Independence

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 12: Independence

• Value national independence like our founders and ancestors did.  The founders of America – not just the political founders, but everyone who came and staked their claim to a piece of the New World – saw at once how this New World would make them independent from the Old.

Independence isn’t an individual treasure – it’s a national treasure.  To be free from it all – the intrigues, the diplomacy, the negotiations, the alliances, the treaties, the conflicts, the tension, the wars – is priceless.

Almost no American really values these disasters – only the politicians and powerbrokers do.  No normal American ever woke up in the morning wanting America to be involved politically or militarily in the Balkans or the Middle East or Indochina.

For centuries, Americans were born in personal freedom and national independence.  Why be burdened again with the yoke of international slavery and the immorality of foreign affairs?

• Let Independence be our foreign policy.  What do we as Americans believe in?  What should our foreign policy be?

The American answer is independence of the nation and freedom of the individual.  We want a nation that is independent of all that’s bad about “foreign,” even as individual Americans are free to experience everything that’s good about “foreign.”  We want to say “No” to foreign governments and powerbrokers and “Yes,” to decent foreign people and cultures.  President James Madison said Americans needed

…to foster a spirit of independence too just to invade the rights of others, too proud to surrender our own, too liberal to indulge unworthy prejudices ourselves and too elevated not to look down upon them in others…[i]

Let respect for life be our doctrine, culture and commerce be our ambassadors, and peace be our only ally.  Let’s promote our magnificent American Ideas, not horse-trading with criminals and tyrants.  When we cheer let it be for those who are right, not for those who are on our side.

It’s time for us to let the rest of the world find its own way into the light.  If they want to look to America – somewhere up ahead of them on the path – we’ll do our best to light the way and gladly let them come along.

• Thank God for the oceans and the unbeatable defense they provide America.  This American isn’t the first to see the rich blessing that two great oceans offer to America.  There’s an old saying that the value of property is related to “location, location, location.”  Poland, even with many great people and a rich cultural heritage, has been overrun and demolished countless times, in large part because of bad location.

Great Britain was able to build an empire and rule the world for centuries in large part because of a narrow strip of water called the English Channel.  Is there any doubt that Napoleon or Hitler would have beaten England without that bit of water?

And here we are, blessed with thousands of miles of ocean – the ultimate defensive moat, the decisive barrier to invasion and war, the war-lover’s logistical nightmare.  The world has become smaller in the sense of speed and ease of travel and communication, but it’s still the same size for anyone who wants to have a war – really large, with invasion over long distances extremely difficult or impossible.

What could be better for American independence than for others to say, “They’re so far away that attacking them is really hard?”

• Re-declare, enforce, and live the Monroe Doctrine.  We should declare anew our intention to stay out of the politics and conflicts of the Old World, and our intention to keep the Old World out of the New.  We’re not really against the Old World – we’re against making the New World old, against letting this wonderful new place become a killing ground on the scale of Europe, Asia and Africa.

It has been estimated that from 1900 to 1987, governments killed 170 million of their own people – almost all of them in the Old World, 100 million of them by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao alone.  This is compared with the 34 million actually killed in wars –most of them also in the Old World.[ii]

These facts alone should cause clear-headed reflection and a vigorous re-declaration of the Monroe Doctrine.

In the 21st century, this means drawing lines and insisting that nations – including America – stay on their side of them.  We should make it painfully clear that they can’t cross the line for political or military purposes.  We’ll only cross the line in these ways if they cross it first and cross it for real – no phony USS Maine or Lusitania or Gulf of Tonkin types of made-up excuses.  And we’ll only cross it long enough to end the threat, not to engage in nation-building or other fruitless exercises in hubris.

We should insist that our southern brethren (in James Monroe’s great phrasing) remain independent of the Old World.  It’s too easy for a madman like Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez to think they can get ahead with a little help from Eurasian lunatics.  As the older sibling in freedom, we need to insist that they not invite that ugliness into the Western hemisphere.

At the same time, we should also make it clear that America will honor the same requirement it has placed on the Old World.  We won’t try to impose our own version of Old-World hegemony onto New World nations.  America can lead the way in a new way, neither dominating nor allowing anyone else to dominate.

• Radically change our way of thinking about America’s role in the world, from umpire and empire to freedom’s great light.  America is an empire without an empire.

We’ve learned to think and act like an empire, but we don’t actually have an empire.  We’ve got troops everywhere, but we don’t actually own or control anywhere.  We have military forces in the Middle East strong enough to take over countries and take back the oil wells that we helped to create, but we dabble and doodle and fight and die and kill so that others can stay in control and profit from the wells.  At a minimum, this is very, very unintelligent.

In spite of manifest destiny, in spite of what was done with the Native Americans and the American Spanish, we are not an empire.  It’s just not in us.  We don’t have that feudal, aristocratic orientation that makes us think we have a right – no, a divine duty – to build one.

We’re too idealistic and too practical, all at the same time.  We’re idealistic and really believe that “created equal” stuff, so we don’t think we have a right.  And we’re practical and really know that we don’t have the wisdom or resources to solve the insanity of the nations, so we don’t think we have a duty.

But we know how to defend ourselves.  We’re a righteous terror when we’re attacked.  Think Pearl Harbor.  Since we now know that our government helped get us into that world war with Lend Lease and innumerable provocations of Germany and Japan, we’ll keep an eye on our government to make sure it isn’t creating the problem.  We’ll insist that others work very hard to avoid provoking us, or even the appearance of provocation.  They need to know that if we think they’ve hurt us, they have a serious problem.

But in general, we’ll create an empire of the mind.  We’ll fill the bookstores and the internet and the televisions and the movie houses with fabulous ideas of freedom and rights.  We’ll defeat malevolent powers right there because our American Ideas are rich and true and theirs are not.  This is true cultural relativism:  In a relative sense, their culture has been weighed in the scales with ours and has been found wanting.

Americans are winners.  We like to win.  But we want to win in a new way, with Ideas rather than violence – with the shedding of light rather than the shedding of blood.

• Eliminate all military and political alliances.  President Warren Harding, in the wake of the devastation of World War I, said

But America, our America, the America builded on the foundation laid by the inspired fathers, can be a party to no permanent military alliance.  It can enter into no political commitments, nor assume any economic obligations which will subject our decisions to any other than our own authority.[iii]

And…

Since freedom impelled, and independence inspired, and nationality exalted, a world supergovernment is contrary to everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our Republic.  This is not selfishness, it is sanctity.  It is not aloofness, it is security.  It is not suspicion of others, it is patriotic adherence to the things which made us what we are.[iv]

• Redefine what our international interests really are and shed everything else.  Some people talk about the need to advance and defend American interests.  This is all well and good – but only if we define our interests well.

Are our interests oil and political influence?  The opportunity to play the referee or umpire or police – or fool?  Or rather, are our interests to live in peace and freedom?  The opportunity to play the singer or dancer or citizen of the world?

Our interests are things that many of the people in the Old World don’t seem to understand or – crazily – to even want.  The dignity of the individual, the rule of law, guaranteed rights, limited government, democracy, capitalism, invention, the future – and freedom, always freedom – those are our interests.  President Ronald Reagan said

America must remain freedom’s staunchest friend, for freedom is our best ally.[v]

Ironically, we can only damage these valuable interests if we try to turn them into political weapons and force them on others.  We shouldn’t do that.  If we’re wise, we won’t do that.

But we will say to others, “Don’t try to take our real interests away.  We know what’s valuable, and we’ll fight like a whirling dervish if you put your ugly hands on our real interests.  Don’t think that because we’re a peaceful people we’ll forget how to fight.  Hitler and Stalin were two of the nastiest people in half a millennium and worked very hard to create mass destruction, but we beat one in a hot war and the other in a cold war.  Americans were the ones who created the atomic bomb and the only ones to ever use it.  You do not know what we’re capable of doing when we’re really angry.”

In the book Imperial Hubris, the author stated that even with wars of extermination in other parts of the globe, none of them, regardless of who wins, endanger U. S. interests.

All evoke empathy and stir emotion, but it is, as always, a cruel world, and each nation’s one mandatory duty is to care for and defend itself…America must not commit abroad unless genuine national interests are at risk, and she must go to war only for survival and then to annihilate the enemy.  We must let our efforts to perfect self-government and ensure equality for all at home be the example that spurs democracy abroad.  We must unflinchingly let foreign dragons devour each other without expending American lives, treasure, and self-respect on an endless series of fool’s errands.[vi]

There’s a solid core in American culture that believes in America-first populism.  The brilliant political analyst James Carville said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the coming word in American politics was neo-isolationism.  Somebody in one of these parties is going to run on this platform.”[vii]  Neo-isolationism isn’t a bad way of saying it – we’re going to be isolated in a new way, on American terms.

Ultimately, we need to isolate ourselves from everything that runs counter to our true American interests.  That’s most of what fits under the heading of foreign affairs.

• Redefine what we mean by “patriotism” and “the home of the brave.”  Patriotism is often thought about in terms of national defense and war.  This has been so in most countries throughout most of history.  A person is often considered patriotic if they believe in every intervention and every war, and unpatriotic if they don’t.

But patriotism thought of in this way really can be what the great British philosopher Samuel Johnson called it, “the last refuge of scoundrels.”[viii]

Political leaders can use bad wars, and related phony calls for patriotism, to lead a nation into the abyss.  When the French Revolution ran off the tracks and the country was overwhelmed by riots and violence and starvation, the leaders launched into wars in part to take the people’s minds off the ugliness at home – and all of this was before Napoleon.

Some who have challenged foreign adventurism have been attacked in years past for being ungrateful, or for being some sort of sponge, using up American rights and privileges and resources without being willing to fight for them.  But this is very dangerous ground, leading to some terrible downward steps:

1. The first step is to say to those who question yet another intervention, yet another war, “America, love it or leave it.”
2. The next step with people who take this approach can be to define this to mean “Don’t challenge what America (or rather, the American government) is doing.”
3. One more short step will take us to “America, right or wrong.”
4. The fourth step can be a fatal one, “Kill or be killed.”
5. And the last short step is the one that can take our sons and daughters to an early grave

But is this really how we want to define patriotism and loyalty?  Is the true patriot one who won’t rock the boat, who will go along with any direction as long as most people agree with it?  Is loyalty being a team player, and not challenging the team even if the team is making fatal mistakes?

Or is the true patriot one who loves his or her country too much to let it be wrong?  One who will rock the boat and challenge the team – basic, solid, exquisite American contrarianism – until the team stops killing itself?

Patriotism is a “love of the fatherland.”  A real patriot is someone who loves his or her country so much that they refuse to let it be manipulated or pushed into conflicts and wars.  They’re willing to speak out against power politics and overreaching and actions meant to prop up the politically ambitious and greedy.

People who define patriotism to suit scoundrels forget a number of very important things.  First, people didn’t come to America to blindly follow another government, as they were always required to do in that tired Old World.  Second, even before we have a right to support a war, we have a right to question it and to be free from the mindless wars.  And third, the state has no a priori claim on my life or my children’s lives.  Only God has that.

Bravery includes being willing to die for a good cause.  But it’s much more than that.  Bravery American style is living for a good cause and refusing to die for a bad one.

• Declare victory and leave – everywhere.  We should tell our allies and coalition partners and all of the other assorted (and often sordid) countries, that we are coming home.  No more treaties or alliances.  We’re sorry – that we forgot what George Washington told us.

Here’s what we should be telling the world:  “You have two years to get your ducks in a row, because after that, the only Americans over there will be tourists spending money, which we will have lots of because we won’t be playing nursemaid and referee to the Old World.  As far as our political and military involvement are concerned, we think we’ve done at least enough and probably too much.”

We’ll declare that we won the war.  We will have won, finally, because we’ll be leaving and bringing it all home.

It’s time that we brought our troops home anyway.  They’ve been away since World War II, and it’s past time to bring them all home.  Why do we have troops in Saudi Arabia where people can be arrested for speaking about any religion other than Islam?  Why do we have troops in Europe, the seedbed of most major wars of the last half millennium?  Why do we have troops in the Middle East, the focal point of Eurasian lunacy?  And why, for God’s sake, do we have troops in Afghanistan, a graveyard for untold thousands of Russian and British and Afghan – and now American – soldiers?

So we should come home.  But we should also tell them that they had better not cross those vertical lines in the ocean with anything harmful to the New World.  Don’t wake us up.  Don’t annoy us.  If you do, we’ll come quickly and blow you all to hell.

If you make us come there, it will be like the Avenger in the Night.  We won’t put together phony, obnoxious alliances that make us get in bed with the devils who want to help us defeat other devils, so they can own a bigger piece of hell.  We’ll come in by ourselves and get justice – no more – and then we’ll come home again.  We believe that you are insane but not stupid.  Learned behavior will kick in.  You’ll leave us alone because it really hurts you when you annoy us.

The great thing about declaring victory – even if we haven’t won everything people might think constitutes victory – is that we’re America, big and strong and undefeated when we’re thinking clearly.  Who can challenge our declaration of victory – or independence?

• Tell them to keep their resources.  Resources are important.  It’s difficult to build or maintain a dynamic economy without them.  But resources aren’t everything, and we shouldn’t be willing to do anything to get them.

Why not?  Because we’re Americans.  We’re incredibly and continually creative:

• We built a transcontinental railroad through rocky and granite mountains
• We built a transcontinental canal through a tropical, Panamanian wilderness
• We went from scratch to nuclear energy much faster than most countries go from farming with hand plows to farming with oxen
• We feed the world from a breadbasket that, until we got here, was called the great American desert
• We went to the moon with slide rules and technology that was in some ways less advanced than a Sony PlayStation™
• We’re powering the technology of the future with a concept – a microchip – which is made from sand

We need to say to others, “We don’t need your oil.  Not because of using up resources – oil is simply old dinosaur and plant leavings, good for nothing if not to power industry.  But we refuse to need it if this means we have to deal with the devil.  And we won’t need it, because we’ll use our own oil, and then we’ll find other and even better and cheaper ways to get the job done.  We’ll find a way to run our cars on hydrogen or electricity…or dirt.  So feed your hostage-taking oil to your camels.  We won’t send you our money, because you’ll just use it to create mischief and turn poor, primitive sheiks into wealthy, primitive sheiks.  You will use our money to live the high life and buy our companies and acquire our weapons and pretend to be important.”

They want us to leave them alone so they can make control-freak rules, thousands of rules, about hair length and facial hair and women’s clothes and women’s roles.  We should accommodate them.  But let them do it with pennies rather than dollars.  Let’s put them back into the Middle Ages, where their civilization is firmly rooted and totally stuck.  Let’s not send them the money so they can turn a barbaric society only fit for wielding swords into a barbaric society wielding weapons of mass destruction.

We need to make the Middle East irrelevant.  The Middle East would already be irrelevant except for the industrialized world’s demand for oil.  And it isn’t just the Middle East that would be removed from having any possible influence.  Without oil revenues, lunatics running Venezuela and other countries in the developing world would have no platform.  They would rule mind-numbing poverty and then face their own people’s wrath.

This would make us independent of princes and sheiks and others who have been given wealth – given, because they couldn’t have found the oil on their own and couldn’t have developed a way to use it.  So they have gotten 21st century wealth and influence with pre-Renaissance cultures and behaviors.

Enough.

• Create an American Project for Energy Innovation.  We need an energy-focused American Project to get us past the many fanciful green energy notions, and to get to a plan that can safely and effectively power our industries and transportation…forever.

The American Project has two critical phases:

1)     The Sustain-and-Grow-the-Economy Phase

2)     The What’s-Next-So-We’d-Better-Think-About-It-Now Phase

Phase 1 faces several straightforward realities:

• America is running 25% of the world’s economy and needs a LOT of energy to do it
• America has a broad array of energy sources available, most of which its own government has done a masterful job of limiting or handicapping
• America should change its mindset on these energy sources, reduce or eliminate regulation on them, and do everything it can to maximize their availability
• We don’t know if Phase 2 will kick into play in 25 or 50 years or more, so it would behoove us to plan for 100 years of Phase 1 even as we move ahead with a parallel Phase 2

What are these Phase 1 energy sources right here in America?

• Oil – plentiful and accessible, with many new technologies for both maximum production and safe extraction
• Gas – plentiful and clean
• Coal – plentiful and cleanable – people talk about “clean coal” like it’s a new thing, but coal of all sorts has been “cleaned” by flue gas scrubbers and electrostatic precipitators for many decades
• Nuclear – As plentiful as we want it to be – America invented the technology but has almost eliminated this clean, effective source
• Renewable – although meeting only a tiny fraction of our energy needs even in the best scenarios, there’s no reason not to optimize these – but “optimize” means “develop it with engineering economy,” not “support it with endless taxpayer subsidies” (direct government handouts or guaranteed loans, as opposed to tax deductions available to other industries)

Beyond providing fundamental health, safety, and environmental regulations, the government should mainly get out of the way on all of this.  Of course there are risks with all of these just as there are risks with getting out of bed in the morning.  But a greater risk is that we might destroy this crucial part of our economic infrastructure through ignorant political and interest-group posturing.

The goal isn’t energy independence per se, since there’s nothing wrong with buying commodities from other nations.  But the goal should be energy independence from our own crippling nonsense that is leading us to dependence on lunatics.

What is Phase 2?

Phase 2 is at least in addition to, if not in the long term  in replacement of, our currently available sources of energy.  It’s whatever comes next, and it could be one breakthrough or ten.

What should the government do to support Phase 2?  It has a role to play, mostly in staying out of the way of the relentlessly innovative spirit that defines America.  This means:

1)     Stop creating massive front-door regulatory hurdles like the FDA now does with drugs and medical devices and the EPA does with almost everything

2)     Leave innovators and entrepreneurs with more of their own capital or earned money so they have something to spend on their tinkering

3)     Clean up the patent-approval process, which is almost hopelessly chaotic and costly and often unfair to boot

4)     Recognize that private/university partnerships are more likely to produce results, and less likely to produce corruption, than anybody/government partnerships

So we need an American Project for Energy Innovation to optimize what we currently have and to capitalize on what we could have down the road.  By American, we don’t mean “American government.”  We mean “American” – the rough-and-tumble, creative, innovative, continually churning dynamo that has led the world in innovation for more than a century.

The American Project should be very different from the Manhattan Project of World War II:

• It shouldn’t be a government-run program
• We don’t need an outcome that can be turned into a weapon of mass destruction
• We don’t need a method where it’s hard to tell the difference between peaceful and violent development
• We don’t need a form of energy that always has the specter of disaster hanging over it

Unlike the 1940s, the government is now too big, too clumsy, too overbearing, too politicized.  It would turn a science project into a pet project.  It needs to leave the research and development in the hands of private Americans.  The American Project needs the government only as a sponsor, offering tax reduction or elimination throughout the project and perhaps a huge award to the individual or organization that finds the new way.

The American Idea of Independence includes thinking big with no fear.  We’ve always coupled relentless and idealistic optimism with a we-can-do-anything, pragmatic realism.  The more gigantic the challenge, the better we like it.  With or without government, no challenge has ever made Americans quit.

The English wrote about freedom and self-government, but we fought against England to get them.  The French talked about a Panama Canal and moved some dirt, but we tied two oceans together forever.  A parade of Europeans tried to fly the Atlantic nonstop in pairs, but “a young American boy who left this morning for Paris with a sandwich in his pocket”[ix] did it alone.  The Russians poked into space, but we went to the moon.  Brilliant scientists in the rich lands of the Old World dreamt of nuclear energy, but we delivered it in the American desert.

We’re not better than them.  Just bigger and bolder and less afraid.

How much money and effort, genius and trial-and-error will it take to change our current non-plan?  A lot.  But not more than we have or can afford.   It isn’t more than we need to do, and it isn’t more than we can do.  As Americans, we just need one thing:

To decide to do it.

• Refuse to trade with lunatics.  Free trade should mean more than the free movement of goods and services.  It should include the concept of being free from supplying lunatics or people engaged in lunatic behavior.

First, as a people, we should refuse to trade with either side engaged in any war.  We should do this because neither side is all good or all evil, and we aren’t smart enough to know who has the highest percentage of each (like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union).  We should also do this because we know it’s hypocritical to say that we’re neutral peacemakers when we’re supplying the warmongers – and probably supplying one side more than the other.  And we should do this because not supplying them may make them end the war sooner.  We need to tell all playground warriors, “We won’t play with you if you act like that.”

Second, we should refuse to trade with any nation that is slaughtering its own people.  We sold wheat to the Soviet Union while it was running gulags and show trials, wheat that prolonged their empire and delayed a people’s revolution.  We need a most-unfavored-nation list, telling Americans where selling their products would be like casting pearls before swine and to trade freely with everyone else.

• Refuse to supply any other nation with the means of war.  We need to pass strict laws that no American company can sell any weapons or weapons technology to anyone else.  Period.

These countries don’t know what to do with these things – or more likely and dangerously, they will know what to do with them.  Sometimes, we might see two people fighting and give one of them a gun – still, of course, claiming to be peacemakers.  Sometimes, we see two people fighting and give both of them guns.  It’s time to force them all back into using clubs and swords, which is the only weapons technology that many of their cultures are capable of developing.

We were once called the Arsenal of Democracy, even as we supplied the Soviet Union, the ultimate anti-democracy.  Once a government decides to arm other nations, only one of its problems is discerning who the good guys are.  The other is that, too often, we’re supplying the bad guys because they’re “our” bad guys.

We should take the direction of developing the best technology and most lethal weapons that we can.  We should keep doing it so we can vigorously defend our Monroe Lines so no one can ever defeat us or hold us hostage.

This restriction should include anything a foreign military could use.  Some American companies, along with the American government, say, “Well, they promised not to let their military have access to this technology.”  Please.  If they believe this nonsense, they’re dunces.  If they don’t believe it and say it anyway, they are greedy liars.  In either case, they’re putting America at risk.

Won’t this approach hurt American defense businesses?  Any first-rate defense contractor will still get rich building this stuff – for us.  We need to tell them, “If you sell it to other countries, you will never work for us again.”  That should be sufficient.  If not, we can say to them, “We will consider it treason, and we will send you to prison.”  That should do the job.

And if other countries develop these things and point them at us – if they’re capable of coming or flying over the Monroe Lines – we should let them know that we’ve been keeping all of our weapons technology to ourselves, and we will come like the Avenger in the Night and erase them with weapons they never even imagined.

• Realize that our own government is contributing to the problem of deteriorating American independence.  We should remember the truth of the American motto, “That government is best which governs least.”[x]  We’ve made a mistake in trusting our government too much.  We’ve hoped that it will do the right thing, when we haven’t even defined what the right thing is.

We’ve allowed our government to act like an empire.  It’s now acting to protect its interests – but not necessarily our interests the real interests of all Americans.  We’ve allowed the government to dabble and to interfere in ways that most of us can’t even imagine.  We seem to have a presence everywhere and to take a stand on everything.  Nothing goes unnoticed in the governmental corridors of power.

And why does it seem that America, in recent decades, finds itself so often supporting non-liberal, corrupt, absolutist, even brutal regimes?  Chiang Kai-Shek in China, Batista in Cuba, Diem in South Vietnam, the Shah in Iran?  The end of this is always the same – a radical pendulum swing to an even more brutal dictatorship, with the bonus of hatred for America thrown in.  Chiang became Mao Zedong, Batista became Fidel Castro, Diem became Ho Chi Min, the Shah became the Ayatollah Khomeini.

The argument, “At least that tyrant is on our side,” should cause us to soberly re-evaluate what “our side” means.

There are actual threats to America.  We certainly need the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security to have at least some vague awareness of who is in the country and what they might be planning in the way of mayhem.  But this isn’t enough.  We need to think about how we could have stayed out of harm’s way in the first place.  It’s much less likely that these people will hate us – not effectively, at any rate – if we aren’t there.  They’re not likely to come here to blow up buildings and cities because they hate democracy and western values – in part because they don’t even know what democracy or western values are.

A powerful principle of organizational design is that “every organization is perfectly designed to get the results it is now getting.”  If we don’t like the results – like the fact that everything seems to be America’s problem – we have to change the design.  Doing more of the same won’t get the job done – it’s been wisely said that the essence of folly is doing the same thing over and over again and hoping to get a different result.  And doing it harder or stronger, or doing more of it, will just get the same results, only harder and faster.  We can’t expect to play power politics and be considered just one of the gang.

“It is the natural progression of things for liberty to yield and for tyranny to gain ground,” we’re reminded by British statesman Edmund Burke.[xi]  The desire to have power and control isn’t only present in Europe and Asia.  We have a fairly high level of it right here.  But this government belongs to us, the people.  We can reverse the process – we can make the government yield and help liberty to gain ground.

• Eliminate foreign aid, including support for the IMF and World Bank.  What business does our government have with distributing our money to foreign governments, many of whom are corrupt?  Or to use our money – often borrowed – to bribe or manipulate foreign countries?

No foreign aid, but only private charity.

And we should end support for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, first-world tools for developing world control.  Let nations earn, save, and invest their own money – or learn by going bankrupt.

We have a Declaration of Independence.  We should start using it once more.