It is the government’s duty to guarantee an even terrain of freedom in which each individual can prosper in accordance with his individual merit. It is not the government’s duty to guarantee a prosperous outcome to those who did not earn such an outcome by their own inherent merit. Most of the limitations that people face are self-imposed. And of those limitations that actually are imposed upon people from external sources, the primary external source is usually government.
A Dharma Nationalist government in America would call for the complete eradication of the bureaucratic welfare state apparatus, thus leading to the dramatic downsizing of most federal entitlement programs. If allowed to form a Dharmic government, we would immediately implement the outright abolition of several federal agencies. Departments and agencies to be abolished within the first sixty days of assuming power include the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Resources, the Department of Labor, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), among other departments and agencies. Every other department and agency will have their budgets scaled back to within 50%–80% of their current budgets.
Large-scale Decentralization of Governmental Authority
“It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.”
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)[4]
The last section dealt with the bureaucratic content of government. This section will focus on the geographically expansive range of governmental authority. The further away from the local level that important, life-altering decisions are made, the less input and control citizens have about the important issues and policies that effect their immediate lives. Consequently, the more likely it is that such decisions will not reflect the reality of the situation in local communities. In order to ensure the maximal amount of citizen control over their own lives and destinies, we must place the bulk of governmental authority back on the most localized levels possible — neighborhood, village, town, city, and county organizational authorities, as well as newly empowered neighborhood associations. The first and foremost decision-making level, however, will always be that of the individual family.
The federal government must only intervene and overrule local legislation when it has been demonstrated that such legislation is either unconstitutional, when it poses a severe threat to the security of the nation or its own people locally, or when such federal legislation can be proven to positively improve the overall state of the nation without jeopardizing local legislative and administrative power.
Empowerment of Local Communities
The level of power that any given organizational unit in society possesses must increase in direct proportion to how localized that organizational unit is, and must conversely decrease in accordance with how remote from the local level that organizational unit is. The most local and fundamental organizing unit in any health society is the family. Each individual family unit must, therefore, possess as much autonomy, respect, rights to privacy, and power of authority as is maximally possible. The family unit will be given the highest degree of decision-making empowerment possible. This is especially the case when it comes to any decisions about the welfare or guidance of children. Each succeedingly larger unit of social organization (village, town, municipality, county, etc.) will also have their decision-making empowerment enhanced in service to the family units that make up that larger unit of social organization.
Proper Tasks of Government
Almost every governmental body in America today has lost sight of what constitutes the proper scope of governmental responsibility. This lack of understanding on the part of governments has led to dire consequences for the populace. To reiterate this crucial point, the proper tasks of any non-federal governmental body is limited to the following tasks: suppression, prosecution and punishment of criminal activity; maintaining a judiciary to ensure that the law is followed; construction and maintenance of common public infrastructure; operating the federal postal system; and the upholding of Natural Law, primarily via persuasive encouragement, with direct legislation as a secondary course of action.
[1] As the academic researchers Bogdan Mieczkowski and Oleg Zinam have noted in their co-authored work Bureaucracy, Ideology, Technology: Quality of Life, East and West (Charleston, IL: Association for the Study of the Nationalities, 1984), “Freedom of societies is thus inversely proportionate to the power of bureaucrats.”
[2] From a letter by Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, May 27, 1788.
[3] Notes on the State of Virginia (1787).
[4] Illustrated London News, August 17, 1918.
Domestic Policy
The Twelve Dharmic Planks of Domestic Policy
1. The sanctity of private property rights will be upheld at all times.
2. The immediate elimination of the progressive or graduated income tax.
3. The protection of all rights of inheritance.
4. Protection of the property of all private citizens.
5. Radical decentralization and demonopolization of the national banking system.
6. Radical decentralization of the means of communications and transportation into the hands of localized, private, family-based institutions.
7. Radical reduction of the instruments of production owned by the state, corporate monopolies, criminal media conglomerates, and the military-industrial complex, as well as encouraging private families to bring wastelands into active cultivation, along with the improvement of the general environment.
8. Elimination of equal liability of all to labor. Encouragement of small family businesses, and family-run agriculture.
9. Deindustrialization of the agricultural sector, renewal of the many thousands of small cities and towns containing a population of less than 50,000, thus encouraging a more equitable distribution of population over the country. Rather than all power, culture, opportunity, and means of communication being concentrated in only the 50 largest cities of America, these elements should be shared by thousands of smaller cities, as well as all towns and villages.
10. All education for children should be provided exclusively by privately-run schools and/or home-schooling within the family, with an absolute minimum of interference from the state.
11. The traditional family (a male husband, a female wife, with or without children) shall eternally form the primary organizational unit of the nation. Each and every other form of government — local, municipal, county, state, federal, etc. — exists in the humble service of the prosperity, protection and interests of our nation’s millions of traditional family units.
12. While the government is tasked with providing law enforcement services, the individual, family and local community shall always be recognized and respected as the first line of defense against crime. Thus, all citizens shall retain the right to be armed in any manner each citizen deems necessary to defend himself against criminal elements.[1] Individuals, families and communities have the right to organize themselves into local crime watch and protection associations, and to thus guide local law enforcement agencies in their tasks.
Energy Policy
The primary goal in our energy policy is achieving sustainable energy independence as rapidly as possible. We must radically reduce our dependence on foreign oil. In place of such dangerous dependence, we need to implement a dual program of seriously investing in alternative energies research, such as wind, solar and hydro energy, as well as redouble our efforts at drilling oil domestically. To a lesser degree, we also need to focus on developing nuclear power, as well as using more coal. In the interim, since we are currently forced to buy much of our oil from foreign sources, we must boycott oil from all totalitarian Abrahamic regimes, and only buy from non-totalitarian nations whenever feasible.
Education
/> “No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.”
Plato, Crito
The nation’s public educational system is a complete failure. As of 2012, SAT scores are officially at the lowest they have been in 40 years.[2] Our schools have proven themselves incapable of equipping students with the intellectual skills, objective factual knowledge, values and character training, spiritual development, and sense of civic responsibility that schools should, by definition, impart to their students. Rather than truly educating our children, public schools are abusing our children by pandering to the lowest common denominator, stressing crypto-Marxist social engineering dogma rather than academics, stressing the embrace of “feelings,” “emotional intelligence,” sensitivity training, and popular culture instead of learning academic skills and disciplines, as well as assisting in the breakup of the traditional family structure.[3] The public school system has failed our children to a degree that is systemically irreparable.
We must decentralize and privatize education to the furthest extent possible, leading to the eventual elimination of the abusive monstrosity of public education entirely. In the interim, rather than viewing the public school system as the primary structure for educating our nation’s youth, public schooling must quickly become a secondary, fallback system. Private schooling, under the guidance of parents, must become our primary system of education. G. K. Chesterton stated the paradox of the current system in this way:
In one sense, this is supremely the educational age. In another sense, it is supremely and especially the anti-educational age. It is the age in which the Government’s right to teach everybody’s children is for the first time established. It is also the age in which the father’s right to teach his own children is for the first time denied.[4]
Education must be solely in the hands of parents, students, teachers and private instructional institutions, without the meddling influence of destructive bureaucrats, teachers’ unions or Marxist ideologues. Teachers’ pay must be exactly commensurate with their ability to teach effectively, and with their students’ level of successful learning. If a teacher is not doing his job, he will be fired. The over-bloated bureaucratic nightmare deceptively misnamed the Department of Education must be eliminated.
Health Policies
“To keep the body in good health is a duty... otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.”
Gautama Buddha (563–483 BCE)[5]
One of the most immediate and genuine concerns that individuals, families and societies have is a need for health and well-being. This includes physical, mental, moral, social and spiritual well-being. A Natural Law government will encourage the promotion of policies that will dramatically improve and maintain the overall health of the people.
Such policies include: encouraging a reduction of such unhealthy activities as smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, the use of narcotics, the elimination of teen driving (the driving age will be raised to 21), and synthetic food production.
Writing about the importance of diet and exercise in optimizing health, Hippocrates (460–370 BCE) stated the following: “If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”[6] Rather than wasting both time and money in the worthless pastime of watching popular sports, every citizen will be encouraged to engage themselves in physical fitness programs. Local civic organizations, such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, will be encouraged to organize mass fitness camps, public fitness exhibitions, and nature hikes. Every locality will have men’s and women’s gymnasiums for the cultivation of health and fitness among the people. We will encourage the general populace to participate in traditional, healthy and meaningful sporting events, such as Greco-Roman wrestling, equestrian training, archery, and the martial arts.
Health is most ably secured when people are living in accordance with Nature’s Laws. This includes the revival and use of natural remedies, such as traditional herbal treatments, Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese medicine, massage, prana therapy, and so forth. These healing arts will be cultivated side by side with the many miraculous scientific developments that our people have discovered in allopathic medicine over the last four hundred years. The goal of our national health system will thus be to integrate the most natural medicinal arts with the most advanced scientific breakthroughs.
Stress, and the ancillary illnesses exacerbated by stress, has especially become a significant national health epidemic. Stress has become as prevalent, as debilitating, and as deadly as AIDS, cancer or heart disease.[7] Debilitating stress is viewed as one of the most crucial health challenges that our new Dharma government must combat. It has been conclusively proven through thousands of scientific studies that maintaining a daily meditation practice is the most effective and natural means for dealing with stress. Thus, a Dharma administration will encourage the teaching of effective meditation techniques to every adult and child in the nation. While meditation education will be encouraged, however, the practice of meditation will never be forced upon any citizen who freely chooses not to adopt this practice.
Local Councils of Arts and Culture
“Degrade first the arts if you’d mankind degrade, Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.”
William Blake, “On Art and Artists”
Art and culture were traditionally considered to be sacred expressions of the beauty of nature and of God, who is the source of nature. Art and culture were not ever meant to be denigrated into the neurotic ugliness that has replaced true art today. The artist was not originally a troubled and psychotic con artist, a greedy businessman, or someone devoid of actual talent. A true artist was considered to be someone who was inspired to act as a clear and revealing window into higher worlds and aspirations.
A Dharma Nationalist government would revive the traditional understanding of art and culture as an expression of actual beauty and meaning. We will foster the promotion of culture, beauty, music, and art in all spheres of life by encouraging the creation of Councils of Arts and Culture in every local community. Such councils will not be funded federally, but will be funded and maintained strictly on the local level.
Architectural and City Planning
“Modernist architecture is fundamentally anti-historical. It is the first architecture that does not derive from a preceding architecture; the first that begins with a vertical rupture in time.”
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Architecture is one of the outward aesthetic manifestations of any civilization’s philosophical and spiritual ideals. A people’s pride, cultural expression and aspirations are reflected in the buildings that they create. Each previous civilization in history had a dominant school of architecture that reflected the ideals of that culture. In the last century of secular materialism, the predominant schools of architecture have reflected the basest utilitarian, functional and socially neurotic aspects of a decadent society hopelessly surrendered to spiritual decay. As a result, today’s devastation architecture reflects the ugliness and impersonalism of a society steeped in collective meaninglessness.
A Dharma Nation must have standards of architecture that reflect our own specific civilization, and that encourage beauty, hope, while including natural elements and awe-provoking complexity, and yet the simplicity of wonder. Using the ancient science of Sthapatya Veda (also known as Vastu), ancient Greco-Roman architectural models, and other architectural arts and sciences from our noble heritage as foundational guides, all city planning and building construction will again reflect the highest aspirations of our civilization.
Ruralism
“Man, no matter how often he has tried to urbanize himself, can only live like a normal human being in an essentially rural place of residence.”
Ralph Borsodi
(1886–1977)[8]
One of the most disturbing hallmarks of the last century’s foray into radical materialism has been the systematic and merciless destruction of traditional rural culture, along with the positive family values, economic self-sufficiency and closeness to nature that organically arise when the time-honored lifestyle of ruralism is encouraged. The rural must always take precedence over the urban in the allocation of resources and influence. The Dharma Nation Movement calls for the immediate implementation of a new ruralism in order to restore this healthy, natural and spiritually enriching culture.
Strong National Defense
The primary task of any national government is the defense of the nation from foreign attack and invasion. Without a strong and vigilant defense of the nation’s borders, citizens, families, traditional communities and interests, all other concerns and endeavors of the nation are imperiled. A strong and well-trained military is the only real assurance of peace and of the perpetuation of our culture. A Natural Law government would seek to maintain and continuously expand the effectiveness of the most powerful armed forces on Earth. A superior military is the result of a superior officer class, the quality of the trained service men and combat troops available, and the maintenance of a very high morale among all military forces. Consequently, there are several measures that we would implement to ensure that we have the best military on Earth.
The Dharma Manifesto Page 14