will get a sense of what is going on politically. Some of these kids will stick with you after they graduate from college. If they can stay in the community, which I recommend that they do, this can be your hardcore corps.