The Free Market 10, no. 1 (January 1992)
Last March, I laid out my “Thirty Day Plan” for de-socializing America. But I didn’t scrap all of big government; now it’s time for more:
DAY ONE: Foreign junkets are outlawed. If anyone on the federal payroll wants to fly overseas, he has to buy his own ticket. The State Department, Congress, and White House go into hyperventilation.
DAY TWO: Medicare and Medicaid are abolished as illegitimate transfers of wealth that drive up the cost of care. HHS, whose insolent $30,000 clerks can’t speak intelligible English, goes out of business.
DAY THREE: The Supreme Court reads the Constitution, and reverses every court decision of the last fifty years.
DAY FOUR: The doors of the Legal Services Corporation are nailed shut. The envious must now pay for their own anti-business law suits.
DAY FIVE: Marxist inheritance taxes are terminated as the moral equivalent of stealing pennies from a dead man’s eyes.
DAY SIX: To help prevent the growth of a new welfare state, the franchise is restricted: no one on the dole, which includes government employees, may vote.
DAY SEVEN: Civil service is abolished, and the grand, old Jefferson-Jackson “spoils system” reintroduced. With “rotation in office,” there is no permanent governing class of officials, and voters can actually change the government.
DAY EIGHT: Racial set-asides are repealed. The remaining government contractors are judged on ability.
DAY NINE: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is axed; 126 years after slavery, employers are freed. They can hire, fire, and promote on their property as they think best
DAY TEN: The Food and Drug Administration is killed. The First Amendment now applies to commercial speech, and producers and consumers decide the content of food labels. Patients and doctors determine what drugs to use, and a host of life-saving drugs and medical devices are developed.
DAY ELEVEN: National Public Radio is replaced by static, a big improvement. Taxpayers no longer subsidize hysterical left-wing broadcasts about the oppression (i.e., non-funding) of transvestite Kenyan obukano street musicians.
DAY TWELVE: The war on drugs is no more. Prices and therefore street crime plummet, and hoodlums no longer grow rich, thus restoring the natural socioeconomic hierarchy.
DAY THIRTEEN: Mother-Knows-Best government is gagged: no more hectoring about tobacco and alcohol.
DAY FOURTEEN: NASA is blasted. Private businesses and scientific organizations now launch satellites at their own expense. If Star Trek fans want space exploration, they are free to pay for it.
DAY FIFTEEN: The Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House becomes a museum of big government. Although now housing just part of the president’s personal staff, it once held the entire departments of War, State, and Interior.
DAY SIXTEEN: Head Stan, the beloved but incompetent children’s welfare program, is abolished as a scam on the taxpayers and an unwarranted intrusion into families.
DAY SEVENTEEN: The Office of the United States Trade Representative is abolished, along with every tariff, quota, and “free trade” agreement. Businesses negotiate their own deals with foreign governments, at no cost to the taxpayer.
DAY EIGHTEEN: The Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp are shut down. American corporations doing business overseas must now bear their own costs.
DAY NINETEEN: Sixty-eight federal commissions, boards, and committees are scrapped, including the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, and the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Device.
DAY TWENTY: Government and quasi-government museums like the Smithsonian are privatized, and soon discover that regular Americans won’t pay to see left-wing, state-exalting, anti-American multicultural extravaganzas, or a mirror hanging on a wall and labeled: “Mirror.”
DAY TWENTY-ONE: The Federal Emergency Management Administration is abolished. Disaster relief is left to private charities, which actually provide it, and there are no more FEMA. schemes for “emergency” bureaucratic takeovers of the country.
DAY TWENTY-TWO: Any federal agency whose initials are incomprehensible to the average taxpayer is bumped off, including FHFB, FLRA , FMSHRC, and FRTIB.
DAY TWENTY-THREE: The Americans with Disabilities Act, which burdens businesses with new regulatory costs and shuts the most severely disabled people out of the work force, is killed.
DAY TWENTY-FOUR: The Seventeenth Amendment mandating direct election of U.S. senators is repealed, and state legislatures once again elect senators as their representatives, vastly strengthening the states as against the federal ex-leviathan.
DAY TWENTY-FIVE: Bankruptcy laws are repealed; debtors who refuse to pay their debts are treated as virtual thieves.
DAY TWENTY-SIX: The FHA, Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and all other agencies that subsidize housing are torn down. No longer is there malinvesment in this area.
DAY TWENTY-SEVEN: The U.S. Foreign Service, whose ambassadors live luxuriously in mansions with retinues of personal servants, is replaced with fax machines.
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT: To protect American sovereignty and independence, the U.S. left the U.N., the I.M.F., and the World Bank in my first 30 days. Now we leave 46 other globaloney outfits, including the International Labor Organization, the World Health Organization, and the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission.
DAY TWENTY-NINE: We continue, junking the International Jute Organization, the International Criminal Police Organization, the International Office of Epizootics [horse fungus], the International Office of Vine and Wine, and the International Rubber Study Group.
DAY THIRTY: Finally, we dump the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Development Association, and the International Finance Corporation. Bankrupt foreign politicos must now apply to the Household Finance Corporation.
