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Idea
Modern governments are designed to replace all of the functions of society with a bureaucratic, central institution. Any other type of society consists of people in social roles administering the values they agree upon, and these people act through social, cultural, academic, religous and familial channels.
In a pluralistic society, achieving the consensus necessary for a central authority becomes difficult. Having an institution that accurately and fairly enforces that consensus is even more elusive. Further, most people want the organic type of society where agreement is forged and people act collaboratively. Institutional society makes its own conclusions, and then coerces the citizenry to obey them with reward and threat.
Modern governments inevitably break down into tyranny because without that organic agreement, increasing numbers of their population deviate from the bureaucratic norms. A widening cycle of punishment and indoctrination occurs until the government is completely alienated from the people, and disorganized because it cannot attract good people. At that point, it collapses into authoritarianism.
Pragmatism is a new concept in government. We suggest that government abandon its institutional role, and instead become a provider of services, and that we allow local organic communities to decide their own standards. In other words, government needs to get out of the morality and conformity enforcement business, and focus on the services we really need: protection from criminals, defense against other powers, and regulation of infrastructure like roads and water supplies.
Under institutional government, our country has grown bloated with people who make a living by playing the game and not by serving a role of particular value to the community. We have become more alienated, crime has risen, and our government has become increasingly intrusive. At the same time, people who try to accept the institutional dogma become more alienated, and so grow vindictive in their assertion of non-realistic ideas.
We describe ourselves as family-oriented government because the model upon which we base our vision is that of a healthy family. The parents provide a safe home, and the children join the community which helps raise and educate them, and values are not imposed but learned. This kind of society does not waste its money on supporting unproductive people through parasitic bureaucracy. It just nurtures our best resource, which is smart, driven youth.
It's time for pragmatism. Our founding idea is that the goal of government should be function, not guidance. Our long-held belief is that local communities will prosper if not forced to rely on an intricate and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Our hope is that by changing model of government, we can reverse the decline and reach toward a more effective and fun society.
Platform
The Pragmatism Party advocates tirelessly to reform institutional government and replace it with an organic society in the following ways:
Finances
No sensible government spends itself into debt, and only insane governments spend themselves into debt fighting to impose morality on others. We can reduce the size of government, and in turn reduce taxes, while sparing our infrastructure and the research and development that benefits our industry.
Since our government became a debtor state, we have handed control of our finances to foreign powers upon whom we depend for loans. In the name of cutting budgets, we slash important programs, and ignore others that are important to special interest groups and their lobbies. The result is that we are sending away the results of our labor, and bringing in those who want to use us for their own profit.
A sensible solution is to trim our budget, pay off our debts, and make our currency more valuable again as a natural buffer to competition from places where it is cheaper to manufacture and cultivate products that we need. The result would be self-sufficiency, which would result in a more stable country with fewer enemies.
Economy
Our country once led the world in manufacturing and farming. Now we rank low on the lists. What took us from the high position was the creation of an institutional bureaucracy. In a bureaucracy, the individual or corporation can get ahead not by doing good but by appearing to do good. The result is an endless series of laws and regulations that restrict business from being effective, but do not prevent its evils.
A sensible solution would be to have fewer regulations, but to have them be clearer and be related to the basics of doing business. For example, requiring cradle-to-grave plans for any product manufactured on our shores would address environmental needs while not hampering business with paperwork and the services of dubious "experts." We can build sensible science into what we require of business.
We also need to look at the protected role of unions in our economy. Once a necessity, they have now become a means for dividing us and bargaining for greater wealth without corresponding responsibility. They hurt the worker in the long term by making our products less quality-oriented and so less competitive, which decreases the value of the salaries paid the worker, even if the numbers are higher.
Privacy
The greatest threats to your privacy are large corporations and large government. Our solution is to reduce the role of government in enforcement by reducing the behaviors it regulates, and to allow local communities to determine what they will tolerate. It helps us to have frontiers and free experimentation zones, and also to see the consequences of dumb behaviors.
In the corporate world, our best defense as citizens is a civil court system that values the right of privacy of the individual. It is a travesty that we do not own our own image, and that if someone else takes a picture of us, they can copyright it and sue us for using it. It is equally non-sensible that we do not own the private data that we create, whether shopping on the internet or our reading habits in a newspaper.
Bureaucratic government does not understand how privacy must be an inherent right, and has to be built into the way we consider all our laws. Instead, such governments wait until there has been a tragedy, and then make ineffective laws that grab headlines but do not fix the problem. The Pragmatism Party endorses designing privacy considerations into all laws at the lowest level.
Intellectual Property
At this point in time, we have two camps that divide us on this issue. One says that a patent or intellectual property should exist in perpetuity, and be used to collect from whoever uses a similar idea. The other says that all information should be free, and that almost nothing can be copyrighted. We take a more sensible stand: people should be able to market what they invent, and after a reasonable time, those ideas should go to the public domain.
One area where government can lead in this respect is in research and development. Major efforts like space exploration, the military and geological surveying have returned untold amounts of wealth in knowledge to the public domain. The research required demands a large, well-funded effort but the results can reward ordinary citizens for many years.
We believe that intellectual property should exist, but only for reasonable profit, and without the collaboration of government in creating new laws and enforcing new regulations that are unnecessary. Copying music and software may be stealing, but suing people for using similar vague ideas or dubbing a CD-R of a recording that has already been monetized is equally theft.
Citizenship
A pragmatic approach to citizenship is to realize that our country does not need population growth. It needs economic growth, and capability growth. Importing people to work cheaply will create much bigger costs that the price of labor as it stands now, and while it will make the importers rich, will hurt the average citizen. We oppose open or mass immigration.Sensible governments filter out people who are diseased or without skills. We are not a charity and accepting too many people will ruin the prosperity that they came here for. Instead, we should carefully pick and choose for those with skills we need. When they settle in a local community, it will be up to the local community and its standards to determine who lives there.
The explosion of immigration into the United States over the past fifty years has benefitted one party only, and that is employers who profit from cheap labor. It has weakened the source nations of these emigrants, caused instability in cities as they swell with lower-income workers, and diluted the character of the country through the violent resistance to pluralism of those who know they are being exploited. This situation must end.
Freedom and Justice
Under the institutional state, policymakers decide what set of rules and values should be applied to the citizenry, and they then enforce this with excessive rewards for compliance, federal bureaucracy to coerce others to comply, and paramilitary police punishment for those who do not conform. This vision of justice could be called the centralized ideal, in that it assumes that what we need is a resource of raw total power to crush those who transgress.
The Pragmatism model is more realistic. We are not Utopians, and recognize that every society will have crime and injustice, although to different degrees depending on design. We know that the best way to thwart crime is vigilance, which happens best in local communities where people know each other and so recognize aberrant behavior. We also know that what is crime in some communities will be viewed as acceptable in others.
In our proposed model, government would regulate large-scale criminal activities and mundane crime would be handled by local communities. These in turn could opt for a number of punishment, exile or other options for their criminals. Government would change its mandate from trying to prevent crimes of choice, like drug abuse or abortion, to preventing violent assaults, racketeering, pedophilia and grand theft.
Health Care
Any candidate who wishes to be popular will endorse universal health care and never mention how to pay for it. As it stands, the costs of health care in our country are astounding, and results are good but not as good as the amount of money flowing out can buy. A pragmatic solution is to provide a care pool, based on reasonable odds, in which citizens can purchase health care at massively reduced rates.
This system can take advantage of the benefits of privatization, which is more flexible than government bureaucracies because its actors are not guaranteed continuation by virtue of who they work for, as well as the power that the size of government provides. In addition, it avoids becoming overburdened by those who contribute little in taxes and receive massive amounts more in benefits.
Any sensible approach to health care will involve reducing the costs of our hospitals by limiting their liability in malpractice cases. One way to do this would be to use a progressive scale for awards which weighted jury awards by how many recent failures the hospital had created. This would penalize and remove bad hospitals, and result in cheaper service at others.
Education
Every president for the past two decades has promised to increase the result from our educational system, but the test scores get more and more dismal. The reason for this is the unrealistic thinking of bureaucratic government, which assumes it can mould people into workers of uniform ability, much as it can mould their minds. However, individuals are different in level of intelligence, type of intelligence, and drive, and the former appears to be a congenital condition.
Our education system fails because it teaches kids the same material in the same way, even though they are of different abilities. Our view is that school should be a strict meritocracy geared toward those who are going to get the most of it, which would be those who are good at it, and that we need to teach more basic skills up until age 15 when we should allow kids to leave if school is not the right place for them.
Similarly, discipline problems and others could be ejected from public school if they were disruptive or not ready to learn. Our priorities currently emphasize making "the numbers" look better, but the educational system fails bright children and leaves others bored and unstimulated. Kids will benefit from more rigorous and open-minded curricula which emphasize the joy of learning for those who can do it, and do not "dumb down" the material to fit the slowest kids in the room.
International
We have entered a time when threats from many quarters are facing our way. The solution is to create a foreign policy which does not alienate others, to establish clear rules for nations who want to trade with us (at all), and to come down hard on those who transgress against our needs. With problems like overpopulation, pollution, nuclear proliferation and piracy facing us, we must both behave well and be willing to crush those who threaten us.
Foreign policy has traditionally relied on giving aid money to nations for compliance, and invading those who do not comply. This outlook will be seen as controlling and eventually provoke resentment. The Pragmatism Party, as realists, instead advocate giving no foreign aid, imposing no moral law, and acting only in our own interests against those who pose a threat.
Further, we believe that foreign policy should not be a mystery for other nations. Instead of deception diplomacy, we should state what we want and be unyielding in getting it. Our primary weapon against transgressors is a cessation of trade, which means we need to be ready to be self-sufficient, and our secondary weapon is our military, although we will work hard not to deploy it as it can waste time, lives and money to wage unnecessary war.
Environment
As realists, we find it difficult to believe that our species has never considered preservation of its environment as a primary goal, because it not only produced us but sustains us and we rely on it more than we care to admit. Whether wild fish stocks, clean air and water, or simply woods to roam in to keep our sanity, we need our environment and it has been systematically abused by authoritarian governments propelled by the self-advancement of individual human beings.
When societies are based solely on self-gratification, and the only expression for that is material, a patch of forest is no longer land that is simply beautiful and necessary: it's real estate. As humanity grows, an infinite progression on a planet of finite space, more and more land becomes saleable. To someone who wants to be wealthy, that patch of land could be a McDonald's or Krispy Kreme or rental warehouse.
Individuals acting independently of each other but according to this principle of material gain are responsible for the expansion of our population to insane levels, and the excessive plunder and genocide of our environment. Natural ecosystems are intricate to the degree of millions of factors, and require many miles of open space to survive, and they die off suddenly when they drop below certain thresholds.
As Pragmatists, we recognize that our survival "equals" the survival of our environment, and so in every area of the law we would build in at a basic level concern for the environment. We would also limit population, starting with those without special skills or abilities, by passive and peaceful means like cash payments for sterilization. We must do this to ensure a human future as well as a natural one.
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