LIBERTARIAN? NO. HUMANITARIAN.

What does government do in the great United States of America? Well, I would have to say it does too much and too little. The Middle Path has escaped the attention of most politicians and voters. Corporate interests avoid The Middle Path because it does not yield the profits that depend on their model of growth, growth, growth, more, more, more.

American Libertarians have some decent ideas about the scope of government. Unfortunately, all too often their 'lean' is paired with a bourgeois rationalization of  'mean'. Their religious fealty to capitalism is also a problem, deeply rooted in the personality disorder of their goddess, Ayn Rand. Ms. Rand was not really a capitalist; she was the ultimate opportunist. Who else would dare decry the Russian Revolution after exploiting its aftermath for free higher education?

Governing a massive country with widely varied ecosystems is complicated. I would not propose that Federal government could function without a fair amount of bureaucracy. This is where the Libertarian attraction to a decentralized model makes some sense. Decentralized government is the breaking trend in Europe, for example. The failure of an E.U. bureaucracy to recognize regional needs and differences is exemplified in the growing dissatisfaction with Brussels throughout the E.U..

Why do people need government?  What could government do well at minimal cost? Where do the answers to these questions meet?

Human beings need leadership. We are social primates, living in massed groups by nature. Ayn Rand's cult of individualism is simply a projection of the author's narcissism. It is more likely to produce a Bernard Madoff than a Mother Theresa. America's Wild West, idealized in retrospect, was a massive experiment in individualism, anarchy and greedy acquisition. Its markers were gun violence, general lawlessness, environmental degradation and genocide. What has it yielded in the long term? Water shortages, poisonous agricultural practices, entrenched petrochemical culture and gross overpopulation which is rapidly destroying America's finest natural ecosystems.

What happens when leadership becomes corrupted by personal gain? It seems our current leaders are all Rand acolytes in practice. Even the nearly canonized Obama entered politics a humble social activist and left a wealthy celebrity, a master of empty pontificating. Bill and Hillary Clinton exemplify the corruption of ideals that fame and money inevitably cause when individualist celebrity takes root. When the idealist becomes convinced that he/she is infallibly correct, his/her ideals are fatally corrupted.

This fatal corruption of idealists in government has led to the current descent of government into obsession with controlling how citizens think, speak and feel. Personality politics have descended into personality control of the masses in the name of "equality". There is no actual freedom in that form of enforced equality by way of social hypocrisy. Censorship, questionable affirmative action policies, focus on individual differences rather than the strength of a united electorate. These are divisive and unproductive results of idealism gone bad. Government in the U.S.A. has absolutely no Constitutional ground for telling people what to think or say ... about anything or anyone. Controlling is not the business of a Constitutional republic. It is the business of totalitarian states. 

So, what do people need from government that government could provide inexpensively?

1. Health education and actual health care. Cutting military spending by a relatively small percentage could finance health education and health care for all Americans through a one-payer government insurance program with quality assurance mechanisms and cost controls. Government health education, based in science unfettered by religious ideologies, could significantly address unwanted pregnancy and healthy equality for women of all socio-economic strata in society.

2. Academic education. Cut loan programs which benefit banks and provide free tuition to all public colleges and universities for truly qualified applicants who compete via national qualification examinations. Emphasis of these examinations could be placed on academic areas which contribute significantly to scientific and social progress in America. All applicants taking the same examinations and subjected to equal scrutiny, based on their knowledge, not their genetic or stylistic characteristics. 

3. Environment. The government could immediately stop funding the petrochemical industry with subsidies and land leases on government property. The automotive industry could be required to escalate its transition from petrochemical cars to electric cars. Home builders and large landlords could be required immediately to conform to higher alternative-energy standards in buildings. Cities and towns could step up clean-water and water recycling programs.

4. Transportation. Mass transport could be revolutionized. All major cities could be turned into no-drive zones with proper government planning and infrastructure projects. Bike lanes and sidewalks could take precedent over streets. Light rail lines could replace car/bus lanes. Interstates could be constructed to deliver pedestrians, cyclists and mass-transit users to large public parking facilities around inner cities. On-off ramps within cities can be closed to non-essential vehicles. This would allow for faster through-traffic flow between cities. 

5. Public Safety. Crime is as old as the species. Crime and accompanying violence are pandemic wherever human beings are devoid of worthwhile work, overcrowded, malnourished and/or under-educated. Violence should be considered a crime when practiced by government on any level: Locally, nationally or internationally. Violence by government is an indication of government failure. The American Defense Industry is a misnomer. It is actually the American Aggression Industry. Policing has followed a military model in recent decades due to the consolidation of public safety agencies with Homeland Security, a military bureaucracy. Rather than focusing on crime prevention through social progress, policing has turned to public control. Public safety can be provided by government by taking its emphasis off reactionary policing and placing it on public health and improved general education. A greatly reduced military could be charged with simply protecting the borders and citizens of the United States from attack or invasion.

6. Minimum individual income. All individual working adults should be guaranteed a minimal annual income. This is different than a minimum wage. This amount could be limited to those who are working, seeking employment or unable to work due to disability/age. It could distributed on the basis of annual assessments of region-specific levels of expenditures required for food and shelter. Similar to assessments done for adjustments to social security payments to retirees. This income payment should be separated completely from reproduction or retirement insurance. In other words, the current incentives for under-educated and underemployed women to have children for income should be eliminated by government for the benefit of advancing individual women in society and the benefit of the unborn who might be subjected to lives of generational poverty. The elderly should still have access to a retirement safety net. 

7. Taxation. By gutting the American Aggression Industry, the need for tax money to provide an equitable standard of living for all Americans would diminish immediately. A flat tax could be raised fairly from all individual U.S. adults with income. Discrimination between unmarried and married adults should be ended. Incentives for reproduction should also be ended. That tax, most likely much lower than current tax levels for all Americans due to the elimination of massive military spending and loopholes for billionaires, could easily fund the better characteristics of government as outlined. 

8. Universal justice. Government should be in the business of seeing to the fair and equal treatment of all individual citizens under Constitutionally valid law. 

Bureaucracies have historically fallen to revolutions because they have evolved into parasitic organisms which feed on the public they were invented to serve. Our Federal government is stumbling to a similar future. Local governments in this huge country vary from the mad elephant of Chicago to the smoother educated affluence of San Francisco. A distracted citizenry has allowed itself to be divided by a puppet show in the corporate media. Whether this continues to an inevitably disastrous conclusion remains to be seen. Perhaps the future of mankind will rest on the decentralizing of all governments. The smart separating from stupid. The mindful and compassionate separating from the greedy and corrupted.