A Radical Reset
Our Republic has been converted into a democracy which is just another name for mob rule. The mob is getting what it wants, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, good and hard. One day soon, the entire edifice is going to collapse under its own weight and what takes its place historically will be tyranny. A Radical Reset is the alternative and the system is called Antipolitism. It calls for a new republic based upon merit and not ambition. No parties, no money in politics, no careers in politics, and only serving the public good.
A Radical Reset
Sell the Land, Save the Republic
The national debt has become a looming sword of Damocles over our economy with potential catastrophic consequences when the bill comes due. We explore the only three possible outcomes: paying the debt (impossible), inflating our way out (leading to hyperinflation), or economic collapse—and propose a radical but viable alternative.
• The U.S. currently carries about $38 trillion in debt, more than any country has ever owed in history
• Politicians will likely choose inflation as the path of least resistance, but this historically leads to hyperinflation and societal collapse
• During economic crises, societies often turn to strong leadership, creating conditions for potential authoritarianism
• The ancient Roman model of Cincinnatus offers an alternative vision of leadership—solving problems then voluntarily relinquishing power
• Federal government owns approximately $400-500 trillion worth of land that could be strategically sold to address the debt crisis
• Selling federal lands would require careful implementation to prevent cronyism and ensure transparent, fair processes
• Private land ownership often results in better stewardship than government management
• This approach represents a pragmatic alternative to economic catastrophe
Pick up a copy of A Radical Reset, the Manifesto of Antipolitism, on Amazon in Kindle, paperback or hardcover versions to learn more about creating a republic by merit-based lottery that removes money and ambition from governance.
Happy Wednesday, dudes and dudettes. It's me, herbie K, your host here on A Radical Reset, the home of antipolitism. If you're interested in antipolitism, as I open each show, I will remind you. You can pick up a copy of A Radical Reset, the Manifesto of Antipolitism, on Amazon in either Kindle, paperback or hardcover versions. Simplified, and there's a podcast about it earlier. You can find it if you scroll down through the episodes where I do a quick overview of it.
Speaker 1:But Simplified, it is a republic by merit-based lottery, open to everyone. Open to everyone in the sense that if you do something of merit you'll be in the lottery. And from that we convert Congress, we take all the money out of politics, there are no political campaigns and we eliminate most of the corruption. People will always find a way to be corrupt. We live in a real world, not an imaginary world, but mostly all of the corruption and we get rid of special interests, except to inform us there's nothing wrong with someone coming to a congressman's office and saying this is why you should support this and here's the reasons why. And yada, yada, yada. That's fine. It's another thing altogether if they hold a $25,000 plate fundraiser for the next campaign. That's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars in presidential terms anyway. So, to make a long story short, it is a near perfect republic. Now, I consciously don't use the word democracy, because democracy is mob rule and always ends in tyranny, and I'm trying to avoid that in our own culture, unlike all the other democracies that have tried this experiment before us and failed, even in current times, if you think about it.
Speaker 1:So let's, today, talk about the looming sword of Damocles hanging over our economy. I want to talk about the national debt. Now. It's one of those things where it's talked about so much. I think people are so numb to it and so disconnected from what it really means and what it could mean to them that it loses its meaning, and I completely understand that. I mean it's a mind-boggling number, you know. Today I don't know what it is. It could be I think it's 36 or 37 trillion. We're adding several trillion a year, and they're in this whole big beautiful bill debate thingy that Trump has to have done to preserve tax cuts.
Speaker 1:I understand all the things. I don't mean to make light of all those things. Those are all important issues, but here's where I'm coming from. One day we're going to have to settle this bill and there is only going to be three ways. There are only three ways to settle it.
Speaker 1:We can either pay the bill and we don't have the $38 extra trillion laying around in cash to do that, and the only way to have that extra $38 trillion around to do that would be to do the second way, which is the most likely way, which is politicians will choose to inflate our way out of it or try to, and it'll end in a hyperinflation. But when it does, you know it'll anyway. We all know what comes of that. Hitler's come from, things like that, but that's always what happens at the end of one of these democracies. I hate to tell you, but that is the historic norm. The politicians will choose to inflate because it calls, at least in the very short term. It calls for no sacrifice, and if you don't have to sacrifice, that's what politicians like, because their number one goal in life is getting reelected. So that would be the second choice.
Speaker 1:And the third choice is which is what it will ultimately come to if we choose the second one is collapse, and collapse it does happen. This is where the whole world has to do a giant reset. Poverty becomes endemic. People who thought they were safe are soon going to learn the Buddhist maxim that control is a delusion and safety is an illusion. Safety is an illusion and control is a illusion and control is a delusion. Okay, everyone got that. Nobody is really safe. You know, when you build a whole life, it can be wiped away in just a minute. Hold on, I have to take a sip of water. Okay, here we go. Also, the idea that you have control of anything beyond your bowels, and then only to a certain age, is just an illusion. Okay, things happen all the time. That's why we constantly complicate our lives.
Speaker 1:That's why I've said many, many, many times that I, as also a semi-follower, at least of Taoism the philosophy, not the religion believe that, as Lao Tzu says, it's better to do nothing than to be busy doing nothing. Or, in other words, 999.999 times out of 1,000, the best thing to do about anything is nothing. By the way, I've given this advice to people many, many times over the years and almost invariably later they'll tell me they wish they took it, because they also almost invariably never take it. Funny how people ask for advice. I don't offer advice unless asked for. Funny to me how many people ask for advice with no intention of taking it, it's just funny. They're really looking to have echoed back to them what they think they already know. But if someone says to them, well, here's what you really should do, they never do it Not ever. This is why I could never be, for example, a psychologist or psychiatrist. It would drive me crazy. As soon as that came out of my mouth, that sounded kind of funny.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's talk about what we can really do, what we could do about the debt if, magically, magically, we became rational. Now, I do not hold out high hopes for this. My hope is that things become really, really Okay, let me back this up. I was about to go right into it, but before I do, I want to make this very clear, okay, and I want to set a few parameters and guidelines in this.
Speaker 1:We're human beings. We don't live in a perfect world or on a perfect planet or in a perfect universe other than you know. Somehow the math perfectly works out, but beyond that, that's it. There is no perfection. Therefore, particularly because we are human beings, things will never go as planned. You know, men plan and God laughs. So you know, we do a lot of things and we also have the perception that the people above us somehow know more than we do.
Speaker 1:You know, the whole idea of anti-politism came to me when it dawned on me that I could walk through any crowd of average people in the United States and in any area I could go to I don't know a rodeo okay, where there's going to be, you know thousands of people. Or a NASCAR race or a, if you prefer, an Indy race I don't know what I'm. You know a baseball game, a football game. I could go to any large gathering of people in a broad section of the economy okay, and point at 535 people randomly, and they would have an IQ at least equal to the existing Congress. That there's really nothing special about any of these people.
Speaker 1:The perception that any of them know something that you don't know is, I think it has to do with our need for kingship. I think that's why in the Bible they talk about kings, not presidents. I think we have a need to believe that someone above us is somehow divinely inspired to know more than we do, or at least not divinely inspired has access to information and a know-how that we somehow do not possess, and I think we'd all be terrified to understand how little different really the private conversations are from the public conversations of the people we hope are smarter in private. If you know what I mean, and I know that you do so when I go into what I'm about to talk about, I'm about to lay out a parameter of how it could happen, and it's going to sound like it could sound like I'm wishing this upon us. You know, sometimes the choices are not between good or bad. The choices are not between good or bad, but between bad and worse, and that's what we're looking at here.
Speaker 1:We are nominally in debt more than any other country has ever been in the history of the whole world. We owe more money than anybody's ever owed to anybody ever, at any time, anywhere. Any way, no one has ever done what we've done, which is built an entire lifestyle on debt, and increasingly so with every passing day, where the government becomes increasingly a provider of everything, down to happiness, or at least it tries to, and inevitably screws it all up. But we spend and borrow enormous amounts of money to do this. And here we are, so we're not going to go through a rehash of how we got ourselves in debt.
Speaker 1:Another sip of water, because for some reason I'm dry. I live in Arizona, guys. The humidity today is 8%, 8. That's not 18 or 80. 8. So it gets a little dry here Okay, here we go. I little dry here Okay, here we go.
Speaker 1:I grew up in Miami, where it was exactly the opposite. This time of year, I'd be taking a shower with my clothes on, whether I wanted to or not. Okay, so, anyway, where was I? So the scenario I'm going to lay out is we're going to have a disaster one way or the other. Now, look, I'm not wishing this upon us. I don't hope it happens. It's just going to happen, and I know that there are plenty of doomsdayers who think it's going to be the breakdown of all society. And it could be, but I find that unlikely. Okay, people tend to close ranks when things turn to absolute mud, but when we close ranks, we're going to look for a new leader. And is that leader going to lead us into a Hitlerian vision of disaster, as is so often the case, not necessarily with the whole Holocaust that goes with it, but basically a dictatorship of another idiot who claims to know more than we do, but doesn't?
Speaker 1:Everybody is about the same, guys. The only difference between the person running for office and you is the level of shame that they can tolerate and what they're willing to do for career. That's why I want to change politics from a career to a duty, so that the people who get involved in are there because they have a duty to serve their community and their country, as opposed to an ambition, and because every time they look in the mirror they see the president of the United States, which is, believe me, the case of the vast majority of politicians. And you know that's true. You just know it instinctively when I say it. I guess it would be impossible to fact check it, but common sense would tell you that's the case. They're constantly looking to climb the ladder, climb the ladder and, in their heart of hearts, the ultimate height of the ladder. So anyway, particularly at the national level, at the state level, it's a different story.
Speaker 1:The things I talk about in an antipolitism, under an anti-political national regime, so to speak, national system, it would be optional. If the states wanted to do an anti-political model at the state level or hold elections. Some states with light populations, like Wyoming, for example, our least populous state, would really. I think they're our least populous state. It's either them or Alaska, is it? I don't know. Anyway, they may want to just go with elections, because they're really. It would be hard to set up a big enough random pool to do it right. Whatever, you know, it's up to the state, because states don't have that one damning ability that the federal government has, which is the print money, which is really what's got us into all this trouble to begin with.
Speaker 1:So here we are. So we're going to have a bad time. I don't want to call it a recession or a depression or a collapse. Let's just say we're going to go through some really hard times economically and politically, because the two things cannot be extricated from each other. But this is a cold, hard fact. We are going to go through some hard times, and when we do it's, how are we going to cope with it? How are we going to come out of it?
Speaker 1:I spoke a little bit in the last podcast about how a lot of individuals are indebted, with student loan, debt of various kinds. But that's just a small part of the disaster that we're all in. We're all a part of this. There's no getting out of it. Rich to poor, there's no getting around this. We are about to have the poo-poo hit the fan and a lot of people who think they're poor now are going to find out what poverty really is. And that's a terrible thing and I'm not wishing it upon anybody, but that's what's going to happen, and it's because of all of this debt and the bill is going to come due.
Speaker 1:So here is the way that, potentially, an anti-political government would handle it. So let's say, in this scenario, there's a collapse and let's say that anti-politicism catches on and the movement catches on and yada, yada, or one thing leads to another, and the there is an anti, anti. It's not going to be a political party, but there are a majority of people in congress and the president him or herself, who who now have bought into the concept and you know what are we going to do? And we now have an and they reset this. I mean, this is really like a far-out scenario. But but what would an anti-political government? But what would an anti-political government do? What would an anti-political president do? It's much more likely, now that I'm sitting here gaming this in my head, it's very unlikely we're going to elect an anti-political Congress to do this. It is far more likely we elect a single individual, male or female doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Why do I keep saying that? I'm so trained? Are you trained, like I am, to always like disclaim everything you say? God forbid you should be taken wrong. Maybe it's just me. I, you know. It's like, if I notice, the other day I was in a meeting with a woman and, frankly, she walked into the room and she smelled delightful. I mean, there was no other way to put it, but I didn't say it because there's no way to say it without sounding creepy. You know, I don't know. So I just kept my mouth shut. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, and I had no interest in this woman romantically. I just thought she smelled great, and you know people who do that. That's not an accident and I thought I'd compliment her. But then I thought, no, I better not compliment her because it'll just make me seem like an old creeper. So, anyway, we're going to go through a crash. I don't even know why I went into that digression.
Speaker 1:And so here's the scenario, however it plays out. There's the anti-political president declares an emergency. He gets an enablement act from Congress to allow him or I'm going to keep using him, I'm just going to use him as a generic. It's far more likely it's going to be a him than a her. Anyway, look at history. The majority of leadership, particularly transformational leadership, is virtually always male. So, for good or for bad. By the way, before feminists jump in and say well, yeah, transformational can be very bad, it can be other. Yeah, I know, I know, believe me, I know, but OK, so, so he's, he goes to Congress. It's an emergency, the economy is melting down. He's got to act. He doesn't have time to futz around with, you know, earmarks and crap like that. The country is screaming, people are losing their homes left and right. Unemployment is way high, it's, you know. People are really wondering if they're going to have enough food to eat. What does that president? And that's how bad it could easily be. What does that president do? Well, the president, first of all goes to Congress and gets what's called an enablement act. This recently happened, roughly speaking. Again, this can be good or bad.
Speaker 1:Hitler got an enablement act too, but Javier Millet got one in Argentina, essentially the same thing that allowed him he was the only libertarian in the whole country, but it allowed him, as a libertarian, to basically use his executive power. And then, because his programs have been wildly successful, and inflation has, by the way, if you want to see what libertarian governance looks like, which is just another word for common sense, that's all libertarian is. It just gets the government out of the way and lets people do what they want to do. It's been wildly successful in Argentina Since the day this man took office. He's the most popular politician in the world and the guy is the only libertarian in the world elected to office. It's amazing to me. So, in fact, since libertarian and anti-political are the same thing, it's going to be the same program from each.
Speaker 1:What would that libertarian slash, anti-political president do? They would get an enablement act so they could act with executive authority, essentially as a dictator, frankly, with some strict boundaries, called, you know, the Bill of Rights. You know the dictator can't violate the Bill of Rights, he can't violate the Constitution, but he can rule by fiat. Essentially, his signature executive orders take on the power of law and judges, whether they have the right or not, cannot stop. This is an emergency. This is no time to play around. We don't want to go to dictatorship, so we're going to give somebody a temporary, very limited dictatorship to fix this thing. By the way, the term dictator was not always a bad word Hitler made it a bad word was not always a bad word. Hitler made it a bad word, but prior to that it was simply.
Speaker 1:The Romans used it fairly regularly. The idea was that you would bring in a dictator for a year or so and they would fix whatever the horrible mess was and go away. The most famous Roman dictator was Cincinnatus, who the city of Cincinnati is named after. And Cincinnatus was great because he was made dictator twice and both times it had to do with being invaded by barbarians. He was a great general. He's retired. Everybody loved him. He was kind of the Colin Powell mixed with Alexander the Great of his day, and he went out and put down the barbarian invasions and got it done.
Speaker 1:But rather than stay in office and enrich himself, which would be traditional in the Roman tradition and spend the rest of his dictatorship, now that he solved the problem, putting a little money in his pocket both times the first time, I think it took him three weeks, the second time, I think it took him six weeks and he just resigned and went home, which is my idea of what the ideal public servant is, an actual public servant. So anyway, a lot of that. Cincinn Cincinnati, by the way was my role model in a lot of ways in creating what I thought an anti-political government should look like, and he was my hero's the wrong word, but he was definitely the person that I was thinking about as I was modeling how to create a government of little Cincinnatuses, and to do that you've got to get ambition out of the way. Cincinnatus was not. His guiding vision in life was basically to retire to his farm, not take over the Roman Republic, which he easily could have done and did not. Okay, later someone came along named Julius Caesar and turned dictatorship into a dirty word, and you know then, yada, yada, yada, hitler, and blah, blah, blah, and there's anyway.
Speaker 1:It's such a mixed history. I'm going yada, yada, yada over millennia, which is ridiculous, but again, this is a short podcast, so anyway I'm going. What would I do Now that we've set all this parameter in judgments? I'm imagining myself in this role only because I'm a lunatic. What would the temporarily empowered president do, regardless of who it is? And the answer is he or she would sell off public lands. That's the obvious solution to this disaster, without collapsing the whole country.
Speaker 1:Now, the minute that you say the federal government of the United States owns so much land. There's never been anything like it in history. It's the last vestige of true freedom in this country. So I say this very guardingly, but it's really our only alternative to complete disaster. We own somewhere. We don't really know how much, but we own somewhere like maybe $400 or $500 trillion worth of land, we being the federal government, thereby the people of the United States, own about that much. It's hard to say. Maybe more. It could be a quadrillion dollars worth of it. Anyway, we've got plenty of land to sell off if we want to Vast vast tracks. Now, easy for me to say, and those of you who are listening to me and living in the city, this is going to sound like a pretty good plan.
Speaker 1:But for those of us and I include myself in this, in this us who love the outdoors and who camp and fish and hunt, and regularly and I live in the West, where most of the land is owned by the federal government, it's called BLM land, which is not Black Lives Matter, it's Bureau of Land Management, and you can camp on BLM land any place you feel like for free. The only rule is you have to move every two weeks. I don't know why that rule. I guess it's to prevent squatters, I guess. But anyway, I've camped on BLM land tons of times and it's awesome and you're not alone out there. There are other people with the same idea but you can get pretty alone pretty fast if that's what you feel like and there are no facilities, generally speaking, and you're just out there on your own.
Speaker 1:You gotta bring in your own. Whatever you bring in, you pack out. You don't leave trash, you leave it the way you found it. The vast majority of campers and people that enjoy the outdoors are practically religious about this. You meet the real bums every now and then, but the vast majority of people heck. If I see trash when I'm out, I pick it up, even though it's not my trash. That's kind of how it is with people who enjoy the outdoors. So when I say sell it off, that brings in visions of a country turned into Disneyland. I get it where you have to pay for access to what is now free and then they turn it into a wonderland. I think that and that is a risk To say that's not a real risk to say that someone won't try, that would be well, would be dishonest.
Speaker 1:But the truth of the matter is we're talking millions upon millions, upon millions, upon millions of acres of land. We're talking something like 80% of the Western United States, and there's plenty of it on the East Coast too, just more interspersed and other places you know, throughout the more populated areas. But having said all that, you know what would happen if someone well, they, you know no one has that much money to buy all that land, to turn it all into Disneyland. And the fact of the matter is land. If you're buying land as private property, there are a few things that are going to be true. The first thing is you're going to take better care of it than the government does, which is to say, not take care of it at all because it's your land. So if the underbrush needs, you know, removal or an invasive species you know someone somehow got into your property is becoming a problem you'll deal with it quickly, okay, as opposed to just letting it get way out of control. Letting it get way out of control.
Speaker 1:The second thing is, speaking as a guy that camps all the time on BLM land, I don't know that I would have a problem paying a small fee for access to, like I mean most of it is not going to get sold anyway. Let's get real. There isn't that much money in the world. Even if we sold all our acreage for a dollar an acre, there's just not enough money in the world to buy all of it. Anyway, it would easily pay off our national debt. So the bottom line is we're only talking about a part of this federal land being sold off because it's just so vast.
Speaker 1:The federal government owns most of the state of Alaska. I'll tell you, what's really interesting about Alaska is if you were to somehow take Alaska and place it in the center of the United States, it would touch every border North, south, it would touch both oceans if you placed it in the center of the United States. That's how big Alaska is, and most of that is federal land. No one's going to buy it all up. So I think this is a fear, but not necessarily a founded fear. Will Disney lands of sorts spring up? Yeah, but as long, you know, in a free market, if the public wants it and someone meets that need.
Speaker 1:So what I can see, for example, in a choice area you know, like where there's a phenomenal river running through it, with world-class trout fishing, let's say and since it's private land I won't need a fishing license, I can just go fishing to pay a little access fee in return for maintaining the river on the part of the private owner. Perhaps if it's a wild river you wouldn't stock it that would ruin it. But if it's a semi-urban location or close to an urban area, you know those things are routinely stocked. A private owner would just do a better job of it. And if there was a nominal fee to go on and use that, I don't see that that's a big deal. And the fee of course has to be nominal because it's a free market. If you charge too much, people won't come. It's as simple as that. No one has to set prices. The free market sets prices better than anyone can, because people will only pay what they're willing to pay and therefore, therefore, a seller can only sell at a price that people are willing to pay and provide benefits.
Speaker 1:So, for example, I as a guy that one of the things I'm going to be doing in the very near future is I want to buy a travel trailer and use it for camping. There's a specialty kind of trailer for what's called boondocking. Well, boondocking is camping without facilities. But look, if there was, for example, easy access dump stations to get rid of your. You know this is going to be a little oversharing, but when you have this kind of an RV, you have a water tank for your drinking water and your you know shower water. Then you have a gray tank which is where the water goes from, like your dishes and your sink and all that kind of stuff that. Or when you brush your teeth, all the stuff down the sink goes into the gray water tank, but the toilet water goes into what's called the black water tank and that you know these tanks have to be dumped. You just can't go running around with a tank full of poop and those are called dump stations and you know to have nice dump stations, maybe multiple dump stations in an easy location that you can pull through.
Speaker 1:None of this means anything to anybody who doesn't camp, but those of you who do get this to where it's really well-maintained and everyone moves through fast and you're not going to sit in line while you're waiting because there's only one dump station or whatever, that would be awesome, blossom, if there were, let's say, vaulted toilets. These are toilets that are outhouses but they're really well maintained and clean. You know, that would be lovely there are different levels could be provided so that the private landowner could afford to take care of the land and rather than you having to buy licenses or pay any other kind of government fees, it would all work itself out. But the point is we've raised trillions of dollars and we could pay off the national debt. Then, once the national debt and by the way I understand I'm simplifying this we could sell rights to the oil drillers. There's all kinds of ways to do this.
Speaker 1:Now, one last concern and then I'm going to wrap things up is that if the government goes to sell it off, they're going to fuck it up because of cronyism. The government fucks up everything. So how could we sell this off and do it at a relatively fair, open way, with open bidding and not insider trading to people who were given the best chunks of beautiful land to their buddies that they're selling off? And the answer is by the way and I'm not talking about selling off Yellowstone there's plenty of land that isn't national monument quality, believe me. So, anyway, what was I talking about? So how would we do that? And the answer is I'm not quite sure.
Speaker 1:I'll be honest with you, but I'm a strategic thinker and a visionary thinker and I know I'm not the only one and I think that if we got together with people in private commercial and land sales in the United States the big private concerns that do this and ask them to handle it on behalf of the government in the fairest way possible and come up with a set of guidelines that maintains fairness with some oversight, in other words, privatize the sale and do it in such a way and I'm not quite sure how to do it, to be honest, but I don't have to be that guy, because this is a country full of talented people the big key is going to be not to let the Congress sell it off. Don't let the Congress sell it off, okay. Don't let the politicians sell it off. This is why Joe Biden is worth $40 million. This is why Nancy Pelosi is worth more. Okay, this is how people who had no money to start with got rich in politics cronyism. We can't have that, okay.
Speaker 1:So the answer to that is have it be done by private sale and commission. So people should be allowed to make money on the transaction, as long as it's open and transparent. So if there's, let's say, a 1% commission attached with a massive land sale to XYZ National Real Estate Company that knows what it's doing and it brings in a good bidder and yada, yada, yada. It's all transparent and there's no cronies. They deserve their 1%, or whatever the number might be. By the way, that's probably too big a number. I mean, we're talking enormous sales. This isn't like the 10% they take to sell the lot at the end of the street. We're not talking about lots here. We're talking about millions of acres, millions of acres, but it would pay off the debt and it would be a way for us to get out of this mess without having to either have a hyperinflation or a complete collapse.
Speaker 1:I am not optimistic, by the way, that this is going to be an outcome. I'm simply stating it as a possibility of what could be if we were anti-political instead of Democrats and Republicans and have our heads so far up our rear ends with our special interests and needing to win and ambitions, and we've gotten to a point where lying has become an expected practice in politics. It's crazy. It's a crazy world we live in and we need to change it, and that's all I'm going to talk about today. Have a wonderful rest of your Wednesday. Don't forget to go over to Amazon and pick up your copy of A Radical Reset the Manifesto of Antipolitism, which is, I think, a pretty good book. I think you'll enjoy it. Anyway, pick it up. It's in Kindle or paperback or hardcover. That would be lovely. It's also a way to support this podcast, which would be lovely as well. Don't forget to share this with your friends. You know the drill Yada, yada, yada. God bless you, god bless your family and God bless America. Talk to you on Friday.