Hello, I hope that the Holiday Season is off to a great start for you and yours! Thank you so much for your support.
I spent the weekend campaigning in Florida, including a phenomenal event in West Palm Beach. We met with a number of progressive activists who have been excited since the launch of the campaign:
One of them, Devin, implored me to always point out that the Freedom Dividend would allow people to be able to walk away from an abusive relationship, either at home or at work. It was a great suggestion.
I also met with the CEO of a public company who expressed his newfound support for Universal Basic Income; he had read my book and was persuaded by it. Our message is working.
Last week I also met with an author, Philip Howard, who has been campaigning for a different approach to government. He writes:
America’s current governing philosophy, created after the 1960s [absolves] people in Washington from having to take responsibility for how things actually work. What keeps it in place, despite its failure, is distrust . . . the decline of responsibility in Washington has been accompanied by a rise in apathy and selfishness in the broader culture. Working for the common good seems naïve. Why bother to get involved? You can’t make a difference anyway . . . The common good? Just kick that can down the road.
[M]any Americans are fearful. The employment base of communities can disappear overnight, replaced by robots or cheap labor overseas. After a century of economic advancement, many Americans feel they are back in the fields again, meeting production quotas in mindless jobs. Many Americans don’t find meaning in their work, or in their community. They are losing hope of a better future for their children. They don’t matter to Washington, and they know it.
Philip argues for a new approach to government that gives people more autonomy and decision-making. He believes that the opposite of individual responsibility is bureaucracy. We should give ourselves and our representatives more freedom to make real choices with real consequences instead of putting our government on autopilot and then looking around and wondering why nothing is working.
“The evil of our times consists . . . in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.”
– Pope John Paul II
I found Philip’s ideas and observations very compelling. The slogan of our campaign is Humanity First. Some people think of this as calling out people as being more important than robots or money, both of which are of course true. But I am increasingly convinced that the opposite of humanity is a soulless bureaucracy. It is bureaucracy that threatens to keep us from solving the big problems of this age. It is only by giving ourselves the ability to rewire the economy that we can begin the process of restoring individual meaning and freedom. We must make our society more human.
On a related note, I was drawn to a story this week of an astronaut who has been begging NASA to fund a telescope that can identify killer asteroids that could threaten human life. Apparently it would cost $40 million to identify tens of thousands of asteroids that might intersect with the Earth. $40 million to safeguard all of human existence? Only in a bureaucracy is that a tough choice – yet this has gone unfunded for years. Yet another thing that I will change as President.
Thank you for your support and belief. We are making a fundraising push to coincide with the end of the year – we must demonstrate growth and momentum. Please do make a contribution today. Let’s make it count.
We are having a New Year’s Eve Party in New York City which should be a lot of fun – I will be there to ring in 2019 in style with the best people I know. If you’re in the area, we’d love for you to stop by.
Your fellow human,
