Contents
PART 4:1 — LIBERTY RESTORED
Chapter 13
WTP STILL OWN THE GOVERNMENT
We Don’t Need to Seize It. We Need to Govern It.
After twelve chapters examining Liberty, the Laws of Nature, the Declaration, constitutional design, economic power, Progressivism, the Ratchet of Government, political factions, and Election Integrity, it would be easy to reach a discouraging conclusion: government has simply become too large, too complicated, too entrenched, and too powerful for ordinary citizens to influence.
That conclusion would surrender the central premise of the American experiment.
The Constitution does not begin with ” We the Government, We the Congress, We the States, or We the Political Parties. It begins “We the People.”
Government possesses enormous power today, but constitutionally, that power is still exercised through institutions created by WTP. Presidents leave. Members of Congress leave. Administrators retire. Judges eventually leave. Political parties gain and lose control.
Agencies can be reorganized. Laws can be amended or repealed. Regulations can change. Constitutional amendments can be adopted. The machinery has become complicated. Ownership has not changed.
WTP don’t need to seize the government. WTP need to resume responsibility for the government that already belongs to us.
Ownership is an attractive word until responsibility comes with it. If government belongs to WTP, then we cannot blame politicians for everything government does while accepting no responsibility for whom we elect, what powers we allow, what promises we reward, what debt we tolerate, or what results we fail to measure.
Representatives respond to incentives too. If voters reward promises rather than results, politicians will become skilled at promises. If voters reward factional loyalty, representatives will become loyal to factions. If voters demand benefits without asking about costs, the government will find ways to provide benefits while postponing costs.
Self-government begins when WTP make good governing more politically valuable than good campaigning.
Voting is indispensable, but it is not the whole of self-government. The ballot is the final act in a much longer civic process.
WTP must understand governing principles, examine candidates, communicate expectations, observe representatives while they govern, measure results, and then vote with evidence rather than merely emotion, advertising, personality, or factional identity. Politics asks how to win the election. Liberty Civics™ asks how WTP govern before, during, and after the election.
Consider WTP as the missing employer. We authorize representatives to exercise extraordinary power over taxation, spending, regulation, national defense, criminal law, interstate commerce, appointments, and countless other decisions. Then many of us stop supervising them.
No serious organization would hire an executive, grant enormous authority, establish no meaningful performance standards, accept the executive’s own description of performance, and conduct the next evaluation years later after competing advertising campaigns.
When the owners stop managing, someone else will manage for them.
Political parties, interest groups, lobbyists, donors, advocacy organizations, and agencies naturally fill the vacuum. They have every right to participate in civic life, but none of them is WTP.
We delegated authority, not ownership. Government is designed to come back to its source. The question is whether the source is prepared to govern it.
The Ratchet returns here. Government can reform itself, but WTP should recognize the incentive problem in expecting institutions alone to continuously reduce their own authority.
The people from whom the power originally came have the strongest reason to examine inherited responsibilities and ask whether they should continue, be reformed, be returned, or be terminated.
The answer will not always be to abolish it. Sometimes the evidence will say keep it. Sometimes reform it. Sometimes return it to the states, communities, families, markets, or private institutions. Sometimes terminate it. The principle determines the question. Evidence helps determine the answer.
Liberty Civics™ is not another faction. There are no dues, no national committee deciding what WTP must believe, and no candidate who owns it. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, believers, and nonbelievers can practice it. The requirement is not ideological conformity. The requirement is a willingness to put governing principles and measurable evidence ahead of factional loyalty.
You don’t join Liberty Civics™. You practice it.
The process should begin before the candidates. What should the government do? What should it not do? What belongs to individuals, families, communities, states, and the nation? What protects equal Liberty?
What preserves competition? What power would we refuse to give our own faction because we would fear it in the hands of the other? Only after answering those questions should we ask which candidate comes closest.
WTP should not discover our governing principles by asking what our candidate believes. We should determine what our candidate believes by measuring them against our governing principles.
After the election, the measurement continues. Did the representative govern according to the principles presented to WTP? Did circumstances require a change, and was it explained? Did the policy produce the predicted result?
Did governmental power increase? Did Liberty increase or decrease? The next election should begin with an examination of the previous record, not another fresh set of promises.
Campaign promises tell us what candidates want WTP to believe. Governing records tell us what representatives actually did with power.
Results belong to WTP too. A representative may faithfully vote for a policy that fails. Good intentions do not repeal the Laws of Nature. We must ask both what the representative did and what happened.
That requires measures appropriate to the principle: Liberty, prosperity, family stability, public safety, educational achievement, debt, purchasing power, economic mobility, dependency, opportunity, equal treatment, election confidence, and accountability.
Don’t merely measure what representatives SAY. Measure what government DOES and what RESULTS follow.
The Measuring Stick
Before blaming the government, ask: Do I know the principles by which I evaluate it? Did I examine candidates before voting? Have I measured what they did afterward? Do I apply the same standard to my preferred faction? What governmental responsibility have WTP delegated that we are no longer actively supervising?
CHAPTER 14
THE NORTH STAR
Principles Must Govern WTP Before WTP Can Govern Government
WTP still own the government, but ownership does not answer the most important question: how should the owners decide what constitutes good governance?
We cannot answer by looking to a president, because presidents change. We cannot look to a political party because parties change positions, coalitions, priorities, and leaders. We cannot simply follow public opinion, because majorities can be wrong. We need something more fundamental.
Navigators crossed oceans by fixing their position against a point in the sky that appeared nearly stationary while everything around them moved. They did not expect the North Star to move toward their ship. They adjusted the ship to the fixed point. Self-government needs the same discipline.
For Liberty Civics™, that North Star is principle: enduring principles derived from Liberty, the Laws of Nature, the Declaration, constitutional government, American experience, and measurable results.
The North Star does not move because we do.
There is a consequence we cannot escape. If principles are truly principles, they must govern WTP too. Political scorecards traditionally point in one direction: the citizen holds the Measuring Stick, and the politician gets measured.
That is useful but incomplete. WTP are the source from which governmental authority originates. If the government has accumulated unnecessary power, if debt becomes unsustainable, or if factions dominate elections, citizens have participated in the incentives that produced those outcomes.
Before WTP can measure those who govern, WTP must be willing to measure ourselves.
That is the bifurcation at the heart of Liberty Civics™. WePEG1787 is not merely asking what the candidate believes. It also asks what we believe. Before examining the candidate, WTP examines the principles, thinks about them, challenges them, compares them with history and evidence, and scores them. Then the candidate’s scores can be placed beside ours.
WTP should know what we believe before a candidate tells us what to believe.
The purpose is not to manufacture 10s. If WTP are expected to score every principle a 10, we have simply created another ideology. A citizen may score a maximum of 10, 7, 3, or zero. The score is information.
The first civic achievement is that the citizen confronted the governing question directly rather than allowing a faction to answer it on the citizen’s behalf.
Agreement is not the objective. A nation of free people will disagree because free people think for themselves. Politics needs coalitions large enough to win and therefore packages issues. Liberty Civics™ unpacks them again, one principle at a time.
What do you believe? Why? What evidence supports it? What power follows? What result should follow? Would you apply the same principle when your opponents hold power?
The objective is not uniform thinking. The objective is independent governing judgment.
Principles must also stand above personalities and parties. A personality changes. A party changes. Circumstances change.
The sequence should be Principles → WTP → Candidates → Representatives → Results,
not Candidate → Party → Positions → WTP. In the first sequence, citizens govern; in the second, citizens follow.
A North Star that moves whenever our party moves is not a North Star.
Eventually, reality gets a vote. A policy can promise lower costs and produce higher ones. A regulation can promise competition and reduce it. Spending can promise growth and disappoint.
The political argument does not determine what occurred. Evidence does. Liberty Civics™ must therefore be willing to examine its own principles when repeated results contradict its predictions.
The Measuring Stick must be willing to measure itself.
Calling something a North Star does not mean our wording can never improve. The Laws of Nature do not change because we misunderstand them, but our understanding can change. Two hundred and fifty years of experience gives us evidence that the Founders did not possess.
Principles should be durable but not immune from correction; they should change because better evidence moves them, not because a political faction needs a different answer this election.
Now the bifurcation opens the floodgates. One citizen scoring the principles learns something. One candidate scoring them creates a comparison. Thousands or millions of citizens scoring them can reveal what WTP actually believe principle by principle rather than inferring those beliefs from party registration or election totals.
A single vote compresses countless judgments into one choice; principle scoring can unpack them.
A candidate can then enter a room where WTP already know their own scores. The conversation changes from “Do we like you?” to “Why did you score this principle a 4 when many of us scored it an 8?”
The candidate can explain. WTP can listen. Minds may change in either direction. Politics has not disappeared; it has become subordinate to Civics.
After the election, four pieces of information become available: what WTP said, what the candidate said, what the representative did, and what results followed. WTP score the principles. Candidates score the principles. Representatives create the record.
Results test everybody. That is not merely a scorecard. It is a feedback system for self-government.
The Measuring Stick
What principles do I believe the government should follow? Why? What evidence would cause me to reconsider? Do I apply the principle equally when my opponents hold power? Am I measuring the candidate against my principles—or changing my principles to match the candidate? Am I willing to score before demanding the candidate’s score?
CHAPTER 15
THE MEASURING STICK
WePEG1787 — WTP’s Principles of Effective Governing
For fourteen chapters, we have been building toward a remarkably simple idea: WTP cannot govern what we do not measure. We have principles, elections, candidates making promises, representatives exercising power, enormous public budgets, and political organizations telling us what the government accomplished or failed to accomplish.
What WTP have largely lacked is a common instrument connecting all of it.
That is the purpose of WePEG1787—We the People’s Principles of Effective Governing. WePEG1787 does not tell WTP whom to elect. It does not belong to a political party. It does not require candidates or citizens to agree with every principle.
It makes governing positions visible and comparable before power is granted and gives WTP a framework for measuring what happens afterward.
WTP score. Candidates score. Representatives govern. WTP measure. Results answer.
The Bifurcation That Changes Everything
WePEG1787 began as a way to measure candidates: give them governing principles, ask them to rate their agreement from 0 to 10, publish the results, and allow voters to compare.
But there was a missing half. What is the candidate’s score being compared to? A candidate scoring a principle 8 tells a voter little unless the voter knows whether he or she scores it 2, 5, 8, or 10.
With the citizen’s score, WePEG1787 becomes an instrument of self-government. Both WTP and the people asking WTP for authority examine the same principles. Both reveal their judgments.
Neither receives an automatic preferred score. Agreement becomes visible. Disagreement becomes visible. Most importantly, the political party no longer has to stand between the citizen and the governing question.
Before WTP measure the candidate, WTP measure ourselves.
Zero to Ten
The scoring system is intentionally simple. Each principle is scored from 0 to 10. Zero means no agreement with the principle as stated; 10 means complete agreement; the numbers in between express degrees of agreement.
The score is not a grade assigned by Liberty Civics™. A 10 does not make someone a good American, and a zero does not make someone a bad American. The score tells us how strongly that person agrees with the principle as written.
If Liberty Civics™ rewarded people for producing the “correct” scores, WePEG1787 would become another ideological conformity test. Instead, the purpose is disclosure.
A candidate should be free to score a principle zero and explain why. WTP should be equally free to score it zero. Then we can have the governing debate.
No One Is Exempt. No One Is Omitted.
The Measuring Stick works only if applied consistently. Executive-power principles apply to the president we support and the president we oppose.
Fiscal principles apply to Republican spending and Democratic spending. Federalism applies whether California resists Washington or Texas resists Washington. Election Integrity applies whether our candidate wins or loses. The moment we exempt our own faction, the Measuring Stick becomes a political weapon.
No one is exempt. No one is omitted.
The Candidate Before Power
WePEG1787 adds structured disclosure before governmental authority is granted. The candidate reads the same principles available to WTP and provides a score for each one. A 10 is a clear statement of strong agreement; a 4 is useful information too. A refusal to score is also information.
The purpose is not to trap candidates. It is to let them reveal themselves.
A candidate may have an excellent reason for disagreeing with a principle. WTP should want to hear it. A candidate may expose a weakness in the principle itself. We should want to hear that too. The Measuring Stick must be willing to measure itself.
WTP Before the Ballot
Place the citizen’s scores beside the candidate’s. Instead of beginning with Republican or Democrat, the voter can begin with governing principles. Where do we agree? Where do we disagree?
Which disagreements matter most? Is another candidate closer? Is my preferred candidate actually governing from principles substantially different from my own? WePEG1787 does not replace voter judgment; it improves the information upon which judgment is made.
The Election Is the Beginning of the Measurement
Suppose a candidate scores a principle 9 and wins. That score becomes a benchmark. During the term, WTP can examine votes, executive actions, budgets, appointments, regulations, or other decisions and ask whether the representative governed consistently with the position presented before the election.
Circumstances can change, and representatives should be allowed to learn, but a change deserves an explanation: What changed? Why? What evidence justified the change?
Then Come the Results
Agreement with a principle does not prove that a policy based upon it worked. The Laws of Nature still get the final examination. Did Liberty increase or decrease? Did competition improve?
Did family stability, public safety, educational achievement, purchasing power, economic mobility, opportunity, equal treatment, election confidence, or accountability improve? Did debt or dependency increase?
Not every outcome can be reduced to a single number, and correlation does not imply causation. Measurement can be difficult. None of that is an argument against measurement; it is an argument for measuring better.
Don’t merely measure what representatives SAY. Measure what government DOES and what RESULTS follow.
Four Records
WePEG1787 ultimately gives WTP four different records. The WTP Record tells us what citizens say they believe. The Candidate Record tells us what a candidate said before receiving power.
The Governing Record tells us what the elected representative actually did. The Results Record examines what happened after the government acted. Those records create a feedback loop: Principles → WTP → Candidates → Governing → Results → Re-examination of Principles.
This system must retain the possibility that WTP are wrong. Perhaps the implementation failed. Perhaps outside events overwhelmed the policy. Perhaps the measurement was defective.
But if a principle or our formulation of it repeatedly predicts results that do not occur, we must reconsider. That possibility separates a Measuring Stick from an ideology.
WTP cannot demand accountability from the government while exempting our own governing judgment from accountability.
The Debate We Actually Need
Imagine two candidates completing WePEG1787 and producing dramatically different scores. Put the principle on the screen. Put the scores beside it. Let each candidate explain.
Give WTP the evidence. Now we have a governing debate instead of competing thirty-second advertisements. The same process works among citizens.
Two neighbors may discover that they have voted for opposing parties for twenty years while agreeing on most governing principles, or they may locate a genuine fundamental disagreement. Either result is useful.
WePEG1787 does not eliminate disagreement. It locates it.
Leveling the Playing Field
There is another consequence of the Measuring Stick that may be even more disruptive to conventional politics: WePEG1787 can dramatically lower the cost of becoming a credible candidate.
A first-time candidate often begins with enormous disadvantages. The incumbent has name recognition, donor relationships, party infrastructure, endorsements, voter data, media contacts, and a governing record. A challenger may have none of them. Before the challenger can even discuss governing, enormous resources may be required simply to become known.
That creates an unintended barrier to representative government. Highly qualified citizens may make excellent representatives, but have never spent years building a political organization.
A business owner, teacher, pastor, engineer, physician, farmer, economist, parent, veteran, or community leader may understand governing principles exceptionally well and still face a system in which the ability to finance a campaign becomes part of the qualification for governing.
WePEG1787 changes the starting point. Give the first-time candidate the same Measuring Stick as the incumbent. Let both score the same principles on a scale of 0 to 10. Put the scores beside the candidates’ résumés.
The unknown candidate now has a way for WTP to understand governing judgment before that candidate possesses a governing record. The incumbent retains an appropriate advantage where it belongs: WTP can compare previous scores with an actual record in office.
WePEG gives a first-time candidate something political money normally has to purchase: an immediate way for WTP to know who the candidate is as a governor.
Money Can Buy a Message.
It Cannot Change the Score.
Money will always matter in elections. Candidates need to communicate, travel, organize, reach voters, and operate campaigns. WePEG1787 does not repeal those realities and cannot eliminate independent political spending.
But it can reduce what enormous amounts of political money can accomplish.
Suppose Candidate A scores a governing principle 9 and Candidate B scores it 2. A political organization can spend millions praising Candidate B or attacking Candidate A.
It can purchase advertising, mail, digital campaigns, consultants, opposition research, and messaging. But there is one stubborn fact it cannot purchase away: 9 and 2. The candidates scored themselves. WTP can read the principle and compare.
A smear does not change a Principle score.
This is how WePEG1787 can help neuter the power of unlimited political spending without limiting anyone’s speech. The answer to political money does not necessarily have to be for the government to decide who may spend what.
Another answer is to reduce the value of expensive persuasion by giving WTP better information. Instead of the government controlling political speech, WTP become harder to manipulate through it.
The Politics of Personal Destruction
Character, honesty, competence, criminal conduct, and relevant past behavior can matter greatly. But campaigning can also turn opposition research into a substitute for governing debate.
WePEG1787 cannot prevent attacks. It can make them less decisive. A candidate can answer the allegation and return to the record: Here is who I am. Here is what I believe. Here is how I scored. Compare me with the other candidates.
The Filing Fee Experiment
Take the principle to its logical conclusion. What should it really cost a qualified citizen to present himself or herself to WTP for public office?
Imagine a civic culture in which a prospective candidate could pay the required filing fee, submit a résumé, complete the WePEG1787 principles, explain the scores where desired, and stand before WTP.
Campaigning, contributions, endorsements, criticism, and free political speech would remain. But the candidate would no longer be politically invisible.
The price of admission to representative government should not be the ability to finance a personality contest.
This could matter greatly if Liberty Civics™ produces what self-government should produce: many first-time candidates. WTP should be able to identify capable people in our communities, ask them to run, and give them a realistic way to present themselves without first requiring them to become professional fundraisers.
From Dark Money to Daylight
The conventional dark-money debate focuses on who gave the money, how much, through which organization, and what disclosure or regulation the government should require. Those can be legitimate questions.
Liberty Civics™ asks another: Why is the money so valuable? It is valuable because money can influence what WTP know and believe about candidates.
WePEG1787 attacks that value at the information level. Put the principles in daylight. Put WTP scores in daylight. Put candidate scores in daylight. Put the résumé in daylight.
After the election, put the governing record beside them, and then put the results beside the governing record. Money can still speak. It just cannot own the Measuring Stick.
Don’t silence the money. Make the money less powerful by making WTP better informed.
The Floodgates
Candidate scoring alone improves elections. WTP scoring creates a civic language. Thousands or millions of citizens independently scoring principles could reveal patterns that party affiliation cannot.
A community might discover overwhelming agreement on one principle across party lines and deep division on another. Representatives could see where constituents actually stand rather than relying only upon election totals, polls, advocacy groups, or party platforms.
This is not direct democracy replacing representative government. Representatives still represent. Elections still elect. The Constitution still allocates authority. But representatives gain a clearer picture of the governing principles of the people they represent, and WTP gain a clearer picture of ourselves.
No Political Authority Required
Nobody has to wait for Washington. Congress does not need to pass a Liberty Civics™ Act. A president does not need to issue an executive order. Political parties do not have to approve. WTP can begin.
A citizen can score. A candidate can score. A civic group can ask candidates to score. A worship center can teach governing principles without becoming a political faction.
A classroom can compare constitutional principles. Technology can distribute the results widely. Self-government should not require the government’s permission.
The Measuring Stick
Before an election: Have I scored the principles? Has the candidate? Where do we agree and disagree? After the election, did the representative govern consistently with the scores? What power was exercised? What results followed? Would I accept these same scores, actions, and evidence if the names and parties were reversed?
FROM REFORM TO TRANSFORMATION
The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Next New Thing
The Great Depression was not an abstract policy debate. Output collapsed, unemployment reached catastrophic levels, banks failed, savings disappeared, and families faced genuine hardship. A serious Liberty Civics™ examination begins with an acknowledgment of the scale of the crisis.
It also acknowledges that Federal Reserve failures and monetary contraction contributed to the severity of the collapse. The existence of a crisis does not determine what the government should do, but it does change the political burden dramatically.
Crisis dramatically lowers political resistance
to governmental action.
The immediate question in a crisis is often, What must we do now? The constitutional and civic question afterward must be: What should remain?
Banking emergency measures, the Emergency Banking Act, deposit insurance, financial regulation, relief, public works, agricultural programs, labor policy, Social Security, and many other New Deal initiatives should not be treated as one undifferentiated program.
Relief, recovery, and reform addressed different purposes and should be measured separately.
Deposit insurance illustrates the chain of consequences. A guarantee can reduce panic and protect depositors, but it also changes incentives, as depositors have less incentive to monitor bank risk. That creates a case for supervision and regulation. Problem → Guarantee → Changed Incentives → Regulation. One intervention can generate a legitimate reason for another.
Government experimentation without measurement can become permanent policy without demonstrated success.
The Depression also changed expectations about responsibility. When individual, family, charitable, local, and state institutions were overwhelmed, federal action became more politically acceptable.
The enduring question was whether emergency federal responsibility would remain temporary or whether economic security itself would become a continuing national responsibility. Social Security answered much of that question by establishing enduring federal roles in old-age benefits, unemployment insurance, and assistance.
Emergency relief had become an enduring governmental responsibility.
Permanent programs then alter private behavior. People plan retirement around expected benefits. Employers and financial institutions adapt. States build systems around federal funds.
Removing the program later can impose costs created partly by the program’s own existence. That is the Expectation Ratchet.
Federalism can also change through money. Federal Revenue → Federal Grant → State Participation → Institutional Dependence → Continuing Federal Influence. States may formally retain authority while federal funding increasingly shapes the choices available to them.
Did the New Deal end the Depression? A serious answer is more complicated than a slogan. The economy recovered substantially after 1933, banking stability improved, and relief and infrastructure programs had important effects.
Yet full employment and full productive mobilization arrived only with World War II. The severe 1937–38 downturn also demonstrates how fiscal and monetary policies themselves can become major variables when the government is deeply involved in economic management.
Once the government becomes a major participant in an economic system, government policy itself becomes part of the system’s risk.
The New Deal also transformed constitutional expectations. Court doctrine became more accepting of broad federal economic regulation, and the political confrontation over the Supreme Court demonstrated how institutional limits themselves can become part of the struggle over policy.
Transformation need not occur through the abolition of constitutional institutions. It can occur through accumulated responsibilities and changed interpretations of existing power.
The Next New Thing
The New Deal was followed by the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, and later New Federalism. These programs arose in different circumstances and should be judged separately.
Yet the sequence raises an important question: if each governing program solved the underlying problem, why did each subsequent generation repeatedly need a new thing?
Circumstances genuinely change. Technology changes. Population changes. New problems appear. Innovation is not the enemy of Liberty. The error is assuming that a newly named governmental program escapes enduring realities of scarcity, incentives, human nature, concentrated power, and unintended consequences.
The government can create a new program. It cannot create new Laws of Nature.
The political debate can gradually shift from whether the government should bear responsibility for an outcome to how it should administer the responsibility it has already assumed. The next administration may criticize the previous program while accepting its underlying governmental starting point.
Perhaps the most revealing measure of a governmental program is not what the next administration abolishes, but what it accepts as its starting point.
New ideas should be welcomed. New claims of exemption from old realities should not. The name changes. The Laws of Nature do not.
The Measuring Stick
When the government offers the next new thing, ask: What problem is new? What Law of Nature has changed? What responsibility is being transferred? What power follows? What inherited program is being accepted as the starting point? How will WTP know whether the new program worked?