How to Fix the United States: Extended Edition: A New America
It’s becoming increasingly clear that there exists two distinct classes of individuals in the United States: those who abide by the laws, and those who make the laws. Because of this, I’m afraid if we keep going down this path, as a nation, we are heading for very dark times ahead. And we can’t even vote our way out of this, because this corruption spans both sides of the isle and multiple administrations. But if we cannot even trust the very people who were sworn to protect us, and if these people hold all the power in society, then how are we supposed to rise up and fight back?
We have a few options actually, and ideally, peaceful ones.
Tax Strike/Extensions
This country was founded in the spirit of “no taxation without representation.” America was essentially ruled over by the folks across the pond. But us Americans didn’t really have a say in how our lives were conducted or ruled over. And that was unfair. So in order to fix that unfairness, people started talking. And when enough people started talking and aligning on the same central idea, that if the rulers are making rules without even taking into consideration the opinions of those who are ruled over, then… “What the FUCK?!”
That is essentially what is happening right now in our country, but in a much different set of circumstances and with much different tools at our disposal. Back then, news traveled by horse. Today, news travels at the speed of light, sometimes blinding us with its intensity. But this gives us a great power that our forefathers never had, and probably could not even dream of: instantaneous realignment and assembly.
There’s still two months left before the standard tax filing deadline in the United States. What would happen if 300 million Americans decided to not pay, or at the very least, file for an extension? I’ll tell you what happens: They will listen.
General Strike
A friendly Redditor pointed out to me another good option for getting them to pay attention: a general strike. I originally thought of putting this in my article but felt a bit disheartened at how the government is currently simply ignoring all strikes and things just move on, business as usual. But I think with the right volume of people, this could have a much stronger impact, and there is evidence that with a high enough volume of people, things start to change.
Here are a interesting few snippets suggesting the probable impact of a strike that involves a minimum of 3.5% of the US population, taken from https://generalstrikeus.com/
A general strike is when working people refuse their labor until demands are met • Research shows We need 3.5% of the population, OR 11 million Americans, to be successful • The same research shows a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.I think this is a fantastic avenue that could be used in addition to a Tax Strike, so that we amplify the collective effect of these strikes.
One problem specifically with the generalstrikeus.com website is that I cannot easily find out who owns and who runs it, and therefore I don’t trust it. That type of obfuscation is suspicious, so take caution with engaging with that website. They should ideally have an About page clearly showing who runs it, so that we know it is genuinely grassroots, and not just claiming to be (they claim to be grassroots on their homepage).
Here is the lookup information from https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup, where you can see much of the information is redacted
Registrant:
Handle: SQSP_CONTACT_00d8fe6d-9bf4-48f3-ac5c-faad5538080d
Name: The RDAP server redacted the value
Organization: The RDAP server redacted the value
Phone: The RDAP server redacted the value
Fax: The RDAP server redacted the value
Mailing Address: The RDAP server redacted the value
ISO-3166 Code: US
Contact Uri: https://domains.squarespace.com/whois-contact-formA New Hope for A New America
Even if the American people pulled off this widespread Tax Strike, what next? What are we actually demanding from the Federal governments and State governments? I’ve thought about this, for just a few days, but I was able to come up with many sound, common-sense answers to most peoples’ most pressing logistical/practical questions. I will go over these now:
What Happens to the Federal Government?
Effective immediately, all federal politicians AND employees are ether laid off, or have a temporary period of “wind down” time and then be laid off, with very few exceptions. This will give us time to transfer most responsibilities to the states. And with this layoff, everyone will receive comfortable severance packages; let’s say 2 years of income. I don’t think anyone can argue that that isn’t fair. And we know the Federal Reserve is good for it. This will give folks plenty of time to restructure and reorganize their lives and find new jobs.
I generally align with a Milton Friedman / libertarian view for how the federal government should operate: essentially, we need to protect individual FREEDOM and enforce private property rights. And everything else naturally follows from that. If we still collect federal taxes, they will be minuscule, only to pay for things we actually need, and there will be permanent spending caps or caps tied to GDP/economic health. There will be no federal emergency funding; states will now take that helm, and I will explain more in detail later on in this article.
And we should adopt new rules for politicians. Did you know, that roughly 50% of politicians have a net worth over 1 million dollars? Can you guess what percent of the general population has a net worth over 1 million? About 1%…. What the FUUUCK?!
It is clear, these “politicians” no longer represent the American people. They have no idea how the average American lives and what struggles we go through. They are insulated and protected from all the situations normal people deal with on a day to day basis. They don’t understand how to legislate over us. They make friendly rules for their lobbyist fiends on Wall Street and pocket millions. We need to fix that. So, from here on out, we are instantiating a new rule about the eligibility of running for office: if your net worth, or your immediate friends or families’ net worth, is over 10 times the median income for your locality, you are no longer eligible. This guarantees that “normal” people will get elected, and run for office, with some healthy headroom for outliers.
What does 10 times the yearly median income look like today? Well, the median American income in 2023 was roughly $78,000. So if we multiply that by 10, we get $750k. And this will be tied to locality, so folks in California will have different numbers than folks in Alabama. The point is, that eligibility for office is tied to how rich you are. If you are too rich, you’re simply out of touch with the average American.
New Responsibilities for the States/Federal Government
I’m sure most people will immediately scoff at the idea of not having a federal government. And I can agree, to a very small extent. And here is how we find new solutions for all the problems we just created:
Money and The Federal Reserve
How will the US Dollar function? Easy: abolish it. It will have a “wind down” period of 5 years, where after this deadline, the US Dollar becomes disavowed/unrecognized by the world economy. Then, you might ask, how the hell will things work? How will we do global trade and commerce? Again, easy: use the new fair, decentralized, uncontrollable, public, transparent, neutral, censorship-resistant, global, and trust-less technologies at our disposal: Bitcoin and Lightning.
Granted, this does not have to be the case for all 50 States. Which is why the States will have the FREEDOM to adopt whatever currency or basket of currencies they’d like. This should be a FREE MARKET decision, not a top-down, centralized, communistic mandate. I find it funny that in America, pretty much everyone agrees that business competition generally makes things better and more fair, whereas monopolies and collusion makes things worse. Except for this one, very little thing, called the US Dollar: we have adopted a top-down, command-economy, instead of a proper market-economy, which we do for just about every other aspect of the economy in the US. We need to move away from this communist, command-economy institution, we call the Federal Reserve. It wasn’t even a thing until 1913. The US functioned without it until then. And we don’t “need” it any more. We can easily spin up new currencies on Ethereum or Solana with a few lines of code, and there are fast ways to convert to and from any of these currencies, and more. (I don’t actually like Ethereum and Solana; I lean more Bitcoin Maxi, but I just use these as an example of the idea that we no longer need a centrally controlled, fallible, human controlled, currency, and it is trivially easy to make new currencies now, which was not the case pre-internet.)
So, let’s leave it up to each state to decide which currency is the best for their local economy, and I’m sure we will see trends and patterns emerge about which state picked better or worse currencies, which will be a signal for the rest of the world to follow.
The Constitution
What happens to the Constitution? Easy: we reset back to the Bill of Rights, with perhaps a few additions/amendments. We can discuss and argue about those amendments, but the point is that our founding fathers got some things right, and the Bill of Rights was definitely one of them.
Defense
How will the States defend themselves? Simple: we will form a Union, analogous to the European Union, where each member state cooperates and assigns duties and responsibilities and coordinate among themselves.
Ironically, we are already called the United States; perhaps we can keep that moniker and just adjust the underlying details.
Other Finer Details
I’m sure we can discuss and debate the finer details ad-infinitum. My major guiding principle is to “make illegal states unrepresentable”, which I borrow from the software engineering world. Ironically, the term “state” here fits very nicely in this governmental context as well. The major point here is that the American people want a hard reset. We are sick and tired of being ruled over by murderous asshole pedophiles. Enough is enough! This ends NOW!
Evil fears light. We should use the internet and any and all other tools to shine this light as brightly as possible.
I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t pretend to. I just want people to start talking about and discussing these things, openly. We will naturally figure out all the details over time, as we always do. We must exercise our First Amendment Right to FREEDOM OF SPEECH, as much as possible, lest it be trampled on and trumped over. But the bigly point remains: our current institutions are broken, and there is no good/safe/sustainable way to fix them, other than throwing it all away and starting fresh. But that is not the end of this country. We will rise up again, like a Phoenix from the ashes. And America will truly be great again.