MEMO from Jim Babka, President, DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
I’m about to hit the road, and my itinerary includes meetings with candidates for public office. Remember . . .
Rand Paul is running for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky, and he has promised to introduce our Downsize DC Agenda bills if he’s elected to office. And right now, he’s leading in the polls. The Downsize DC Agenda includes the following . . .
* The Read the Bills Act
* The One Subject at a Time Act
* The Write the Laws Act
* The Enumerated Powers Act
* The Free Competition in Currency Act
Now I’m meeting with these other candidates, asking them to make the same pledge Rand Paul made. BUT PLEASE DON’T CONTACT ME YET ABOUT YOUR FAVORED CANDIDATE. Instead, stay tuned — I’ll let you know when the time is right, and what to do, as well as how to do it.
Challengers for public office are one more way we can pressure sitting office holders to introduce our legislation. And maybe, some of our challengers will win! But RIGHT NOW, we’re building the infrastructure to work with challengers in an effective fashion. Meanwhile, as I pack for my journey . . .
Word comes that we’ve won another small victory in Congress.
Thanks to public pressure, including lots of pressure from DC Downsizers, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), has been modified!
The idea was to start making your vitamins comply with international rules. We’ve dodged that bullet, but we can’t yet say that it’s a final victory . . .
* No one knows what will happen when the so-called food safety bill goes to conference committee
* And it’s still possible Senator McCain could revive his original vitamin bill
In addition, the Food Safety Bill itself WILL pass. It simply has too much support from corporate welfare interests, while we have too few members of the Downsize DC Army, and related groups, to fight against it. So, here’s where things are heading . . .
Our government is squeezing small businesses to extinction, by constantly erecting regulatory schemes with which only big companies can afford to comply.
In this case the victims are small family farms, but in other cases, like the recent new lead regulations, the victims were small toy makers, Mom and Pop retailers, and thrift stores. Remember . . .
Mattel was responsible for the scare over lead in toys, but Mattel was also in favor of the new regulations that resulted from Mattel’s mistake. Why? Because Mattel could afford to comply with the regulations, while many, small competing toy makers could not. Thus, thanks to government regulations, Mattel has benefited by thinning-out its competition. It’s wrong to profit from your own screw-up, and it takes a State (coercive, Big Government) to make such a thing happen.
This is increasingly what it means to live in The United States of Corporate Welfare . . .
* Small businesses get regulated out of existence
* The remaining businesses are too big to fail
* Big businesses know that they’re considered too big to fail, and so they feel free to take big risks that often result in big disasters
* The little guy then gets taxed to bail out the big guy, and
* More regulations are created that kill more little guys
So what can we do about this?
Well, there’s more than enough SOCIAL POWER available to reverse this situation. As we mentioned, by way of example, earlier in the week, 174 million people want Congress to repeal the healthcare bill, and if all 174 million of them directly asked their elected representatives to pass the repeal, then it would happen, overnight. But . . .
Only a few hundred thousand of the 174 million have bothered to pressure Congress directly, and so the politicians find it easy to ignore public opinion. It really is that simple. Which means . . .
We simply need to recruit, organize, and mobilize, the public force that already exists. Now, we’ll be the first to admit that DownsizeDC.org isn’t growing fast enough. It’s a source of constant frustration to us, because we think the potential is so great. We’re doing everything we can to make the growth happen faster . . .
That’s why I’m packing my bags to hit the road right now. And while I’m away other members of our team will be busy coding new software, and testing that software, so we can supply you with new tools to do more and better things, so we can grow faster with less effort. But frankly . . .
I don’t think the slowness of our growth has only to do with things that we aren’t yet doing, just as it isn’t our fault that most of the 174 million Americans who want the healthcare bill repealed have never bothered to contact their representatives. A lot of the difficulty we face is entirely psychological . . .
* Government grows too fast
* And Downsize DC grows too slow
* Because we like to wait for other people to do something before we do something
If you’re waiting on someone else to raise DownsizeDC.org’s budget above its current, meagre $170,000 per year, that person you’re waiting on may also be waiting on you. Break the stasis. Grab the social power that already exists. You can do that by taking independent, individual action. Please contribute to what we’re doing. The secure form is at the DownsizeDC.org website.
Jim Babka
President
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.