Dear Governor Palin
by Gary North
by Gary North
Recently by Gary North: Monetary Unwinding and Secondary Recession
I am writing this to you on the outside possibility that in this, the world of six degrees of separation – also known as the Kevin Bacon game – someone will hand you a print-out of this letter and say, "This guy is kind of weird, but maybe this could work."
Let's clear the deck from the beginning. I am asking you to make some specific preparations. Then, when you have your ducks in a row – and your trusty 12-gauge shotgun is loaded – you will hold a press conference. You will deliver a speech.
Here is my suggested draft of your speech.
Thank you all for coming.
Today, I make two pledges. First, I promise to work very hard to avoid providing any more skit material for Tina Fey. Second, I am not going to run for President. Ever. No matter what.
Let me tell you why.
I am going to host some tea parties – a whole lot of tea parties.
I never played tea party in my youth. I preferred to go hunting. Now I am going to play tea party and go hunting, too. I will not be hunting moose. I am after bigger game: incumbent politicians.
A few years back, I got into politics. I got elected mayor of a small town. Then I got elected governor in a very large state. Not people big – geography big.
I am going to spend the next 25 years training overtaxed, over-regulated, politician-scoffed-at voters to do what I did.
I have just signed a contract with Fox News. I have agreed not to run for any political office, ever. I will therefore not come under any Federal Communications Commission rules governing equal time. I am here for the long haul on this basis: no equal time. I will get all of it unless I get fired. Then I will do it on some cable channel or on YouTube.
My show will have one overriding theme: grassroots political mobilization.
Until there is a grass roots rebellion, county by county, nothing is going to change inside the Washington Beltway. Congress never changes. It just makes more promises it can't fulfill. It then spends more borrowed money, trying to fulfill old promises. The Federal government is one giant Ponzi scheme of promises. Over the next decade, the biggest of these promises will be broken.
Social Security will go bankrupt this year. It now spends more money than Social Security taxes bring in. It is quietly siphoning off billions of dollars a year out of the general fund.
Medicare went bust three years ago.
The FDIC, which insures the nation's banks, went bust last September. Same solution: siphon off money from the general fund.
But the general fund went $1.4 trillion in the hole in 2009. It is expected to go another $1.3 trillion in the hole this year. And on and on and on it goes; where it stops, nobody knows. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve System just keeps printing more money. The biggest broken promise in America is the promise that the Federal Reserve gave back in 1913 – stable money. The dollar's purchasing power is down by 95% ever since the Federal Reserve opened its doors in 1914.
There will not be reform at the top of the pyramid until there is a political earthquake at the bottom.
It's time for some tea parties.
Locally, taxes are up. Crime is up. Insecurity is up. Government regulation of our families is up.
The main thing that is down is public high school test scores. The public schools are a disaster and getting worse.
I am going to train people to take America back from the incumbent politicians.
The tea parties will be local. They will be everywhere. They will be a permanent fixture of the American scene. I will do my bit to provide some training.
I have set up a new organization: County Rights, Incorporated. The doctrine of states' rights is way too centralized for me. We need determined voters to take back their counties as a first step to taking back their states.
I'm not saying I won't be talking about national politics and the disasters that Congress and the bureaucrats are overseeing. But my focus will be clear: you can't have a clean sweep of Washington until you control the broom. The broom handle is in the counties.
There are 3141 counties in the United States. Most of them are rural. Most of them can be taken over by a dedicated hard core of voters who have an agenda. I am going to help train voters who have this agenda: resist Washington.
This is a free country. We are allowed as voters to shape politics. I am going to help train those voters who are ready to re-shape politics, beginning in their counties.
That's not to say I'm not in favor of training people to take over small towns. I love small towns. Most of all, politically speaking, I love small towns with low taxes. I intend to help create a whole lot more of them.
You have heard the old saying, "Support your local sheriff." The sheriff is the armed law enforcement agent of the county government. You had better get control the government that hires the local sheriff. Then support him.
I am going to be on the road. I will do my Fox News show, but I will be appearing all over the country on a regular basis. I will not be running for anything. I will be training people to run for everything: school boards, county commissions, everything.
When the officers of the Federal government come to town to tell folks what to do, they will be greeted by citizens who know their rights and who are willing to sue the Federal government for any violation of any of the ten amendments. My favorite is the second amendment, but they are all great . . . and they are all being violated by Washington.
I am going to recruit local lawyers who will sue the Federal government. I am going to recruit lawyers to train local citizens to sue the Federal government. I am going to set up a YouTube channel for lawyers to train people to sue the Federal government.
I will have them create downloadable forms for suing the Federal government. Why have just one local lawyer or local agency suing the Federal government? Why not hundreds of lawsuits, from everyone locally who has had his rights violated?
Paper is cheap. Toner is cheap. Let's get those laser printers rolling!
We are going to raise Washington's cost of invading local counties. We are going to meet the bureaucrats with legal resistance. Before some Federal agency sends out a Federal Marshal to start telling a county what to do, it had better set aside a few million dollars of its annual budget to pay the legal fees. This will be good news for lawyers on the staffs of those agencies. It will be bad news for every other staffer. I believe in the legal system. I believe in using it.
While I'm on the topic of the legal system, I plan to set up a program to train citizens in the rights of juries. The jury system is the backbone of liberty in the United States. When a jury declares "not guilty," that's the end of the case. The law against double jeopardy goes into effect.
Jurors need to know that they are sovereign inside the jury room. No judge can tell them what to do or say. No other government official has a right to be inside that room. In that room, twelve citizens decide.
I am going to recruit lawyers to teach people their rights as jurors. That will make a great YouTube channel.
I love YouTube. The other video-hosting sites are great, too. I will use more than one. So will the specialists I recruit.
This is democracy in action inside a Constitutional republic. We still have a Constitution. We still have a republic. Democracy has long been in a coma at the county level. I think I can help awaken it.
But what about political liberals? Don't they have a say? You bet! They get to compete, too. The more, the merrier, I say. But they had better compete first at the county level. They had better decide that their liberties must be defended locally if these liberties are to be preserved from the grasping hand of Congress and the Washington bureaucracies, who are pushing this nation into bankruptcy.
Let the political competition begin . . . in the counties.
Maybe you want to know what my view of government is. Government comes in four forms: self-government, family government, church government, and civil government.
By far, self-government is the most important. Where it is absent, there is lawlessness. In response, people have to spend more money and time on the other three. When self-government declines, anarchy and tyranny increase.
I have a theory of civil government. Civil government is about inflicting pain. That is its whole purpose: to inflict pain on people who are convicted by a jury of their peers of having inflicted pain on others.
The day that civil government got into the happiness-producing business, it began inflicting pain on people who had not inflicted pain on others. It began taxing people, not to protect them, but to pay off special-interest groups whose candidates won the last election.
Civil government started borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and it has never stopped. One of these days it will default on this debt. Peter will get nothing, and Paul, now addicted to government money, will face a catastrophe.
I am dead set against any view of civil government that tries to make people good. It can't make anyone good. Civil government is hard-pressed these days just to keep people from using violence and fraud against their neighbors.
A civil government that tries to do more than punishing violence and fraud will eventually wind up committing violence and fraud on a huge scale – way beyond what any local criminal syndicate can impose.
So, that's my message. It can be summarized in five points, like the digits on your hand. The crucial point is like your thumb. It makes all the difference.
Self-government under God
The other four follow:
County rights
Cut taxes
Resist Washington
Use the courts
If you get invited to one of my tea parties, I sure hope you will attend.
And thanks, Tina, for all the great publicity.
Well, that's it. If you do this, you will inflict more pain on the Washington political establishment than any other ex-governor, including Ronald Reagan.
This is what Washington fears most: grass-roots political mobilization. That would threaten the concentration of power, the growth of the debt, and the permanent immunity of the Federal Reserve System more than anything else.
Conservatives for 40 years have talked about the need for grass-roots political mobilization, but they always set up money-raising operations inside the Beltway or across the county line. Why? Because that's where the power is and therefore where the fundraising opportunities are.
What we need is the decentralization of power. We need someone who has a national political reputation to mobilize voters and jurors at the county level. Is this you?
You may not want to appear too extreme. If so, you won't want to use my slogan: "State's rights are for commies." But it gets across my outlook.
On the 2010 bankruptcy of Social Security, click here.
On the 2009 bankruptcy of the FDIC, click here.
On the depreciation of the dollar since 1914, click here.
On the size of the Federal debt, click here.
Three more items. First, I wrote about my strategy for local politics 25 years ago. I got it published 10 years ago. It's called "the dogcatcher strategy." Just search Google. Or click here.
Second, I own
www.CountyRights.com. I'll give it to you if you want to do something creative with it.
Third, I suggest a logo for you. Every mass movement needs a logo. Yours should be an empty lipstick tube. On one side are these words:
Too many pigs
On the other side are these words:
Too much pork
Hand out one to everyone who comes to your press conferences. Sell them at your tea parties. Sell them on-line at
www.TooManyPigs.com. I own
www.TooManyPigs.com. You can have it, too.
Sincerely yours,
Gary North
January 30, 2010
Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit
http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.
Copyright © 2010 Gary North
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