UPDATE: $4,849 needed to make budget for July. Two days left. Contribute here.
Now, some news about coming tactical innovations.
This point bears constant repetition…
* Tax funded favors are concentrated on the special interests who receive them. This gives these interests a huge incentive to defend their benefits.
* But the costs of these benefits are spread among all taxpayers. This gives taxpayers little incentive to fight any special interest.
Milton Friedman called this the problem of “concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.” He believed it was a major reason the Leviathan State grows constantly larger. We agree. That’s why we’ve devoted ourselves to reducing the cost taxpayers must pay to fight Statism.
This Dispatch will…
* List the specific costs we’ve already lowered
* Describe the cost we want to lower next (we’re going to eliminate our current registration process!)
* Hint at a new way the reduction of this cost can make you more powerful in the near future
Lowering the cost of withdrawing consent
The State derives its powers from the consent of the governed. When citizens withdraw consent The State is forced to change. Withdrawing consent is the greatest power citizens have. Sadly, it’s also a perfect example of how the costs of resistance have been too high.
Most citizens have had to wait 2, 4, or 6 years to withdraw consent at election time, and even then they have always been limited to replacing one set of bad politicians with another.
Imagine if you had to convince 51% of your fellow citizens to allow you to stop doing business with Company A, before you could begin doing business with Company B, and that the new company was always just as bad as the old company. Well, that’s how elections work, and that’s why they stink as a way to register dissent. But no other way was much better prior to the Internet.
Now, however, you can grant and withdraw consent in the blink of an eye. But still, not all means of doing this are equally good…
The cost advantage of our Educate the Powerful System
Many advocacy sites will tell you who your elected reps are, but you must then go to three different websites (1 House Rep, 2 Senators), and fill out three different forms just to communicate one message to your Congressional delegation. Downsize DC changed all this.
We created software that allows you to communicate with all three of your elected reps at once, with just a few mouse-clicks and key strokes.
You provide your vital information a single time, then our software fills out all of the Congressional contact forms for you. And, as you’ll see below, we’re about to make this process even easier.
Our Educate the Powerful System was the first way we lowered the cost of resistance, but that was only the beginning…
The cost advantage of the Downsizer Dispatch
The second thing we did to lower the cost of resistance was develop a communications style that saves time. Most of our Dispatches are shorter than a newspaper op-ed. Many are only half that long.
We use short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and tight lists of powerful facts. This leverages your time in several important ways. The way we write the Dispatch allows you to learn more and take action faster, with less effort, then any other communications approach we’ve seen. But then we took it one step further…
We started putting our educational material into pre-written sample letters to Congress. This means you no longer have to write your own letters from scratch. You can copy or edit ours. Plus…
By forwarding the Dispatch to friends, you can also help educate others, at almost no cost. Forwarding the Dispatch serves a recruitment function too. We’ve combined education, recruitment, and pressure on Congress, into one, quick, easy process that costs only seconds of time. But we’ve also lowered the monetary cost…
The cost advantage of Downsize DC’s approach to funding
Most organizations fund themselves in very expensive ways. They spend large sums on direct mail, telemarketing, fundraising events, and traveling fund-raisers. There’s also a heavy reliance on major donors who can sometimes send organizations in a different direction, causing them to lose their way. We’ve taken a different approach, aimed at (once again) lowering costs. We do…
* Almost no direct mail
* No telemarketing
* No events
We also spend no money on traveling fund-raisers. And we want our major donors to be the icing on the cake, rather than the cake itself, so that we never lose our way, or become too dependent on too few sources of income. This means that nearly all of our support comes from monthly pledges and email appeals (of which we’ve averaged about 3 per month so far this year). And recently, we’ve taken another big step toward lowering our fundraising costs.
We’ve streamlined our software so that it’s now profitable for us to accept contributions and monthly pledges as little as $1.
We’ve lowered the cost of resistance to just a few mouse-clicks, keystrokes, and pennies. But we aren’t done yet.
Downsize DC is about to lower yet another cost
We think one of the greatest barriers to recruitment is the registration process. People are tired of registering at websites. But…
We need the registration information to determine who the right House reps are, and so Congressional offices can know that they’re hearing from real constituents. Still, by being clever…
We think we can get rid of the registration process almost entirely.
We’re working on new software that will allow new members to start sending a letter to Congress immediately, without having to fill out a registration form first.
The needed information will still be collected, but we’ll do it within the natural flow of sending a letter to Congress. Better yet, much of the information will be filled out automatically by our software using automated look-ups with the U.S. Postal Service.
We think this new process will cause a significant increase in the number of people who join Downsize DC, and in the number of people who use our Educate the Powerful System to send letters to Congress. But that’s not all…
We may be able to put the Educate the Powerful System everywhere!
We think our new approach to registration will make it possible for us to do something very powerful and exciting. We think it will enable us to provide html code so that you, or anyone else, could make the Educate the Powerful System available through your own personal website or blog.
That’s right, the innovations we’re working on could cause Downsize DC’s ETP System to appear all over the Internet. Even YOU could have it on your own website! Talk about lowering costs!
The Downsize DC Advantage
We hope that you appreciate how different Downsize DC is. We’re trying to solve specific strategic and tactical problems, and we constantly tell you what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it. How many organizations think this way and act this way?
But our ability to do these things in entirely dependent on your voluntary support. We may have lowered a lot of costs, but no one can lower the cost to zero. Right now, we’re $4,849 short for the month, with only two days left to go. We’re probably going to need at least one $1,000 donation, a couple of $500s, and lots of $100s, $50s, and $25. If you like what we’re doing, and want to see us keep moving forward, please make a contribution to assist us.
And monthly pledges, as low as $1 a month, help us plan and proceed in future months, as well as keep us independent.
Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.