Government reform is like Waiting for Godot; it’s always promised but never arrives. I write about it to keep alive the fact that there are many policy options to reform a country that lives in massive debt, regulatory sclerosis, and continuous undeclared wars. Every year at appropriations time, Congress and the president have the power to establish fiscal sanity and reduce the size of government. It never happens. Republicans and Democrats just keep spending more than what the taxpayers give them to spend.
Summary of my three books:
Reform the Kakistocracy: Rule by the Least Able or Least Principled Citizens received the 2021 Independent Press Award for Social/Political Change. It provides citizens with a roadmap to reverse the accumulation of federal power and debt over the last century. It also received the 2020 Bronze Book Award from the Non-Fiction Authors Association. It received several 5–star reviews from Readers’ Favorite. The Independent Press Awards produced a one-minute video on Reform the Kakistocracy that captures the essence of the book. A fuller description of the book is below the book summaries.
The Left’s Little Red Book on Forming a New Green Republic is a parody of Mao’s Little Red Book. It tells the story of how the radical Left uses concern for the environment to attack capitalism, promote socialism, and control individual freedom. Liberty Hill, the book’s publisher, produced a 1-minute video that captures the essence of the book. A fuller description of the book is below the book summaries.
Devolution of Power: Rolling Back the Federal State to Preserve the Republic describes how a federal government with more power than it can manage can be restructured by devolving its domestic powers to the states to create a more accountable government, closer to the people it serves and greater individual freedom. Devolution of Power is a finalist in the 18th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards (2024) in the category of “Government.” A fuller description of the book is below the book summaries.
Kakistocracy, a term used to describe our current government, refers to a system where the least able or least principled citizens hold power.
Reform the Kakistocracy achieves three goals:
It outlines a strategy for reversing the growth of the federal government without the need for constitutional changes while ensuring the preservation of our nation’s founding principles.
The book chronicles the decades-long massive accumulation of federal power by describing how the three branches of the government slowly, and without constitutional changes, revised their constitutional functions. Congress delegated its powers to an Executive branch that gladly assumed the new authority. By aggressively issuing new regulations and Executive Orders, the Executive branch became the primary federal lawmaker. The courts oscillated between approving new sweeping executive powers and functioning as a super-legislature to increase federal powers in ways never envisioned by our nation’s founders or Congress.
This new power structure has led to a significant disconnect between the federal government and its citizens. The government has become the master, and citizens the servants. The consequences are evident in our debilitated constitutional system, which has resulted in decades of policy failures, harmful wealth inequality, and an overwhelming national debt that threatens the nation’s future.
Reform the Kakistocracy criticizes our political leaders for neglecting their fiduciary duty to act in the Constitution’s best interests and the institution they serve. Instead, they give their loyalty to political parties and interest groups that support them. This misalignment of constitutional duty has led to a loss of constitutional checks on the federal government’s powers.
Reform the Kakistocracy presses the reader to address the difficult questions – for whom did we form a government? Who should be the beneficiary of government policy? How do elected officials balance the many competing factors swirling around decision-making? Unlike many books on government reform, Reform the Kakistocracy does not let the reader dangle with vague answers. It provides innovative ways to restructure our federal government to work for citizens, not politicians, and collaborating interest groups.
It tells a story of how concern for the environment (Green New Deal, climate change) is used by the Left to attack capitalism and scare the country into socialism.
It is a parody of Mao’s The Little Red Book. Using the words of the political Left to illustrate how simple words like “red” and “green” can be corrupted to persuade people into believing something other than the advocate’s true purpose.
The book is a collection of quotes from prominent figures on the Left and short introductions for each section to provide context and perspective. Each quote is on a separate page, with speaker identity and citations. Speakers comment on different aspects of radical environmentalism, e.g., hated capitalism, truth is not relevant, humans must go, and “the world will end in twelve years.”
The book is small, 4 x 6 inches paper, 48 pages. Such books are called “chapbooks.” They are easy-to-read formats that allow the book to present complex political ideas in a simple manner. It can be read in under 20 minutes. Chapbooks have been around for centuries and were first used as educational books. The reader will quickly be educated about where the Left wants to take this country.
Polls show only 20% of citizens trust the U.S. federal government to do what is right most of the time. Polls find the average American believes the nation is two-thirds of the way to “the edge of a civil war.” Can the federal government unite and govern this polarized nation? If not, how does it divide?
Devolution of Power directly addresses these questions. It provides a roadmap to unwinding the massive accumulation of federal power by returning many domestic functions to the states. By distributing power throughout the nation, the federal government can focus on protecting America while empowering citizens in the respective states with the freedom to determine the domestic policies they want to be continued by more efficient governments closer to them.
Unlike many books on government reform, Devolution of Power is not just a list of complaints that leave the reader seeking solutions. It addresses how to restructure a federal government before it collapses the nation:
Though electing federal officials who serve as fiduciaries and devolving federal domestic powers to the states may seem impossible, the author presents a compelling case that it is a far easier task than rebuilding a collapsed nation burdened with massive debt, regulatory sclerosis, continuous wars, and little concern for the average American.