BY KIRKPATRICK SALE

It all depends on what you think of the china shop. If you believe it is a neat, ordered operation, providing beautiful and necessary things for discerning and deserving people, then you will like it and be fearful of any bull that might be sniffing at the door.

If on the other hand you regard it as a worn out, dated collection of obsolete knick-knacks that have long since lost their value and are merely gathering dust, then you wont mind what the bull will do or how clumsily he does it.

Washington the political establishment is that china shop. And you know who the bull is. The liberal-global, welfare-warfare arrangement that has been government for the last 70 years, since Americas triumph in World War II, has been based on three unquestioned premises:

1. The right of citizens to welfare entitlements from the federal government, in the form of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and roughly 75 other means-tested welfare programs;

2. The creation and maintenance of a global empire based on military penetration (750 bases worldwide) providing cover and protection for economic (NAFTA, GATT) and political (NATO) penetration as well;

3. The unrestricted operation of the federal bureaucracy allowing the establishment consensus to prevail and run business as usual no matter which political party is in office.

And those premises have been enhanced and buttressed through the decades by the powerful liberal cultural forces of the American academy, which is the indoctrinatory home of the left and Marxist professoriate, the Hollywood film industry and its cavalcade of leftist stars-with-a-cause, and especially the modern media, slap-happy handmaidens of the establishment with no longer a pretense of objectivity in their fawning zeal for the Democratic party. With the Trump election, all that is challenged. Trump himself may not fully understand what he represents, but he is surrounded by people who do. In particular, his right-hand man and perhaps the power behind the throne, Stephen Bannon, who has been quoted as saying, with unusual clarity, I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of todays establishment. An astonishing statement, but it is clear he will do his best to see that Trump carries this out.

It is likely not to be neat and orderly, since thats not the kind of man Trump is, and indeed the first few weeks have seen some scattershot decrees. But when you name a cabinet that is designed to thwart much of what the liberal consensus has been doing for 70 yearsa woman for Education who is against public education, a man for the Environmental Protection Agency who has tried to eviscerate it in the past, a doctor for Housing and Urban Development who has no comprehension of what the department does, a fossil-fuel executive to be the top diplomat, and a labor secretary who pays minimum wage to his restaurant employeesthen it is obvious that there is some design and purpose at work.

I for one welcome this fundamental restraint of the liberal orthodoxy and hope the Trump regime will operate swiftly and intelligently to reorder government as we know it. But I fear that at the moment it is far more reactive that purposeful, Trump operating more by instinct, particularly his instinct to respond to challenge, than by any sense of where exactly he would want to end up in four years. In aid of providing a more methodical approach to taking down the establishment, I propose the following program as the basis for action for the Trump administration for the next four years.

Abolition of the income tax, a foolish tax that punishes people just for making money, which is what the whole society is about anyway, when a proper government would tax behavior that is unwanted. And with it, of course, abolishing the IRS.

Dismantling the empire and withdrawal of troops from all overseas wars and bases, to be redeployed for border protection and the management of the Army Corps of Engineers in the task of infrastructure repair at home.

Sharply cutting welfare, particularly for the able-bodied, and insisting on strictly enforced work requirements (in Maine, this cut welfare caseloads by 80 percent), plus the abolition of all marriage penalties and policies that work against stable families.

Abolishing foreign aid, in entirety, including the Export-Import Bank, programs that chiefly benefit and Wall Street banksters that make the loans and American global corporations that get the contracts, and with it the elimination of payments to foreign treaty organizations.

Elimination of federal interference in private, family and religious affairs, allowing states to decide issues such as abortion, pornography, prostitution, prayer in schools, political speech in churches, religious symbols in public and similar matters.

Elimination or serious reduction of all cabinet departments created since 1947, including Education, Energy, Health, Housing, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs, whose necessary functions, if any, could be decentralized to the states.

There: six simple, straightforward, effectual, and thoroughgoing ways to reform and restrain Washingtonian power and bring a few things crashing down. And easy enough for a bull to follow.

Kirkpatrick Sale, who lives in Mount Pleasant, is the author of 12 books.

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The redeeming chaos of a bull in the government china shop - Charleston Post Courier