Support the People Around You

I believe that the first step to restoring America is to support the people around us.

In the America of old, people would turn to their neighbors before turning toward the government.

The result of this neighborly mentality was that Americans developed extremely diverse communities held together by strong independent local institutions.

The founders realized that government is a structure that limits the people. The secret to prosperity is to limit this artificial governance. By removing artificial constraints on the people, the American Experiment in Self Rule led to widespread prosperity.

In this classical liberal vision the people are the positive space. The government is a negative limiting factor.

Unfortunately, limiting government alone does not lead to prosperity.

Remember. in this vision, the people make up the positive space. The way people organize themsleves determines the outcome of limiting the government.

Imagine, for example, that we had a limited government in a slave economy. The slave owners would take advantage of the limited government to enslave more people and to become more brutal in their slavery.

Because the society is dysfunctional, limiting the government makes things worse.

Limiting governance in a society where people feel that killing and robbing to get ahead is a virtue leads to a large number of thefts and murders. 

Limited government alone does not lead to prosperity. The way people think and the way that people self organizes determines the outcome of the limited government.

The argument for limited government is incomplete if there is not a robust discussion about

In the classical liberal vision is, People comprise the positive space. The government is a limiting factor on the people.

Our attention should turn from government to the private sector.

I happen to be one to put my money where my mouth is.

For the last decade and a half I've the structure of the local community the primary focus of my attention. Politics is a minor annoyance.

I realized at the dawn of the Internet that we would either see an Internet dominated by a few multinational players or we would see a robust community focused Internet.

What I've done through the years is to develop geodomains with a tight local focus on communities in Utah, Colorado and Arizona.

The goal of the Community Color project is to show the way that the structure of our local communities is represented on the Internet.

The heart of this project is an attempt to tell people to focus on the positive aspects of a free society and avoid spending too much time on the negative aspects of governance.

While I have despaired about the political scene. In the long term our future depends on our ability to restore the robust independent communities which are being systematically destroyed by progressive ideologies.

Dammit I just wish there were people who wanted to save the beautiful independent communities our fore fathers had built.

Limiting government is only a small part of the vision. The real vision comes with the process of building robust independent communities.

What is so frustrating is that Conservatives seem to miss the biggest part of the picture. Limited government is only a small part of the vision of a free society. The activities and interactions of the people are primary space of our society.

The reason to limit the government is that governance is a constraint on the people. The people compose the primary space. To win the war the freedom movement needs to move from a myopic focus on government and actively engage in the community and talk about ways that a free society solves the challenges of the day.

Conservatism fails in this regard, of course, because the initial spark of conservatism is simply a desire to preserve existing social structures.

But a free society has a dynamic continually changing social structure. The conservative desire to create a static social structure is antithetical to a free society.

So while I've despair about the GOP, I will continue to pour my heart into what really matters and what really matters is the people and the ragtag remnants of the beautiful vision of a free society given to us by our founders and the sacrifice of those who strove to make America great.