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    A Conservative's View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts
    A Conservative's View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts
    A Conservative's View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    A Conservative's View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts

    By Eric Hines

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    This is the first of a pair of publications on American policy; the other is concerned with National Policy, which consists of foreign and defense policy.

    Domestic Policy both is necessary in its own right and must come before National Policy since a sound policy domestically is absolutely required both for the health of the nation within our borders and to facilitate—indeed, to enable—any form of outward-facing policy at the national level.

    Domestic Policy is a combination of social and economic policies. Social Policy consists of these things: the concept of the American nation; American citizenship; the role of faith in our society; the role of immigration and its importance to our society; the importance of consensus; and the role of education.

    Economic Policy consists of these things: the nature of a free market and its condition as the most moral system and the one most conducive to generating prosperity for all (even though there always will be some more or less prosperous than others), the role of the Federal government in protecting and enhancing our economy, and the role of Federal regulation in facilitating our economy.

    Of course, these two major divisions of Domestic Policy are not truly separate from each other any more than biology, chemistry, and physics are separate from each other within science. Just as we divide scientific disciplines from each other to facilitate inquiry and discussion, I'm separating domestic policy into these divisions to facilitate a similar inquiry and discussion—while remaining fully aware and making occasional use of their very large areas of overlap.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEric Hines
    Release dateMar 1, 2015
    ISBN9781311573049
    A Conservative's View of American Domestic Policy: Some Thoughts
    Author

    Eric Hines

    The author is an Air Force veteran, Project Manager, and Systems Engineer living in North Texas. He is not a professional politician, but a reasonably well-educated citizen who has taken the time to study not just where we are, but where we came from and how we got here today. His principles are developed by a person more typical of today's American than the formally credentialed individuals who have spent their professional lives as members of a governing elite.

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      Book preview

      A Conservative's View of American Domestic Policy - Eric Hines

      Introduction

      Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

      —William Ewart Gladstone

      This is the first of a pair of publications on American policy; the other is concerned with National Policy, which consists of foreign and defense policy.

      Domestic Policy both is necessary in its own right and must come before National Policy since a sound policy domestically is absolutely required both for the health of the nation within our borders and to facilitate—indeed, to enable—any form of outward-facing policy at the national level.

      Domestic Policy as I use it in this book is what a nation thinks of itself and does to maintain and improve that self-image. More specifically, Domestic Policy is a combination of social and economic policies. Social Policy, which I'll discuss in Part I, consists of these things: the concept of the American nation; American citizenship; the role of faith in our society; the role of immigration and its importance to our society; the importance of consensus; and the role of education.

      In Part II, I'll discuss Economic Policy—what it should be and how to implement it. Economic Policy consists of these things: the nature of a free market and its condition as the most moral system and the one most conducive to generating prosperity for all (even though there always will be some more or less prosperous than others), the role of the Federal government in protecting and enhancing our economy, and the role of Federal regulation in facilitating our economy.

      Of course these two major divisions of Domestic Policy (and each one's constituent parts) are not truly separate from each other any more than biology, chemistry, and physics are separate from each other within science. Just as we divide scientific disciplines from each other to facilitate inquiry and discussion, I'm separating domestic policy into these divisions to facilitate a similar inquiry and discussion—while remaining fully aware and making occasional use of their very large areas of overlap.

      Finally, as usual, a housekeeping detail. Throughout this book, I use liberty and freedom interchangeably, as I do responsibility, obligation, and duty. In other writings, I've drawn a distinction among them; in the present context, though, their interchangeability as they are used in general discourse is appropriate.

      Part I: Social Policy

      Political tags—such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth—are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

      —Robert Heinlein

      Domestic Policy is the set of guiding principles, whether overtly stated as openly acknowledged in our social compact documents—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—or the same principles understood by us subconsciously, that are the framework within which we citizens live, both individually and in any of the groups we might form. Indeed, even at the Party level, there is a general agreement on these guiding principles, with the major Party differences revolving around the meaning of those principles and thus how best to implement them.

      Ideally, the men working in our government also are guided by these same principles (understanding them according to the Conservative view provided in this book) as they work to implement the various aspects of our Domestic Policy.

      A coherent and well understood Domestic Policy is critical to maximizing the quality of life within America and to maximizing our individual and national prosperity, morally as well as fiscally. Without one, we are a cacophony of 300 million individuals, each of whose abilities and opportunities are lost in the Hobbesian noise. With such coherence, though, each of us can maximize the use of our abilities and the outcomes we create, whether by working alone or in groups—which is a matter of individual choice under those guiding principles.

      As I mentioned in the Introduction, I see the major components of American Domestic Policy as Social Policy and Economic Policy. Social Policy, in turn, consists of the nationhood of America, American citizenship, the role and importance of immigration to our society, the roles of education and faith in our society, and the need for popular consensus to achieve anything of lasting durability. I'll discuss each of these components below, outlining what I consider the optimal policy for each. With that foundation, I'll proceed to Economic Policy in Part II.

      Chapter 1: Nationhood

      A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

      —Mahatma Gandhi

      What is the American concept of nationhood, and how did our Judeo-Christian history shape it? Does that matter? The answers to these questions must shape our Domestic Policy.

      While the original English colonies in North America were business ventures, they and later colonies very quickly became refuges for those persecuted for their political or religious beliefs. Those religious beliefs were varying forms of Christianity, with no small contingent of Jews as well, and the persecutions centered on two things: the proper means of approaching God and the role of the Church in government.

      Added to this, by the beginning of the overt political conflict that would that would become our Revolution, most of the American colonial higher education institutions were church-run: our Founders were nearly all church educated, and several of them were ordained ministers. In addition to all of that, inter- (and intra-) colonial strife continued the essentials of the preceding century's English Civil Wars: they were religious disagreements. The point here, though, is not the conflicts themselves (in the colonies they were mostly non-violent, except on an individual level, anyway). The important fact is that Christian tenets and Christianity were deeply held in the hearts and minds of our forebears and had been for generations—as they are today, despite the publicity garnered by groups suing over this or that overt display or espousal of religious belief. Indeed, the fact that faith remains so deeply imbued in our culture today is what enables those suits to exist: if it were not, there would be no need of suits to support the excision of (Christian) religious symbology.

      How do I get from that introduction of fundamentally Christian with some Judaism to Judeo-Christian? In addition to the Jewish contingent in our colonies and those who fought our Revolutionary War in support of independence (the first Georgian patriot to die in combat was a Jew), recall the Christian Bible's Old Testament. That Testament has a very close alignment with Judaism's Talmud; this should not be surprising given the faiths' historical relationship.

      Recall, too, that our Christian faith in the 18th century (and the 19th, and forward) took very seriously the Old Testament—very much as seriously as the New Testament. This is illustrated in our early American literature. Herman Melville defined a major character in just three words: Call me Ishmael. Every American reader—Jew and Christian—understood immediately the kind of man Ishmael was from that Old Testament referent.

      The emphasis we place on Law and doing things legally, even in the apparent contradiction of rebellion, also came from the importance of the Old Testament/Talmud in those Americans' lives. (That our emphasis was on man's law and not king's law in a secular world was because those Americans also knew Locke and Rousseau.) Both secular and God's law were emphasized in our Declaration of Independence. God's law: all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator.... Man's (not King's) law: let Facts be submitted to a candid world, followed by a long list of charges and specifications that had finally driven us to do our duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new

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