Whatever Comes to Mind: Overview: The 3 Pillars of Public Policy

Public policy has lost it's way. Our leaders have been so tossed about by the storm of public opinion, they have lost the ability to be constant and truly forward thinking when creating and implementing public policy that will provide the greatest long term benefit for those they serve, The citizens. They have forgotten that their power is based on the trust of those who place them in office and have abandoned principles for the sake of imaginary power. This power will dissipate as they continue to lose the trust of their constituents and they will find themselves in the most unpleasant of circumstances on the day that the people choose to reclaim the power that they had entrusted their representatives with.

I believe there is time to correct this error. I believe there is an approach that can save our nation and reestablish the trust and admiration that was once afforded to our public representatives. I call this approach "The 3 Pillars of Public Policy" and I will be providing an outline of this concept here in this writing.

The 3 Pillars of Public Policy

I believe that the implementation of public policy that promotes the fulfillment of these three pillars will lift our nation from the divided and corrupt state that it is in, and return us to a greater ethical and moral standard than this nation has seen in the past 50+ years.

The 3 pillars are; Life, Liberty, and Fiscal Responsibility. This may sound kind of familiar. The Declaration of Independence used the aspects of Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of Happiness. I believe that adherence to these 3 pillars will allow our citizens the greatest opportunity to pursue and achieve happiness.

Life:

The pillar of Life encompasses the need to protect all life in any way possible and it requires that we acknowledge that human life is the most important form of life on this planet.

Why is human life the most important? Well, to me it is obvious. Human life is the most important because human life has the greatest potential of all other life combined. Our ability to reason and manipulate the environment around us is unparallelled in Earth's history.

Policies that uphold this pillar would include policies that protect the environment, and endangered species. But not at the cost of human life or livelihood.

This also includes policies that put an end to the systematic murder of millions of unborn children in this country. The potential of an unborn child is far too great a resource to waste.

Liberty:

The pillar of Liberty is focused on our freedom to act, think, and believe anything we want to. It also requires the hard thing of allowing those we disagree with to act, think, and believe anything that they want to. It means that we must be allowed to suffer the consequences of our choices, and reap the rewards as well.

We should not implement policies that shelter individuals from the consequences of their Liberty and we should not implement policies that rob individuals of the rewards of their Liberty.

Fiscal Responsibility:

This pillar cuts to the core of our defective public policy. Our representatives have too long been allowed to steal from future generations to further their short term grasps for power. They take money from the public coffers and offer it up to their campaign supporters as part of a self perpetuating cycle that continues to remove our public officials from an understanding of the true needs of the public. Or worse, the money has been used to create a state of dependence among those who are “assisted” by tax payer funds with no expectation or encouragement to break free of the dependance.

This pillar, when adhered to will create a greater desire for self reliance among our people and ultimately reduce the number of individuals and families that are dependent on tax payer programs for their livelihood.

Policies that uphold this pillar will provide assistance when needed and require the recipient to work in some capacity while receiving the assistance. I believe that so long as an individual has the capacity to reason, they have the ability to work. Examples of this would be Stephen Hawking, or Bill Gates to name just a couple of people. Both of them were productive and significant contributors to the world without the need to be physically capable of lifting 100 pounds of brick.

Other policies that uphold this pillar will require our representatives to free our nation from debt. It will force them to make hard political choices and keep our nation running within it's means. It will require them to sacrifice the favors that they have wrongly curried and act in the true best interest of the nation. It will require them to stop excusing a degree of corruption based on a presumption that the ends justify the means. It will require us to hold them accountable for the choices they make that harm the nation instead of helping it.

Now for the hard part. We can sit back here and go on and on about how our representatives are unwilling to lead in a way that is to our benefit. But if we are unwilling to fire them when they do not do what is necessary they will have no motivation to do any of these things. It is our greatest challenge to hold our representatives truly responsible for breaking our trust and all of this is nothing more than a theory if we do not test it and force it into practice.