The year is 2017. There has been a massively successful movement of pro-capitalist, anti-socialist, free-market libertarians to privatize government programs and replace their functions with voluntary associations, businesses, charities, and other organizations all competing against each other for the dollars of consumers who value their products and services.
The movement was funded almost single-handedly by Mukesh Malayalam, the inventor of the Geo-MagŪ energy system, which harnesses the earth's natural magnetic fields to produce electricity, and drove the price of oil to below $4.50 a barrel. Malayalam, the famous Pakistani child prodigy, moved his world headquarters to Surprise, Arizona, in Maricopa County, and within 5 years doubled the population of Arizona, providing jobs and "free energy" to millions. Malayalam's philanthropic foundation, which quickly surpassed the assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, invested billions of dollars in television ads, movies, school curricula, and celebrities in music to push Malayalam's pro-capitalist agenda of "more responsibility, less government, and with God's help, a better world." Hundreds of millions of energy consumers around the world, grateful for plummeting energy costs, eagerly scooped up the pro-capitalist vision, with Mel Gibson's pro-capitalist movies shattering box-office and broadband records, and dozens of new music artists leading aging singers in bringing libertarianism to the top of the pop charts.
First to go was government welfare. Free energy was providing jobs for all -- even in the collapsing oil industry -- and dropping prices while raising real wage rates. Churches and voluntary associations quickly moved in to cover the needs of the few who had been left behind. "Voluntary giving has always been greater than tax-funded government handouts," said Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist and head of the "Samaritan's Purse" charitable clearinghouse. "We've always been confident that if government got out of the way, churches and other private charities could meet the needs of the poor more efficiently and more personally, adding a spiritual dimension."
Education was also rapidly privatized, and test scores skyrocketed as juvenile crime plummeted. Malayalam's Geo-MagŪ industries set the trend by establishing schools for children of employees, and these students -- if they didn't stay on with Malayalam's growing Geo-MagŪ empire-- were being snatched up by neighboring Maricopa County hi-tech industries while similar students on the East Coast still languished in crime-ridden public high schools. Soon the apprenticeship model swept the West and spread East, and traditional government schooling was quickly recognized as the dinosaur it had long become.
One government agency after another on both the local and state level was abolished as private-sector counterparts began adopting Malayalam's many technological innovations and left government agencies in the dust. After Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and California effectively eliminated all state borders between themselves with the adoption of the SunBelt Economic Pact (SEP), the aging Ted Kennedy, in a move that outraged his followers and led in 2010 to the end of his long political career, proposed a similar unification of the Northeast. Kennedy's call was seen as an abandonment of the nearly-anachronistic pro-government principles of the Democrat Party, which were already experiencing death-throes in the West. Polls indicated that more than 80% of Americans (but only about half in the Northeast) supported Capitalism and favored abolition of nearly all government programs.
In a movement led by Speaker of the House Ron Paul (R) of Houston, the Federal Government had been reduced in size by nearly 75% since the Presidential Election of 2008. Now just one year away in 2018, "The Abolition Amendment" was expected to be approved by the legislature of the last state necessary to make it the final amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as the Ohio and Pennsylvania legislatures raced against each other to be the state that put it over the top, securing the 2/3 necessary to ratify the proposed 29th Amendment to the Constitution.
Also dubbed "The Last American Revolution," "The Abolition Amendment" has two short sections:
(A) The Constitution of the United States is hereby declared null and void, the federal government abolished, and all powers of the federal government are hereby returned to the People or to the several States, from which they were delegated.
(B) Section (A) of this Amendment shall take effect upon the vote of the entire People of the United States on the first Tuesday of November, 2018.
While momentum to abolish all traces of socialism was rapidly making the Amendment superfluous, Americans are starkly divided over the proposed Amendment. Many people, even among those who support capitalism and abolition of uncompetitive government programs, feel a sense of sentimentalism and patriotism which won't allow the idea of abolishing the United States to take root, even though one-fourth of the states have effectively been abolished, and Washington D.C. has nearly been emptied of its power, especially since the Defense Department was virtually abolished by Malayalam's perfection of "scalar wave" weapons in 2009. (Malayalam's victory over Defense Department attempts to confiscate scalar wave technology was the subject of Mel Gibson's blockbuster movie in 2011.)
But perhaps the most curious source of opposition to the Abolition Amendment is the North-LaHaye coalition.
Tim LaHaye was the co-author of the "Left Behind" fiction series, a best-selling series of books and movies at the turn of the century which made him a millionaire before his [ironic event]. LaHaye had just reached his 90th birthday. Gary North was the author of a book, Unholy Spirits, which was as obscure in its lifetime as LaHaye's was popular. North was the heir of the "Christian Reconstruction" movement that secured the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, according to Newsweek magazine, which dubbed the Chalcedon Foundation the "think tank" of the Religious Right. North's 1994 book, itself a revision of a 1976 book, None Dare Call it Witchcraft, was revised again in 2007 after Malayalam's rise to celebrity status. North, expanding the claims of his earlier book, claimed the prodigy's powers were demonic. LaHaye labeled Malayalam "an obvious candidate" for the "antichrist." Both LaHaye and North, who for decades jousted with each other over competing views of prophecy and the future, together rallied conservative Christians to join the "Romans 13 Foundation" in Pensacola Fl, which surprised many observers and even many conservatives with its strident opposition to the Abolition Amendment.
|
Romans 13 is a Biblical text with a long pedigree in Western Political thought, a heritage which was largely forgotten until resurrected by the North-LaHaye coalition. "The Powers that Be," taken as the title of a pro-capitalist DVD that went quintuple-platinum in just the first two months of 2010, is taken from the language of the 13th chapter of the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans. "They are ordained of God," said North of the Powers, quoting a subsequent phrase in the Apostle's letter. "The Abolition Amendment is pure anarchy, and will bring down the judgment of God upon America," North warned.
The Abolition Amendment is widely seen as a referendum on the entire concept of "the government." Pro-capitalist forces have stressed the "non-aggression axiom," the idea that it is always immoral to initiate force against another. Citing the failure of socialist economies around the world, many pro-capitalist leaders have forthrightly called for "the end of government as we know it," an ironic twist on a slogan from the now-discredited Clinton Administration of the 1990's, and the short reign of Bill Clinton as Secretary-General of the United Nations before its scandal-ridden downfall in 2012. Capitalists say recent trends illustrate capitalist theory by showing that socialism and government bureaucracies simply cannot compete with the private sector in providing goods and necessary public services, such as welfare, education, and dispute resolution.
The date is now November 1, 2018. The election, which, despite the claims of the last four Presidential elections, can legitimately lay claim to being "the most important election in our generation," is days away. Polls have been ubiquitous. Some have suggested that the Internet has made it possible to poll literally every American, instead of merely thousands, and it can be safely said that 50% of Americans minus one vote are prepared to vote for the Amendment, while 50% minus one vote are committed to voting against it. You will be the deciding vote. Your vote will determine whether we abolish "the government" in America.
How will you vote?