Our national representatives know that their spending habit is bad, that it's hurting us, putting us in terrible debt, but we can't really blame the Senators and Representatives. They don't know any better than to do what they think we want them to do.

A lot of attention has been focused recently on the national debt, but this is not a new phenomenon. A quick look at The World Almanac And Book Of Facts for 1996 shows that by 1870 we had already accumulated a national debt of $2.4 billion. In 1936, four years before World War II, the government managed to spend $4.3 billion more that it collected.

It's been getting worse lately. In 1980, the deficit was $74 billion. In 1985, $212 billion. 1990: $220 billion. For the past five years, the deficit has never been less than 200 billion dollars.

Deficit spending gave us the extra push to settle us into the industrial age, to fight the wars that emerged in the new world, and to enable an expanding economy. To keep that expanded economy running, however, needs more and more fuel, bigger and bigger deficits. It's like tying more horses to the team to keep us moving forward. We don't need more horse, more federal spending, more deficit. We need a new engine, a new way of doing business. Particularly, we need more focused, more directed power. To address our modern social needs, we need the governmental equivalent of smart bombs, not General Sherman.

All those good intentions, which were helpful in earlier times, are the cause of our problems today. Above my fireplace I have a large picture of a kitten sleeping peacefully in a doll sized beach chair and under this is the Taoist saying: Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place. This is the advice I would like to offer the leaders of our nation.

It's our fault, really. During a national town meeting program that I saw on PBS, citizens were brought together to talk about issues and to question our leaders and potential leaders. Many of the questions began with, "What can the federal government do to solve..." or "What program could be established to address..." I would love to see a presidential candidate, when asked what he would do about this problem or that, proclaim with proud sincerity, "Not a damn thing! What are you going to do about it?"

Our social dilemmas have become like a piñata. They're flying around wildly and everyone is trying to get them under control by bashing them with another stick. If we're not careful, someone's going to bust the damn thing open and it's not candy that will fall out. What we need to do is remove the blindfold, take a long break, and let it slowly come to rest.

Every new law, policy, and solution winds the cultural spring a little tighter, but a civilization, like everything else in nature, wants to reach a point of low potential energy. Life is inherently chaotic, and any form of government is a fight against entropy. The bigger the government, the harder the fight. Remember Rome. Trying to fit everyone into the same retirement model (social security), or the same health care system (Medicare), or the same education system (Goals 2000), is unstable because, very simply, people are different. One size does not fit all. To make them stable against the chaos of diversity and individual creativity you need a lot of energy, laws, and enforcement, but it's an unhealthy stability at best. We needed that extra energy to propel us through the massive social changes that took place this century, but if we keep it up, we'll burn ourselves out.

Consider the Soviet Union. It demanded a very restrictive social plan. To maintain it required rigid and harsh laws. Divergence from the state approved plan was met with intimidation and severe punishment. The Soviet Union found its entropy by breaking apart, like a pressure cooker blowing a gasket. It's so much easier to just turn down the heat.

The way to do this is to eliminate all these federal programs and so called solutions. Stop messing with the problems and let them find their own way. Dump the whole mess onto the backs of the states. Then, instead of raging like a massive beast that defies constraint, these problems will be divided into fifty little beasts, and each state will handle them in the manner which suits the citizens of that state. We all share the burden of the debt and the out of control entitlement programs. We should at least be allowed to carry that burden in a manner which enables real solutions.

Devolving the power to the states brings us to a more stable, more maintainable social environment which is better positioned to deal with the quick changes of the world today. People aren't designed for massively large government. The feedback loop between a problem and its solution is too long and too diluted because of the attempt to make it appeal to everyone. We're too practical, inventive, and impatient to wait for national solutions to problems we could better handle ourselves in the first place.

It's good that we have hillbillies in Tennessee, surfers in California, cowboys in Texas, farmers in Iowa, eskimos in Alaska, fishermen in Maine, and everybody in New York. The Texan solution to a problem will be quite different than a solution to the same problem in New Hampshire. Proponents of a federally managed social safety net might argue that we need common standards to smooth out the differences between states, but that runs contrary to our nature, it suppresses our creativity at the local level, and hence requires more money and effort, more rules, and more enforcement, which causes more debt and disillusionment, which calls for more national solutions. It's a self fulfilling spiral. By trying to keep up with issues like the Internet, the environment, technology at large, more government only causes more tension and a need for more solutions, which begs more government. To start solving the complex issues of our complex society, we've got to get off of that merry-go-round.

Quebec is trying to leave Canada. A lot of people in Hawaii want out of the Union. Citizen militias show clear disdain for the federal government. The breakup of the Soviet Union, Mandela's success in South Africa, Tiananmen Square, Gandhi's liberation of India, all demonstrate that people want to control their own lives, not to be subjects of an empire. Before we bust at the seems we need to move away from the strong central controls that served us in the past. We need to disassemble ourselves into manageable pieces calmly, before we do it with anger and with guns.

We still need the federal government, of course, for national defense, a common currency, foreign relations, and management of interstate issues. These are the services we should expect from the national level. Expecting the president to fix our schools or organize our police is as silly as expecting him to arrange our neighborhood's trash pickup schedule. Until we stop asking for national solutions, however, we're only going to get more of them.

That means that we're going to get more debt. The solution to the debt is not simply changing the protocol by which we pay taxes, but by aligning the nation with natural principles. We don't need a change in procedure, but a change in perspective. We're going in debt because we're trying to catch mice with a rickety Rube Goldberg machine rather than getting a cat. We're trying to change the course of the river rather than building a bridge. If you let a man catch his own fish, you feed him for a lifetime. If you force him to use only the federally approved fishing pole, dictate the weight of his line, pass legislation concerning the size and shape of his lure, and punish him for not meeting federally mandated fishing achievement standards, you'll still have a hungry man.

We need to abolish the IRS and repeal the sixteenth amendment, but rather than replacing them with a flat tax or a national sales tax, we should abolish all forms of federal taxation. Rather than sending our money to the federal level, and then receiving it back as block grants with rules and mandates attached, citizens should pay taxes to the states and then let the states block grant the money to the federal level to pay for the military, embassies, and such.

We have ourselves to blame and only We The People can turn this around. Our expectations and desires drive our votes, and our votes drive the promises of politicians. We need to reward them for sitting down and shutting up, for taking care of their own business and leaving us to ours. Until we truly desire to be free, until we hold the vision of our own strength and competence firmly in our minds, the challenges of this nation will continue to be intractable and unsolvable.

There's a saying: If it's stupid, but it works, it's not stupid. Federal programs operate on the exact opposite principal. If it's not stupid, but doesn't work, it's still a good thing. In other words, if legislation comes from caring, from expressing some benevolent values, then even if the implementation is ineffective, there's resistance to changing it because the intentions were virtuous. We have this idea that if we just try harder, spend more money, care a little more, that we'll be able to build a great society. We can't have it both ways. We can't both proclaim the success of these ideas and also whine about how terrible things are.

The truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle. Things aren't that bad. Compared to what the human race has gone through, we're all rich. The pessimists are comparing us not to where we have been historically, but to where they think we ought to be, but we're not where anyone thought we would be because the world and its societies are changing, rather than progressing along a predictable growth path.

We need to stop trying to figure out how to get to The Future and start figuring out what to do now that we're here. For over a hundred years we have held in our minds a manifest destiny of the brave new future that awaits us. This fervor was very strong at the beginning of this century. We had telegraphs, telephones, movies. Soon we mastered the atom. We went to the moon. With a pace of technology and cultural change that this planet has never before seen, we surged forward to make our most fantastic dreams real. Now that our dreams have come true, we don't know what to do.

We're riding the plateau of the massive cultural inertia of the industrial revolution. Like the first stage of a Saturn rocket, it propelled us into a new and different world. We needed the big federal government to handle the effects and opportunities of new industry, but that time is over. Once we reached a certain level of modern comfort, that amount of governmental power started doing more harm than good. Welfare, rather than freeing, entrapped. Work programs, rather than offering opportunities, offered bureaucracy. Social security, rather than being secure, is a drain on the nation.

Did we think that there would be some bright flash, and we would all suddenly be transformed into the Jetson's? Look around. We've pretty much made it to the future. We need new tools to govern this world. The old tools don't fit anymore. We've got to stop hitting every social issue with the big stick of the federal government and let newer, more effective, more appropriate means of government arise. This can't happen as long as we keep begging the federal government to use outdated, clumsy solutions.

The issue isn't the debt, or how to pay for it. The issue is trying to figure out how we're going to live in this future world we've built for ourselves. We're on the cusp of developing nano-technology, genetic sculpting, interplanetary travel, even cures for the most elusive ailments. We are rapidly approaching a new era where the individual, because of the massive world-wide communication infrastructure, will have access to more knowledge and opportunity than any king or president ever had in the past. With that transference must also come a transference of power. The first step in that transference is to place primary control of this country into the hands of the states and governors.

Thank you, big government, for your service in the past. Thank you for making this future world possible. You've given us a new age, and unless you want to stop the progress you started, you need to just get out of the way.

:^D