What's to be done?

#1 - USA - the good, the bad and the ugly

Mar 18, 2025

About a year ago, even before the nomination of Donald Trump, I made notes to write about what he should do. With my Marxist education, I couldn’t help thinking of it in the terms of Lenin’s pamphlet:
“What is to be done?” The points of that seminal work are as follows:

Critique of "Economism"
Meaning the complete denial of reality. Not just economic, but biological, environmental, etc.
The Vanguard elite
Meaning the replacement of elected officials with an unaccountable, ideological, globalist technocracy.
Political consciousness
Meaning the brainwashing of the ‘proletariat’ with propaganda, education and censorship.
Centralized Leadership:
Meaning the centralization of power at every possible level. (see “The WEF casting agency”)
Role of Intellectuals
Meaning the justification of turning empirical facts into flexible, relativized narratives with rosy promises of the utopian future and scaremongering about the dystopian present.

Everything Trump represents is a repudiation of this communist plan. A plan that was well in progress to be implemented by the deep state, the educational system, the media and various globalist organizations.

Trump is not alone. He is riding a wave of a growing opposition to the communist future. Conservatives and libertarians are on the rise in Latin America and Europe. The EU is in decline, as populism is on the rise in the UK, Germany, Netherland, France, Italy, Rumania, Hungary, Slovakia, etc.

When the US sneezes, the world catches a cold

The good

As I said, I wanted to write this post a year ago, but I am glad I didn’t. I would feel foolish now.
Donald Trump and his team already surpassed my wildest expectations starting with his nominees.
Then he followed up with the swiftness of the execution.

He surprised us all with some creative ideas, much like the Roe vs Wade overturn which simply handed the responsibilities back to the states. Shutting down the Department of Education and handing back the responsibilities to the states is the right step toward decentralization.

Two months in, we are still seeing just the easy pickings:

Immigration & border security? Good!
Mass deportations of illegals? Hell, yeah!
No birthright citizenship? Finally!
Shutting down and auditing whole departments and agencies? Great!
Banning transgender participation in women’s sports? Far-out!
Presidential pardons? Absolutely!
Trying to revive the resource economy? Fantastic!
Cutting off support to discriminatory DEI initiatives? About time!

…but there is a lot more easy pickings and a lot more to be done on even the ones listed above. Donald Trump got elected on the promise of draining the swamp, cutting regulation, cleaning up the military, ending the forever wars and putting the US fiscal house in order.

Legislation has been drafted to abolish the EPA and hand back responsibility to the states, but there is still too much money spent on it.
Transgender surgery has been banned for minors. I would like to see not only banned completely, but also to see every single butcher who is performing or has ever performed such surgery losing their licences. They violated the most basic principle of medicine: do no harm!
Some could argue, that it is OK, if a SCOTUS Justice cannot define what a woman is, but for a medical doctor it is inexcusable. No such person should have a licence to practice medicine.
Justice must be served, and it should not take years. (See There can be no peace without justice).
Every transgression of the law perpetrated by politicians and government bureaucrats should be investigated and appropriately sanctioned. It is happening already, we just cannot see the results yet.

For the Trump presidency to be a truly transformative success, he would have to go much further.
Just consider more easy pickings:

No omnibus bills.
Announcing a personal policy stating that the POTUS will NOT sign ANY omnibus bills.
Omnibus bills are the vehicles of corruption, waste and backroom dealings.
If a cause or an issue is important, it should stand on its own merits and voted on separately.
Outlaw civil asset forfeiture.
People’s assets are an extension of their person and should be treated within the same legal framework, procedures and guaranties.
Audit the FED. Libertarians and conservatives are asking for it for its entire existence.
Ask the UN to move from New York. I’m sure North Dakota would be very welcoming. As an alternative, they could move to … let’s say: Calcutta? Nairobi? How about Gaza? We can rebuild Gaza to house every one of the UN agencies.
Reconsider the role of the US in NATO.
The egregiously unequal relationship between is being exposed as I write this. France and the UK is trying to drag America into WW III. They are behaving like impetuous children and the only thing that can change that is cutting them lose.
Allow for precious metal based non-government issued currencies to break the monopolies if fiat currencies.
Rein-in the lobbyists. Lobbying is 4.4 billion a year spent on corrupting the political process.
It just needs to be made more transparent with a strict restriction on voting with a conflict of interest. Politicians should recuse themselves from voting if they ever accepted donations from parties affected by the vote.

Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I understand, most of the above can be achieved by executive action. What follows is little harder, but no less important.

The bad

What is still to be done.

IRS
Americans need a comprehensive tax reform, aiming for a flat rate on a one-page return.
It would be immensely popular and a tremendous productivity booster.

The estimated cost of complying with tax regulations in the U.S. is substantial. According to recent data, Americans spend over 7.9 billion hours annually on tax compliance, which translates to approximately $413 billion in lost productivity. Additionally, out-of-pocket expenses for compliance, such as hiring tax professionals or purchasing software, amount to about $133 billion annually. Combined, the total cost of tax compliance reaches an estimated $546 billion per year, which is nearly 2% of the U.S. GDP.
This includes the time and money spent on activities like recordkeeping, tax planning, learning about tax laws, and completing tax returns. Small businesses, in particular, often bear a significant portion of these costs due to the complexity of the tax code.

While a comprehensive reform would need legislation, even a DOGE-like review could do wonders.

Labor unions
Heeding the wisdom of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the US should shut down all public service unions. Follow the link to follow his reasoning. It would make all government services more responsive and flexible.
Term limits
In both houses and maybe age limit on the Supreme court.

The ugly

What makes this section ugly, is the fight that it will require.
If you are a reader of this Substack, you must know by now my views on responsibility and the importance of understanding proximate and ultimate causes. The biggest problems Western liberalism faces is its refusal of addressing root causes.

The root cause of the problems of health care is professional licensing.
The root cause of the problems with big pharma is patent laws.
The root cause of the unhealthy food crisis is agricultural subsidies.
The root cause of our ideological differences is ‘free’ education.
The root cause of the global conflicts is American arrogance.
The root cause of this arrogance is the unchecked power of the deep state.

Addressing these root causes will not be easy and simply stating them is not enough. I aim to expand on them in upcoming posts, so if you are not a subscriber yet, click on the button:

Stopping the forever wars, reining in geopolitical adventurism is what Americans need and want.
The multipolar new world is not an enemy of the United States. It should be embraced. Parallel institutions are fine. A little competition between them would serve the betterment of the whole of humanity.

America’s greatness should NOT be predicated on dominance,
but on the respect of the rest of the world

The respect that has been squandered by decades of American foreign policies.
Fixing that will not be easy. Margaret Thatcher said that:

The essence of good government is that it is prepared to make difficult decisions necessary to get the long-term prosperity.

I could add to this that long term prosperity is not possibly without peace and the respect of other nations.

….but that’s just what I think. Correct me if I am wrong.

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