This would be a win in many different ways. Ensuring that the transfer of funds into these trusts opens up another opportunity to change how government 'works.'
Money handled by these organizations creates a market in investment managed and controlled by organizations who are conservative, canny, and trustworthy. Different organizations and churches could handle this each in their own way, reflecting the vision of their own members. This area would develop the latent potential still to be developed in volunteer organizations that are controlled by their memberships at the most local level. These organizations already do good; this would allow them to do more.
At the same time removing what proved to be an irresistible temptation to those in government would reduce that well documented impulse to steal. Removing attractive nuisances from the morally impaired is only responsible. And Edward H. Crane, III would have to figure out something else to do for a living, eventually. For a while he will doubtless continue his campaign to repackage despotism as freedom and sell it to the credulous and greedy.
Now, how to pay for this. Collusion to engage in theft is a crime. The attempts to hold up a banner of 'sovereign immunity' by those in government must finally be ended. Government is not sovereign; the only sovereignty mandated by America's Mission Statement is that accruing to each individual. A liability has been created by those who allowed Social Security to be converted from a trust fund to a source of funds. They are as individuals absolutely liable. The corporate interests who cooperated are liable; and penalties should be exacted in full measure.
Government is no more sovereign and immune than is your plumber when he screws up the repair of your toilet. Our justice system also needs reforming; a system for justice is intended to ensure that those doing wrong are held accountable. It is time to do that to government and its minions.
Americans face a challenge that holds both hazard and promise. We faced a similar threat at the beginning of the Revolution and at the beginning of WWII. It is always individuals working cooperatively for a common goal who change the world. America was built on those principles and it can be rebuilt the same way.
The naked politicos waltzing around DC in their sheepskins are the past. The future belongs to us – if we choose it.
Get off all the grids, organize locally, build Coalition. Freedom is still a good thing.
Melinda Pillsbury-Foster is the author of GREED: The NeoConning of America and A Tour of Old Yosemite. The former is a novel about the lives of the NeoCons with a strong autobiographical component. The latter is a non-fiction book about her father and grandfather.
Ms. Pillsbury-Foster has been active in politics since the Goldwater Campaign. She left the Republican Party to join and become active in the Libertarian Party in 1973, working as an activist and party officer until she left the Libertarian Party in 1988 when she returned to the Republican Party and became active in the National Federation of Republican Women.
She is also the the founder of the the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation
