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
Why Central Control Always Fails, No Matter Who's in Charge
Are we damaging America by trying to fix it? In this thought-provoking episode, Herbie Kaye explores the ancient Taoist concept of "resisting the urge to act" and how it applies to our modern political landscape. Drawing parallels between the philosophy of Lao Tzu and America's governance challenges, Herbie makes a compelling case that well-intentioned government intervention has systematically undermined our society since 1964.
Taking listeners on a journey through American political history, Herbie examines how the Great Society programs, despite noble intentions, contributed to family breakdown and cultural decay. He challenges conventional thinking about trade deficits, tariffs, and central economic planning, arguing that voluntary transactions always benefit both parties in a truly free market.
The concentration of power in the executive branch receives particular scrutiny, with Herbie highlighting how presidents increasingly rule by executive order rather than through proper legislative channels—a dangerous trend the founding fathers sought to prevent through checks and balances. Madison's brilliance in designing a system where government action is deliberately difficult gets special attention.
As America faces mounting debt and unfunded obligations approaching $200 trillion, Herbie makes the case for a "radical reset"—returning the federal government to its constitutional roles while devolving most responsibilities to families, communities, and states. This libertarian vision offers a path forward based on courage, liberty, and personal responsibility rather than central planning and government intervention.
Whether you lean conservative or progressive, this episode will challenge your assumptions about government's proper role and the unintended consequences of political action. Subscribe to join the conversation about antipoliticism and how we might restore America's greatness through limiting, rather than expanding, government power.
Good morning, good week, good day, good Saturday, good, whatever you want to say. My friends, this is Herbie Kaye, your host on Eradical Reset, the voice of antipolitism and, from now on, through the election of 2026, also the platform upon which I a candidate for Congress as a libertarian in Arizona's CD4, congressional District 4. I will be talking about current issues quite regularly because, of course, I am running for Congress. We haven't really gotten geared up yet. We're just getting ready for the fall push. Being a libertarian, of course, that means we don't have any money to spend to speak of, so we will be spending some time raising money. We will spend some time organizing.
Speaker 1:I'm putting together a group of volunteers from Arizona State University here in Phoenix, actually in Tempe, which is a suburb of Phoenix, but it's all part of Greater Phoenix. Those of you who have been here, it's really nice. By the way, if you've never been to Tempe, it's a really nice place. Anyway, and you know, knock on doors and do the things that are important, and the goal being well, you know, the goal being, of course, is to win, but I'm not an idiot, I mean, do I think I'm going to win? Not really, but that's not the purpose of this. I'm trying to start a movement of anti-politism, and anti-politism is a republic by merit and will return our country to what it once was, which was great. Now we're doing our best to make it not so great, and one of the biggest reasons we're doing that is central control, and that's really what I want to talk about today.
Speaker 1:I want to talk about resisting the urge to act. We have a bad case of resisting the urge to act. Okay, we have a bad case of resisting the urge to act. You know, when I started writing novels, for example, and I've written a dozen novels, two of them I published. I've taken them down briefly. I'm about to put them back up on Amazon, just because it wasn't the right time. One is called the Grandmaster, the other is called the Terrarium. They're just novels. I think they're good. I wrote them while I was in prison. I have another 10 in the drawer that are written in longhand that I haven't transliterated or had edited, but eventually I'll publish them all.
Speaker 1:But anyway, when you write a novel, you have to resist the urge to explain. It's called RUE. It's like writing 101. To resist the urge to explain it's called RUE. It's like writing 101. Resist the urge to explain. In other words, when you're talking about the plot of a story, you want to bring out the character and the situation and all the mood. The plot should all be reinforced through dialogue and description, not explanation. In other words, instead of saying you know the book opens and it's a long dialogue about the background of the character, just kind of listing everything that went on, you should learn all this in the context of dialogue and description, which makes a much more interesting story.
Speaker 1:Now in politics I'm just going to take a play on that Instead of resist the urge to explain, we should be resisting the urge to act. Our acting is what has put us here and we continually act to fix the problems that we created by the last time. We acted, to the point where we've made a horrible mess and we're making it worse because we've elected a president to office who I don't think donald trump is evil, but I think he suffers from the deadly sin of pride and because of that he he, I think in his own mind, extremely well-intentioned is a machine machine of action, and some of his actions I agree with like deregulation, but to me deregulation is withdrawing an act as opposed to creating an act. So ripping away previous acts doesn't count in what I'm about to say, that's a good action. But creating new actions to create new programs, new laws, new regulations, that's how we got into this disaster in the first place.
Speaker 1:And if we had resisted the urge to act from the very beginning and the beginning that I'm going to talk about here is 1964. And I picked that year I've talked about it in the past before I'm going to talk about it here because to me that was the year when America hit its peak of all time since its creation. In 1964, we passed the Civil Rights Act. That's why I picked that year, which it's controversial in some circles, but overall, everyone has to have a right to their own civil rights, so to speak. It was the Equalization Act of America and at that point and it was not a controversial act in the sense that most Americans accepted it and it set the stage to where it was illegal. It is illegal in the United States to discriminate. Now there are lots of parts of the act that are cumbersome and create complications and have created all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo. But that's why we have a court system and that's why we have a Supreme Court to ultimately adjudicate and determine precedent and what the bounds of these laws are. But all in all, the Civil Rights Act was, to my mind, the last truly righteous act ever passed by Congress, and everything since has been a disaster. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Okay, so let's just talk about what we did In 1965, I mean everything, okay, so let's just talk about what we did In 1965, the then president, lyndon Johnson again, because the road to hell is paved with good intentions undertook what was called the Great Society, and the answer was the war on poverty.
Speaker 1:And I am old enough to remember it Now. Mind you, I was born in 1957, so in 1965 I was eight, and you're going to find this very hard to believe, but I was already politically aware at eight. Our family was just precocious that way, I think, or I was precocious in listening to family conversations. I have always been aware. So I was aware of what was going on with the Great Society and although I was a child, I supported it. My family supported it whole hog, because they were Democrats and Johnson was a Democrat, and it seemed like such a good idea.
Speaker 1:Why would the richest country in the world have poor people? How can we, the richest country not only in the world but in history, have poor people? And so Johnson set out, through AFDC, which is what we it's. What we call welfare is aid to family with dependent children. So, through AFDC and Medicaid and Medicare and all kinds of social safety net programs for housing and food stamps, which are now whatever. Anyway, now it's a credit card instead of a stamp or a debit card, I don't know, but anyway, snap is what they now call food stamps. But all these various programs were created to alleviate poverty and they were all done with good intention and they were all passed, and they are absolutely the root of why we're in big trouble today, because the road to hell is paved with good intentions and we did not resist the urge to act.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to get into a little bit more of that in a minute, but first let me. There's nothing new when I say resist the urge to act. This is not some original thought on my part. In fact, anybody who really is a student of, let's say, philosophy will know that it is really the philosophy of Taoism. So Taoism, which is spelled T-A-O. It looks like Tao, but it's Tao, is both a religion and a philosophy. Let's put the religion aside and let's talk about the philosophical bend. It was founded by a man named Lao Tzu, and in about 600, approximately 600 years before the birth of Christ, he set down the central tenet of Taoism.
Speaker 1:And I am, by the way, not an expert on Taoism. Okay, I am a dabbler of Taoism. I want to make that very clear, and so I'm open to being told. If anyone thinks I'm wrong about the interpretations I'm laying down, please feel free to reach out and contact me. I am open to having my mind changed when I'm wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong, because the central tenant of Taoism is that it is better to do nothing than to be busy doing nothing. Okay, let's think about that again. It is better to do nothing than to be busy doing nothing. Okay, let's think about that again. It is better to do nothing than to be busy doing nothing. We spend a lot of time being busy to do nothing. We elect people to go to Washington to do something, and this is where we have it all wrong.
Speaker 1:If you go back and you read the Federalist Papers written primarily by James Madison, and you read the things he said, he was a very prescient James Madison might be the greatest man in American history as the writer of the Constitution, but putting all of that aside just for a minute, he understood the fallibility of mankind. Then he set up the checks and balances of our system, you know, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch, to limit the power of all three, because he understood that enlightened men will not always be in an enlightened position. In other words and by the way, I'm paraphrasing something that he said, I think it was in Federalist 10, but I could be wrong but anyway he understood that, for example, the president would not always be an enlightened individual, the Congress would not always be made up of enlightened individuals and, of course, it's never been made up of enlightened individuals and there's never been an enlightened president, not even Lincoln, who's very much misunderstood. So the bottom line is he understood the fallibility of human beings and set up a system where very little can get done on purpose.
Speaker 1:We have, because there's something in the human nature that I think it's why the Bible is full of King talk. We just seek a King and we it's easier to focus on one person than 435. Or or a diverse and dispersed judiciary at every different level from you know district courts, superior courts, uh, appeals courts, supreme court, all the other things I mean. I'm not an attorney. God only knows that the system is so complicated that it's hard to blame a system as opposed to an individual. Now, what we've done is the worst of both worlds. Okay, we put too much emphasis on finding a king to save us in this case it's Trump and we put too little emphasis on the other king to save us in this case it's trump and we put too little emphasis on the other institutions, because it's too hard to follow that many people. We get lost in it.
Speaker 1:And so, as human beings, and with our, our, our, uh, what's what's normally for our predilection towards seeking a, a, uh, a kind and just and enlightened king, we have, over the years, by means of the sociopaths who have become president for the most part over the course of American history, concentrated more and more power in the hands of the king, and the legislative branch, which is the primary check on the king, has delegated more and more of it because, frankly, as it became more and more of it, because, frankly, as it became more and more expensive to stay in office, they had to raise more and more money, which meant more and more of their time, which meant less and less of it available to do things like reading bills and then bills in Congress, because it's so expensive to run for Congress that they had to find ways to raise money to do it. Bills became longer and longer to hide little special interest favors and earmarks for very special contributors to these various campaigns. To where the average bill in the 18th century oh, pardon me, the 19th century, you know the formative century of America, you know the 1800s the average bill was five pages long. To where now the average bill is 5,000 pages long, and so they're not being read by the congressmen.
Speaker 1:Let's not kid ourselves. None of them read them. Maybe Thomas Massey does, maybe Rand Paul does, but I don't think so. I think they have staffs that do it for them and they're ridiculously stuffed full of crap and it's all designed to raise money, which means it's an enormous drain on time to do all of these things, which means the Congress has delegated most of its authority or much of its authority, I should say, to be accurate to the executive, and so the president, through executive orders which were never meant to be abused to the extent that, for example, donald Trump has been abusing them, or his predecessor Biden abused them, or Obama abused them, or Bush abused them. They all abused them because more and more, more and more, the Congress doesn't object and so, although a lot of these executive orders would really be, if they were examined closely, either unconstitutional or outright illegal, go through and are honored and followed up on.
Speaker 1:Because it's easier for the Congress to delegate, and both the opposition and the supporters of the president like it that way. Because when the things go right, the supporters and the party in power can claim that they go quote, unquote, right, we'll get into that in a minute. And when they go wrong, the opposition party finds it much easier to attack an individual than the other party. To say that all Republicans are crap is one thing, to say Trump is crap is easier and provides a focus for the enemy. That's why Democrats, I think, obsess on Trump instead of obsessing on Republicanism or such as it's become, because it's easier to focus on one enemy and Trump is already, beyond a doubt, the most executive order-prone president in history, which means the most centrally controlling-prone president in history, and central control ultimately never works. It cannot work.
Speaker 1:Okay, what Trump is doing now, even the stuff that looks good may turn out to be a disaster because of the law of unintended consequences. And overall his term is going to turn out to be a disaster in many ways because of the law of unintended consequences, because he's handing down orders from the center that to him seem I am sure again that he's not a stooge of the Russians that's debunked and he's not Hitler, he's just a well-intentioned egomaniac who believes for the right reasons he's handing down these proclamations that he thinks are saving the country, based on his own predilections and prejudices. And when I say prejudices I'm not talking. The word doesn't necessarily mean racial guys, it means anytime you have an unfounded feeling pro or con about anything. And he has a real prejudice about the trade deficit, which for those of us who really understand economics, it's a phony number, it doesn't mean anything at all.
Speaker 1:I mean the historian George Will famously says that he has a trade deficit with his barber because and I only wish you know George Will is 20 years older than me and I got to be honest, I really envy his head of hair. He has a great head of hair, okay. Anyway, he goes to his barber. He says every month, and he has a trade deficit with his barber, because he pays his barber and his barber doesn't give him anything back, and that's true, he just got a haircut. But that's not a deficit, that's, but that's not a deficit. Trade is always in perfect balance. The point I'm going to make is trade is always, always in perfect balance in a free market, I should say, because the buyer gets what they wanted in a voluntary transaction and the seller gets what they wanted in a voluntary transaction. It's a win-win 100% of the time. The buyer gets the product, the seller gets the money. There's no deficit there. They just get two different things to use.
Speaker 1:And in the case of a world that's operating on fiat currency, I would make a very strong case that the bigger your trade deficit, the better shape you're in, because the more stuff you're getting and the less paper money. You're buying it with nothing. You're buying it with money where the entire value is based on the confidence that people have in the currency. Nothing else. There's nothing behind our dollar or the Russian ruble, or the euro, or the renminbi, or the shekel, or the kroner, or the franc or the peso or you name the currency. There's nothing behind any of it but confidence. The whole world is running on a giant confidence racket and the whole world is.
Speaker 1:At this point, the world economy is balanced on the United States' economy because we are the healthiest of them all, because, as ugly as our centrally controlled welfare state has become and the breakdown of our culture and our society, other cultures have gone further, farther, faster and are therefore in worse shape. So when you look at the European, who have taken the welfare state to a much higher level and have done much more to quote unquote help their poor and their people, they've created a situation where they're now in a permanent recession and they're going down fast. If, if the number for gdp was properly accounted for, not just in the united states but in europe and around the world, most of the world would already show itself to be recessionary, because we count government spending as part of GDP, not just in the United States but globally. When we look, for example, china is insisting that it's growing at 5% right now when in fact it's shrinking. Why is it claiming that it's growing at 5% and how can they justify that? Because they're spending enormous amounts of government money on trying to prop up their economy from the center.
Speaker 1:Again, central control at work. This is all wasted money, creating misaligned incentives and all kinds of consequences. As a consequence, all that money being spent, even though it's being counted as GDP, is actually just more acid, or I should really say more kerosene, being thrown on the fire of the underlying recession that already exists and is fast accelerating into outright economic collapse in China. They're in big, big trouble and we are behind, but we are not far behind because we're doing the same stupid things, albeit not quite as extreme as China yet, but we're getting there Because, while we're not spending money, like the Chinese are like drunken sailors, we're doing things like massive tariffs.
Speaker 1:Now, all of these tariffs, trump says, is to set, you know, to make the playing field level, but I would submit to you that all the and it's true that lots of countries had tariffs on us that we didn't have either similar or any tariffs on at all, and there was a lot of imbalance, quote unquote in the amount of tariffs being charged by each country and each product, and so on and so forth. But what's lost in that whole discussion is that, by doing what we're doing, all we're going to do is compound the problem. We're not going to make it better because we're not Trump isn't. What Trump should be doing is pulling tariffs down. America should be a giant free trade zone, my friends. There should be the only tariffs. The only way I would entertain the discussion of tariffs, the only way I think tariffs have any useful function, might be as a way to fund the federal government. So, in other words, if we were to, here's what I would do, here's what libertarian congressional candidate Herbie would suggest.
Speaker 1:And when I say suggest, I want to get more into that in just a minute. I'm saying a lot of things. I'm going to get into it in a minute. Some of them I will and some of them I won't, because I'll forget I said it. But the bottom line is let's say that we had a 5% tariff on every import in the United States and that was how we funded the government of the United States. So our roughly, oh, $20 trillion a year of business that we do with foreign countries and I'm pulling that number from memory, it might be a little less it countries, and I'm pulling that number from memory, it might be a little less, it might be 16 to 20. But anyway, we take 5% of that, or $1 trillion, and that becomes the entire federal budget of the United States. That's how we pair our bills, including our defense bill. Everything is covered under $1 trillion instead of the current $6 or $7 trillion, because we devolved everything that the federal government shouldn't be doing either to the states or oblivion. Again, I'm going to get to that in a minute.
Speaker 1:So the bottom line is, in an anti-political world, the federal government would be returned to its original constitutional purpose, which is to defend the country, conduct foreign policy and regulate interstate trade, to make sure that, for example, texas isn't charging Wisconsin more for a barrel of oil than Oklahoma. That was a fractured comparison, but you understand the point I'm making. So one state can't charge another state more for its goods and services than any other States is 50 little countries in a free trade zone. That's what we are. And so by devolving all this to the states, there has to be a way to make sure, and that's what the Commerce Clause was all about. But I would rewrite the Commerce Clause to make it much more restrictive. And when I say rewrite, of course that has to go through Congress and it's an amendment of the Constitution. We'll have to go through the ratification process, but we should amend the Constitution to rewrite and strictly limit the Commerce Clause to only the most narrow definitions of regulation of commerce between states, instead of the excuse that the government is used to regulate everything. The Commerce Clause is the root evil in our Constitution.
Speaker 1:Now, having said all that, trump is let's come up to the present time of what I'm talking about resists the urge to act. Trump is acting like a maniac and he's passing enormous tariffs that are going to have enormous side effects that no one's even thought of yet, because that's what an unintended consequence is it's always going to be negative. Historically, central control has never worked, not once. There's no example in history of a benevolent king or leader or president coming to power and successfully setting up a long-term program for success from the center. It always ends in disaster, and this one will be no different. The fact that it is not being labeled socialism or fascism or whatever you want to call it control from the center, the fact that we're doing it under the guise of being a democracy, which is really just a euphemism for mob rule, we have destroyed the republic to a large extent.
Speaker 1:The last barrier to ending the republic is the Electoral College, which I've talked about in other podcasts and is in the book, along with everything else, a Radical Reset available to you on Amazon. A Radical Reset the Manifesto of Antipoliticism. Pick up a copy on Amazon by me, herbie K, and you can read more about what I'm talking about in detail in the program that was set forth. But the bottom line is the federal government should have no role in doing anything. Welfare is at the root of the breakdown of our culture, and the breakdown of our culture is the root of the breakdown of our economy, and the money that we spent, the debt we've accumulated, is all a result.
Speaker 1:The overall theme is that we as a country have gone from virtue to decadence as a result of central control and well-meaning idiocy, where, in 1964, the year that I set out, is when we were at our high peak there were cultural ways is that the right word Cultural boundaries let's call them Cultural boundaries in place that governed our behavior. That everyone of every race and every gender respected is the way you live life. You know and I'm being very this is going to sound very mundane, but it's the little things that reflect on the big picture. But, for example, I was raised that you always open a door for a woman. As a man, it's always ladies first. You always open a door. Okay, that's a little thing, but the fact that it doesn't happen much anymore, it's not a good thing. It's not some expression of freedom, it's not some expression of why should I have to do that? That's just silly. Men and women are equal.
Speaker 1:It was a cultural boundary meant to define decency within the confines of how we all knew what to expect. And what we had to expect was always genteel and pleasant and manners. In other words, always pull out a chair for a woman. Who does that anymore? Again, that seems silly. Why should I have to pull out a chair for a woman? We're all equals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But no, we're not and no, we shouldn't be. And there's a reason for these roles and they have to do with the underlying foundation of decency of people within the culture, and that decency then radiates out into everything else.
Speaker 1:Premarital sex now is not only not shamed, but it's expected. In 1960, it was a disgrace to get knocked up out of wedlock, and a child who was born out of wedlock was called a bastard. And a bastard was called a bastard for a reason, and the reason for that was to prevent everything that's happening now, the breakdown of our culture is the breakdown of the nuclear family. You know, for example, within the black community in 1960, before we started all this crap black poverty had dropped by 50% and the black nuclear family was intact. 80% of black children were born into two-parent families. Today it's 20% of black children and it is directly as a result of this that the black culture is the urban black culture in particular, where most of this is concentrated has been destroyed and decimated. It's not fentanyl, it's not gangs. Those are all symptoms of the problem. The problem is we've destroyed the family and we destroyed the family by replacing it with the state for support when things turn to shit, as they inevitably will in life.
Speaker 1:Friends, you have the right in the Constitution to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not the right to happiness, but somehow politicians, because they have to raise money to run multi-ten million. I say multi-million, multi-ten million dollars. You know it costs nearly $20 million to run for a congressional seat on average. Okay, I'm not going to raise $20 million. This is a libertarian, by the way. We're going to have to do this on the cheap.
Speaker 1:But that's a great thing, because I have the one thing that makes money, which is charisma, which is going on to at least have a strong showing, and, of course, work ethic. Charisma plus work ethic plus I have absolutely no ambition for power or money makes me the right guy to preach this anyway, at least in this little election down here in Arizona and hopefully start something. And that's the goal of what I'm doing is to get a vote big enough to be taken seriously so that on a national stage we can start to build a movement, and then we'll see what happens going into 28. So the bottom line here is Trump's going to fail and Democrats and in my campaign I'm running to try to primarily attract Democrats to my side, because I'm sure that there are lots and lots and lots and lots of Democrats who know that this progressive nonsense is repugnant and yet, while they may restrain themselves from paying lip service to, let's say, multiple genders, they don't object to it in public and they go along with it because they're cowards.
Speaker 1:I know I'm jumping around, but as a Stoic, I know that the most important pillar of life and of Stoicism is courage, and we as a country used to be a courageous country In 1964, when we were on top of our game. We were a courageous country, but we misread that. We took our courage and our predilection to act and try to help people, that road to hell being paved with good intentions, and we began handing down program after program and act after act, and rule after rule and regulation after regulation and tax after tax. And we've done all this based on a mountain of nothing, of paper money. We abandoned the gold standard in 1971.
Speaker 1:Then we've been building up a mountain of a multi-trillion dollar mountain of debt and unfunded obligations. That's now, between Medicare, social Security and the national debt, approaching $200 trillion all told. That doesn't even exist, let alone be payable, and we are in deep trouble. We need to stop. Stop it. We need a reset, a radical reset. We're going to have to default on our debt. We're going to have to start over. It's an ugly scene and when we do it, we're going to have to do it in such a way as to save the republic, and to save, we're going to have to kill the system as it exists a constitutional system and a democracy based on merit. That's all I've got for today, thank you, and have a beautiful day, a beautiful weekend. God bless you, god bless your family and God bless America.