Don't Hurt People and Don't Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto

by Matt Kibbe

  There’s a big football game that’s going on in Congress. The party that has the majority is playing hard to keep the majority, and the party that’s in the minority is playing hard to get the majority. It’s a football game that’s played with money, and the more money you raise for your party, the more influence you’re granted. You’ll get a better committee. Do they measure committees in terms of how much you can do for your constituents? No. All the A-committees in Congress are based on how much money will lobbyists give to you if you get on one of those committees. So, you raise money for your party, you’re a good soldier, you get on a higher fund-raising-capable committee, you raise more money, but now you’ve got a quota. Now you’re on the treadmill. If they give you a spot on the big pirate ship, you’ve got to collect a lot of treasure. That’s the way the process gets distorted. That’s how money distorts the process in Washington, D.C.

  RAND PAUL: Imagine how it could be if Hillary Clinton is the nominee for the Democrat Party. If she’s the nominee and she wants to be involved in the middle of the Syrian civil war, and she doesn’t give a damn about your privacy. Imagine if, on the Republican side, we have someone who wants a constitutional foreign policy, who says, “Sure, we defend our country. You mess with us, you’re going to get what happened after 9/11—overwhelming use of force against you. But we’re not going to be involved in every civil war, and Congress will vote. The will of the people will decide whether we’re in war.” I think you could have a complete transformative election, where all of a sudden the reactionary, nonthinking individual is going to be Hillary Clinton, and the Republicans could have a forward-looking person who talks about privacy and talks about adding a degree of justice to our criminal justice system.

  MK: The newly empowered citizenry, with their new tools of accountability, makes me an optimist, even though everything in this town and everything that President Obama has done to our economy and to our Constitution should make us despair about the future. Are you an optimist or are you a pessimist about the future of this country?

  THOMAS MASSIE: This place is way more broken than I realized before I came here. Now that I’m here, I give it a fifty percent chance that we’re going to be able to turn this ship before we hit the shore. And a fifty percent chance that it’s going to take something big to wake people up and to get the changes we need. But the only thing I can do is fight to turn the ship. That’s what I’m working on. Instead of being home in Kentucky and preparing for the ship to hit the shore, I’m up here trying to avoid the shore.

  MIKE LEE: I’m an optimist in a Churchillian sort of way. Winston Churchill is reported to have said, “The American people can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted every other alternative.” I think we’re reaching that point where we have exhausted every other alternative, and we will be left with doing the right thing. That’s what the American people are doing. That’s what they’re saying. They want to return to a time when the people are sovereign, and they’re citizens, not subjects.

  TED CRUZ: I’m incredibly optimistic. I’m optimistic because I think there is a movement that’s sweeping this nation of millions of Americans who are waking up and looking around. If you look at the past year, the rise of the grass roots, in fight, after fight, after fight in Washington, the grass roots have turned the fight around. Nothing scares elected officials more than hearing from their constituents, and in my view, liberty is never safer than when politicians are terrified.

  DAVID SCHWEIKERT: I’m optimistic also, but be careful because sometimes I’m pathologically optimistic. How do you get the public, mom and dad, the young person, the person who’s trying to grow their life and their business, to be able to take that little bit of their time? And it’s not about writing a check, though those are helpful. It’s about reaching out to a FreedomWorks or other organizations and driving their voice, saying, “We’re paying attention, and we care.”

  CHAPTER 8

  TWELVE STEPS

  WHAT, EXACTLY, DO YOU want?

  I get this question all the time, inside the Capitol Beltway. Sometimes the hostility of the inquiry makes me feel like I’m participating in the drug intervention of an old friend. You’ve finally got their attention, and they feel trapped, busted. Then comes the denial, the paranoia, and the hostility. An addict will shoot at any messenger that delivers the bad news: You have a big problem, and the path you have chosen will not—cannot—end well.

  This is precisely the way that official Washington has reacted to the citizens asking the tough questions of their two party representation. Obviously, those who ask this question typically have an agenda. They are trying to deflect attention, boldly claiming that Washington does not have a spending problem. An addiction to power? Not here; at least nothing that can’t be solved by giving the fixers another fix, more and more money and control. Without another government program, how will anything get better? The relentless clamor for more of your money rattles through Washington like junkies pleading for just one more hit.

  One of the common critiques coming from progressives, the media, and chin-clutching establishmentarians inside the Beltway is that we are just against things. President Obama loves this particular straw man. We oppose a government takeover of health care, so we must be against people getting health insurance. We oppose federal meddling in education, so we must be against children learning. We oppose an omnipotent surveillance state, so we must be against the safety of innocents.

  David Brooks, the resident “conservative” at the New York Times, doesn’t even try to hide his disdain for the new generation of legislators who have come to Washington committed to changing the rules of the game:

  Ted Cruz, the senator from Canada through Texas, is basically not a legislator in the normal sense, doesn’t have an idea that he’s going to Congress to create coalitions, make alliances, and he is going to pass a lot of legislation. He’s going in more as a media protest person. And a lot of the House Republicans are in the same mode. They’re not normal members of Congress. They’re not legislators. They want to stop things. And so they’re just being—they just want to obstruct.1

  Harry Reid went so far as to call us “anarchists,” simply because we oppose funding an expensive federal health-care takeover that the president himself has arbitrarily repealed or delayed in part some twenty times so far.2 The senator most responsible for drafting the legislation, Democrat Max Baucus, called it “a huge train wreck coming down” in April 2013.3 But now we are the “anarchists” for insisting that the government not fund, with borrowed money, something that no one in D.C. seems to think will actually work. They are acting like desperate addicts, aren’t they?

  How do we get from here to there, to more freedom and prosperity? How do we get from where we are today—with ever more encroaching government control, unimaginable fiscal liabilities, and so few in Washington, D.C., willing to do what needs to be done—to the point where the federal government is back to its limited and proper role?

  Public choice economists might tell us that it’s impossible, that governments naturally, inexorably, march forward—like the White Walkers descending on Westeros in Game of Thrones—expanding to the point where they choke off productive initiative, and great nations die. Think Rome, and the tragic devolution from a republic to an autocratic empire, and then to the dustbin of history.

  How can we reverse course and make sure that America doesn’t go down that fateful path of no return? To me, this is the most interesting strategic question that constitutional conservatives and small-l libertarians—moms and dads who just want a better life for their kids—have to answer.

  The solution will never be a quixotic fix of more “revenue” or another top-down reorganization of your life by some faceless bureaucrat who knows nothing of you and your family and doesn’t much care. We need a better, more compelling freedom agenda. The burden on us will always be far higher to explain how freedom works.

  We understand our princip
les. We get freedom. We know that simple rules of personal conduct—Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff—create tremendous upward potential for all of us, and that opportunity for all creates peaceful cooperation. Even though the insiders tell us the opposite, we know that open societies actually spread the wealth, and that closed, top-down systems lock in the spoils of the Haves at the expense of generations of Have-Nots. We understand the ethos of liberty that is ingrained in every one of us makes America an exceptional place.

  So what, exactly, should we do to restore liberty?

  This chapter lays out a twelve-step policy agenda: positive, innovative ideas that would improve people’s lives by letting them be free, by spending less of your hard-earned money on someone else’s favors, by letting you choose, by treating us all equally under the laws of the land.

  Radical stuff, I know.

  1. COMPLY WITH THE LAWS YOU PASS

  As Steve Forbes likes to say, the planners in Washington should have to eat their “own cooking.” This seems like such common sense, but you won’t be surprised to learn just how controversial this idea is behind the closed doors where congressional staffers and career bureaucrats congregate. Do as I say, they prefer, not as I do.

  Former Obama administration Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to enforce your compliance with complex federal tax laws, didn’t even see fit to pay his own taxes,4 apparently believing himself above such prosaic responsibilities.

  Back in 2011, it was revealed that House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other key members of Congress and their committee staff had played the market with the inside information of what their proposed laws would do to the stock valuations of certain industries.5

  This sort of behavior is emblematic of the contempt shown by Congress for the laws they impose on the rest of us. While the STOCK Act6 purported to put an end to congressional insider trading, the substance of the legislation was later rolled back before being implemented, by unanimous voice vote. Members of the House were not given time to review the bill that Senate majority leader Harry Reid had sent over in the middle of the night.

  “Rather than craft narrow exemptions, or even delay implementation until proper protections could be created, the Senate decided instead to exclude legislative and executive staffers from the online disclosure requirements” of the STOCK Act, reports the Sunlight Foundation.7 So the bicameral vote that insisted that D.C. insiders comply with the same trading laws as the rest of us was public and virtually unanimous, but the gutting of the law carries few legislators’ names or fingerprints.

  More egregious still are the constant attempts by members, staff, and federal employees to exempt themselves from ObamaCare. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp wants to change that, offering a proposal that would place all federal employees, even the president himself, into the same exchanges required by the rest of the country.

  “If the ObamaCare exchanges are good enough for the hardworking Americans and small businesses the law claims to help, then they should be good enough for the president, vice president, Congress, and federal employees,” Camp’s spokeswoman explained.8

  2. STOP SPENDING MONEY WE DON’T HAVE

  American families have to balance their budgets. The government should do the same. This is not rocket science.

  Why is it so hard for Congress to balance the budget? The core problem, of course, is that they are not spending their own money. They are spending your money. The ghost of John Maynard Keynes provides them with a pseudo-intellectual rationale to “stimulate aggregate demand.” But we are on to them and know that the only real stimulus they are buying with borrowed money is for their own reelection prospects.

  Given that, as of this writing, the national debt tops $17 trillion, it seems like common sense would dictate a few things:

  • Stop new spending on new programs.

  • Prioritize dollars and get rid of programs that don’t make the cut as top priorities in a world of scarcity.

  • No sacred cows allowed until we solve the problem, so put everything on the table.

  • Deal honestly with entitlements by acknowledging unfunded future promises.

  • You can’t tax your way to a balanced budget without tanking the job creation that actually generates tax receipts.

  I know, more radicalism. Harry Reid is so offended by these budget principles that if you agree with them, he thinks you are an “anarchist.”

  So many in both parties have grown comfortable simply kicking the can down the road and rubber-stamping an endless series of increases in the “debt ceiling,” or short-term “continuing resolutions” that claim deficit reduction in future years while spending more today. But it’s really not that hard to map out a plan to clean up Washington’s fiscal train wreck. In fact, FreedomWorks “crowdsourced” ideas for a citizens’ “Debt Commission” that would balance the budget in just a few years. Senator Mike Lee tried to bring those ideas to his Senate colleagues in November 2011 and was literally evicted from the Russell Senate Office Building by staffers representing Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN).9

  No, this isn’t an Onion spoof. I’m not making that up.

  Senator Lee has introduced a constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget each year and limit spending to 18 percent of GDP, the forty-year average of federal receipts.10 It was the basis for a consensus balanced-budget amendment that the entire Senate Republican caucus eventually signed on to.

  The Congressional Budget Office has released a report suggesting that if nothing is done to control spending, by 2038 the federal debt could be as high as 190 percent of GDP.11 At that point we can send congressional emissaries to Athens, Greece, to solicit innovative budget savings ideas from the Hellenic Parliament.

  3. SCRAP THE TAX CODE

  The federal tax code should only exist to fund the necessary functions of government.

  Special interests and congressional deal making have corrupted the tax code beyond anything imaginable in 1913, when Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, authorizing a national income tax. This incomprehensible complexity favors insiders and the special provisions they lobbied for, and the rest of us foot the bill. It’s political class warfare against working Americans. The problem isn’t tax cuts for the rich; it’s a tax code that prevents working Americans from getting rich.

  Complexity also enriches bureaucratic advantage. Complexity means more career public employees to navigate ambiguous rules. The tax code becomes a weapon in the hands of IRS agents who have a partisan or parochial agenda, or hold a grudge.

  We need to scrap the code, and abolish the IRS. We need to clean out the whole building, hose it out, and start over with a simple, low, flat tax. The government function of revenue collection should be limited and straightforward. No agendas, no social engineering, no overbearing discretionary authority in the hands of gray-suited soviets.

  Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has proposed doing exactly that. “We ought to abolish the IRS and instead move to a simple flat tax, where the average American can fill out our taxes on a postcard,” Cruz told Fox News. “It ought to be just a simple, one-page postcard and take the agents, the bureaucracy out of Washington. And limit the power of government.”12

  The most powerful case for tax reform is a moral one, the common cause of blind justice. If you don’t trust Washington, D.C., to give you a fair shake, why not just treat everyone equally under the laws of the land?

  Making the tax code simple, low, fair, and honest would be a powerful means of unleashing human potential. Class warriors on the left would howl about the injustice of treating everyone equally, but their real agenda is in defending the Beltway interests that have designed the current mess.

  The true victims of fundamental tax reform are the insiders who have carved out their favors, as well as the legislators and bureaucrats who make their living off soliciting, creating, and
navigating new complexity. The reduction in wasted time and money devoted to compliance would unleash capital, job creation, and upward mobility, while the elimination of complex loopholes would level the playing field between Americans and tax compliance enforcers inside government.

  4. PUT PATIENTS IN CHARGE

  Okay, so we all agree that ObamaCare is exactly the wrong medicine. We need to repeal the whole thing and start over. That does not mean that there is nothing wrong. But the answer is in more freedom, not the coercive hand of government bureaucrats.

  The system as it exists today is plagued by a lack of competition and by complex labyrinths that prevent patients from taking charge of their own care and treatments.

  The singular problem with our health-care system is all of the faceless, gray-suited middlemen standing between you and your doctor. So-called “third party payers” are the direct result of government distortions in health-care markets. Remember, allowing employers to provide benefits like health care, with pretax dollars, was a political fix to FDR’s wage and price controls.

  What if we cut out the bureaucrats, and their take, and let you make the choices right for you and your family? Would providers work harder to satisfy your needs? Would you get more quality at a lower price?

  Of course you would.

  There is a simple way to free patients and doctors from third parties like employers, HMOs, the IRS, or the faceless deciders at HHS. This could be accomplished by eliminating the punitive bias in the tax code that taxes health insurance and services when purchased directly by individuals. This would be a pretty simple fix that empowers patients without some complex, top-down redesign by the federal government. If health care is different, and vitally important to all of us, let’s provide care for our families with our own hard-earned dollars, before the federal government takes its cut. In other words, treat everyone the same, regardless of where you work and whom you work for.