Idaho Should Take Steps To Secure Our Freedom And Prosperity

History and experience both teach us that limited government, free markets, and protection of property rights produces the greatest amount of prosperity for the greatest number of people.

History and experience both teach us that unlimited government intervention, regulation, and confiscation of the fruit of our labor produces increasing amounts of poverty.

I believe that our reaction to the current economic turmoil will have a profound impact on our future. Our two options:

1. We could continue down the path of expensive big government whose overbearing policies got us into this mess, or
2. We could return to a small easily controlled government where most decisions are made at the local level.

America became the most prosperous nation on earth - not because of what government did, but because of what government was prevented from doing. We used to regulate the government; now they regulate us.

When government was small and easily controlled, America prospered. We have allowed government to grow out of control, and now America is suffering. As government has become increasingly dominant over the last century, we have become less free and less prosperous.

I sometimes regret saying I'll try anything once. We've now tried big government in America. Should we keep serving it up or should we return to an inexpensive, Constitutionally limited government?

One third to one half of all the wealth produced by all of the labor of all Americans every day is consumed by an obese government that will never stop growing until we resolve to dismantle the bureaucracy and give freedom, responsibility, and prosperity back to the people.

Our wealth is being devoured by costly bureaucracy with all of its overhead expenses. This has reduced the finances available for family, friends, and charities to help those in need, which they still do for a fraction of the cost that bureaucracy can do anything.

Confiscating the fruit of our labor to pay bureaucrats to distribute our wealth to those who did not labor for it destroys the incentive to be productive - both for the one who labored and for the one who gained without labor.

We have allowed a culture of dependency on government to develop. I believe it's time to recreate a culture of industriousness in Idaho. It's more freedom and responsibility, not more government interference, that will produce the greatest amount of prosperity for the greatest number of people.

Why should we continue to allow the wealth of our communities to be confiscated and filtered through federal and state bureaucracies and then have to lobby to get some of it back into our communities? What a wasteful process!

We shouldn't reduce the salaries of state bureaucrats (as I was recently misquoted as saying), we should eliminate state bureaucrats! We must phase out the era of big government in a responsible and orderly manner, fulfilling our obligations to state retirees and those we've made dependent on the system.

A return to local self-government would mean a tremendous increase in the quality of any service the local community wants their government to provide. Local oversight and accountability is unquestionably superior to huge, wasteful bureaucracies.

For a pertinent example, read “Educational Excellence Through Local Control.” As the title suggests, I believe we should get expensive bureaucrats and their counterproductive mandates out of education.

I've been hearing an amazing number of complaints from witnesses of all types of government inefficiencies and services being abused. The bureaucracy is so big that people don't know where to begin dealing with such outrageous wasting of taxpayers' hard-earned money.

Here are just a couple of measures that would cost next to nothing to implement, would empower the people the government works for, and would help create better government accountability and transparency:

1. Every government expenditure of taxpayer money posted online for anyone to see: State budgets are already in electronic format, so it would be easy to upload them to the internet.
2. A “Complaint Box” on every government website and in every public office: Complaints directed to the right people at the time problems occur is an obvious quality control measure.

Both of these measures would help accelerate the process of bringing government back under control and reducing our tax burden. I look forward to sharing some of the other exciting things in the works to ensure our continuing freedom and prosperity in Idaho.