Hawaii – Gigi Bowman: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Clean Food

By Liberty Candidate 2011,

Daniel de Gracia

HAWAII, May 31, 2012 — As congressional candidates square off in primaries across America, one of the most frequently invoked justifications for choosing one party personality over another is “business experience.” We’ve all heard the campaign tagline a million times: “So-and-so’s years of experience in business will help turn around our government and put our nation back on track.” But does experience running a company really make a candidate more qualified for office?

Thinking Carefully About Policy and Profits

In the early days of the Republic, America was a sparsely populated, largely agrarian nation. Legislators often served short careers in office and usually introduced inchoate laws – that is, bills they expected to pass on an as-needed basis. Congressional workload was light to moderate, with most legislators using family members as staff and the topics which came before committees were ones which could be resolved with minimal technical experience.

Today, Congress is a vastly different institution from its origins. Immense expertise on a dizzying array of matters is in high demand as Congress insists on legislating increasingly complex matters ranging from domestic economics to international affairs to even advanced scientific research.

The rise of the “2,000-page bill” introductions along with an already confusing myriad of existing laws, regulations, agency traditions and licensing regimes often force legislators to depend on lobbyists and expert staff members to know what needs to be done. Amidst this chaotic environment, it is argued that a candidate with prior business experience will be the best to handle the so-called “gridlock” of Washington and serve America.

The problem, however, with candidates with business backgrounds – especially those with big business experience – is that running a company well is not the same thing as running a government. In a business, profit-seeking is the core of any successful company. While a company that expands its production and increases its profits may be extremely popular among shareholders, a government that increases its tax revenues and upgrades its operations using “business methods” is essentially becoming better at stealing from taxpayers and more efficient at bossing people around.

As the ancient Greek author Thucydides famously warned in History of the Peloponnesian War, “as the power of Hellas grew, and the acquisition of wealth became more an object, the revenues of the states increasing, tyrannies were by their means established almost everywhere.” Said another way: Want government to help you and your friends get rich? Then use government to rig the market!

Consider this: In a total free market absent any government, no taxes exist; therefore, where revenues minus costs equal profits, money made by businesses goes to paying wages (purchase of labor) and investing in more business (purchase of capital).

Since a free market also has no government-controlled central bank to artificially dilate or contract the money supply through interest rates, the amount of money in the market is relatively stable and combined with increasing efficiency of production, the more “free” a market is, the cheaper products get and ultimately, profits fall.

Continued

by Liberty Candidate, Danny de Gracia II

HAWAII, January 14, 2011–The Obama Administration’s new defense strategy as outlined in the sixteen page document Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities For 21st Century Defense has defined the first and primary mission of America’s military as “Counter Terrorism and Irregular Warfare.”

But in an era where Osama bin Laden is dead and nearly ten years have passed by since the al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, is Obama’s blueprint the right plan for a war-weary America? In America’s military service academies and war colleges, the ancient strategic wisdom of Sun Tzu’s famed Art of War is still taught for its timeless advice on command and tactics.

“[I]f you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle,” Sun Tzu writes, and says further “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

Sun Tzu also presents an interesting economic warning about prolonged war: “if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. Now when your weapons are dulled, your ardor dampened, you strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftans will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.”

As America experiences continued fiscal challenges in the form of a rising national debt and a weak economy, these warnings almost perfectly describe the condition of our military and country. History demonstrates that the correct course of action for a declining power is not to commit to fighting a global war in search of peace but rather to seek to avert conflict altogether through a combination of shrewd diplomacy and a well-equipped military that can strategically deter both small and large aggressors alike.

This wisdom was the default posture of the United States for most of the Cold War, especially in the early post-WWII years when America’s policymakers realized that her enemies abroad could quite easily seek to whittle her into exhausting conflicts by starting flashpoints around the world.

In a January 1954 address to the Council on Foreign Relations, Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense John Foster Dulles remarked, “If the enemy could pick his time and his place and his method of warfare – and if our policy was to remain the traditional one of meeting aggression by direct and local opposition – then we had to be ready to fight in the Arctic and the tropics, in Asia, in the Near East and in Europe; by sea, by land, and by air; by old weapons and by new weapons.”

Instead, the solution offered by Dulles and others throughout the Cold War was to provide America’s enemies with an absolute assurance that initiating aggression against the United States would be met with overwhelming response.

While Obama has been compared by conservative critics to Jimmy Carter, the presidential election year memorandums of the Carter Administration draw sharp contrast to today’s new defense outline. In July 1980, Carter issued Presidential Directive 59 in which his vision of American defense meant “it is necessary to have nuclear (as well as conventional) forces such that in considering aggression against our interests any adversary would recognize that no plausible outcome would represe

continued: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/making-waves-hawaii-perspective-washington-politic/2012/jan/14/will-obamas-new-defense-plan-work/