The health of our democracy depends on our citizen’s ability to understand how their government acquires and deploys the people’s resources.

Well formulated taxes aren’t evil, they’re exceptionally useful.  A well formulated tax raises revenue for the government and regulates trade.  To achieve both of these objectives, compliance must be easy and the people must view it’s influence on the marketplace as socially beneficial.  The mechanics of the tax must also be simple.  If people don’t understand a tax’s influence on their own decisions or on the broader economy, they can’t make informed political or economic decisions.

The government should deploy three types of taxes:

Federal tariffs regulate international trade by taxing imported goods.  Proceeds finance the security that enables trade. Higher tariffs finance larger security forces.

Sales taxes regulate consumption of nonessential products.  Proceeds finance the infrastructure that facilitates trade.  A higher sales tax facilitates more investment in infrastructure and increases savings rates.

Regulatory taxes impose fees on goods and services communities wants to regulate.  Proceeds pay for local social social services.  Higher regulatory taxes decrease the demand for taxed goods and increase funding for services.

These taxes naturally create balance in the marketplace by giving the people, through their government, control over the context within which economic activity takes place.  Taxes must adapt to new social and economic realities.

No where is the industrial convention stronger than in our education system.  All course material is determined by an individual’s age, ending promptly at 18.  All schooling takes place between 9am-5pm, Monday-Friday, September-June.  Students are judged on a linear point scale that goes from bad to good.

Technology is making this system more and more irrelevant each and everyday. No matter what convention requires, every year more educational material will be consumed by students on Wikiepdia and they will inevitably use increasingly collaborative technologies to complete their projects.  These trends should be nurtured, not resisted.  We must realize that individuals drop out of school because schooling in this country is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

The education system of the future is impossible to centrally plan: it will be individualized, dynamic, flexible and nonlinear.  What we can do is make sure that every American who wants to invest in their own education can do so by providing Americans with vouchers redeemable at accredited institutions.

We can also make sure that every American has access to the internet and that comprehensive education programs exist online for free.  Additionally, we can create a scholastic network that provides every individual access to top teachers, professors and experts through the web.  Local teachers can focus on interpersonal skills and community specific learning while offering their students the highest quality virtual lecturers on more specialized topics.

Our plan is simple.  We need:

1. Vouchers for every American.
2. Charter schools.
3. Free online educational material
4. A virtual lecture network.

Our current healthcare system is staggeringly inefficient because it is so heavily regulated by the government.  These regulations, many of which were written by the largest healthcare and pharmaceutical corporations, have created massive barriers of entry so only organizations with expansive compliance departments can serve the public.  The system is unsalvageable.

A sensible health care policy begins with a sensible agricultural policy.  We must end the corn subsidies that make high-fructose corn syrup and beef unnaturally inexpensive.  These subsidies are inconsistent with America’s free market principles and have contributed to the national health crisis.

The importance of healthcare requires that we give every American the freedom to chose their own provider by supplying them with the means to do so.  We interpret the US Constitutions right to one’s body as support for vouchers.

Our policy preference is a $5000/year voucher redeemable with certified practitioners, clinics and hospital that, if unused, can be places into a savings account designated for future healthcare expenses. Congress can change the voucher’s value by modifying tax rates and applying the gains or losses to the voucher system.  It will cost $1.75 trillion a year to give 350m Americans a $5000 vouchers.

Generally, we dislike government participation in the marketplace due to it’s ability to coerce actors but we recognize that the collective must take care of individuals unable to pay for humane healthcare treatment.  We believe that a mature network of charity hospitals will be able to serve this community through voluntary contribution but until then, the American people must foot the bill via an emergency voucher system.

Every individual has inherent worth and the ability to generate income by trading their time with others.  Employment is a natural process in which each individuals within a community learns how they can create the most value and generate the most income by serving others.  Employment becomes problematic when regulations prevent people from engaging in trade.  These regulation increase costs, distort incentives and ultimately create unemployment.

Right now the single largest factor causing unemployment is a regulatory framework that gives advantages to corporations over individuals.  Corporations were the core economic unit during the industrial era but in the information era the individual with the ability to work on a number of projects with a number of other individuals at any given time is the core economic unit.  Our entire regulatory framework must adapt to that reality.

We have a three part full employment program:

1. Eliminate regulations preventing individuals from engaging in trade.
2. Separate healthcare and other benefits from employment.
3. End the tax code’s distinction between freelancers and employees.

The rapid development of our society’s technological capacity and the internationalization of the labor market creates employment instability which we recognize as detrimental to emotional health.  Thus, we find it appropriate for the government to provide a source of unlimited employment at a specific price point to create a de-facto minimum wage by offering people a voucher for working at certified nonprofit organizations.

The greatest threat to the American people is our current monetary system lead by the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank.  By creating money and giving it to other banks at irresponsible rates, the FED has jeopardized the value of the dollar and made it possbile for the dollar to experience hyper-inflation and collapse.  The social turmoil that would result from such an event would be tremendous and threaten the foundations of American liberty.

Our first priority is to retake control of the Federal Reserve through Congressional action.  This is already underway thanks to Ron Paul’s popular Audit The FED Bill.  Once we have the FED under control, we can determine whether we want to abolish or modify the institution.

The US government should provide it’s citizens with some type of banking insurance.  The FDIC engenders confidence in the banking system and the dollar.  We need to increase FDIC coverage to $500,000 and reengineer banking regulations to ensure that FDIC covered banks remain solvent.

Our best insurance against collapsing banks and a declining dollar is creating parallel systems of value exchange that relies on neither entity.  We must legalize and support the emergence of local currency organically created by networks of individuals within geographic areas voluntarily agree to accept non-legal tender.  Local currencies allow a greater variety of transactions than normal currency and provide a layer of security and social cohesion in the unlikely event that hyper-inflation take place.

Without an empire to support, the American military can be redeployed to achieve it’s primary missions: to secure America’s boarders, uphold our Constitution and ensure no foreign military could harm our nation.

Due to the increasingly high level of economic integration between all nations, foreign invasion is highly unlikely.  What is not unlikely, in fact, what is a near certainty, is that individuals will attempt to attack American society.  The effectiveness of these attacks will depend on two factors: the damage the attack causes and the effect it has on the American people.

The best way to limit the damage an attack can cause on the American people is to make it difficult for individuals to acquire weapons of mass destruction.  It is possible, with the full strength of the US military, to ensure that nuclear and biological agents don’t enter the US from abroad and additional precautions can be taken to prevent powerful weapons from originating within.

The American population is our greatest resource to prevent attack.  We must make sure individuals within our country aren’t alienated by our communities, individuals outside our country view America positively and all peoples of the world view each other as one.  Dismantling our empire will enable us to realize these goals.  By nature, there will be alienated people who want to lash out against American society.  Our security forces must neutralize them.

Attack is inevitable but it’s effect on the American people is determined by our culture.  If we can preserve our nation’s love of freedom, no attack, not matter how devastating, can harm the promise of America.

American foreign policy has been designed by a group of special interests who willfully spend taxpayer money and lives for their selfish gain.  The only way to mitigate the influence of these interests on American international affairs is to operate a strictly principled foreign policy.  This policy must embody the same values as the US government: freedom and equality under the law.

American troops are stationed in over 130 countries around the world, costing taxpayers hundreds of billion of dollars a year and generating unquantifiable amounts of ill will among the peoples of the world.  Dismantling the America empire will create a power vacuum that another entity will inevitably fill.  That entity mustn’t be a coercive governing structure like the UN or WTO but rather, a universally applicable principle by which all national governments are judged.  This principle must be quantifiable.  It must be transparency.

Transparency is the ability for society to see inside government.  In a completely transparent nation, society and government are one.  It is in the American people’s interest to live in a world of transparent nations because transparency empowers civil society and enables democracy to flourish.

Democratic governments protect their citizens from exploitation and environmental degradation.  Empowered workers demand higher wages, giving Americans more of a competitive advantage.

The world’s peoples must construct transparency coalitions that rate national government and document electoral fraud.  They must then demand that their own national governments not recognize the opaque governments of other nations.

This type of decentralized, principled system of international governance is our best defense against the emergence of an autocratic one world government.

The platform is simple.

1. National Security: Bring all the troops home and redeploy them along America’s boarder.
2. Foreign Policy: Partner with transparent governments and peacefully support transparency activists.
3. Monetary Policy: Restrain the Federal Reserve, strengthen the FDIC and support local currencies.
4. Employment: Facilitate trade by eliminating employment  restrictions and encouraging micro-finance.
5. Healthcare: Give Americans savable vouchers so they can purchase their own healthcare coverage.
6. Education: Give students vouchers and create high quality open source education programs.
7. Taxes: Enact principled tariffs, a national sales tax, and state/local regulatory taxes.
8. Environment: Phase in a tax on fuels that produce carbon and invest the proceeds into mass transit.
9. Energy: Invest in the electrical grid and facilitate local energy production.
10. Crime: Mitigate black market activity through taxation, regulation and education.
11. Trade: Free trade with transparent nations, regulated trade with opaque ones.
12. Immigration: Institute a skills based immigration policy and make our boarders 100% secure.

All Americans, regardless of political association, support providing social services to the American people as efficiently as possible.  Network America will be faster, better, cheaper than Federally administered services, and exist without the coercive tax structure.  Thus the QS Platform should appeal to everyone.

Small government advocates appreciate how the Network America plan transitions the responsibilities our society has placed on the government to a parallel meta-organization that operates exclusively under the rules of market forces.  This drastically reduces the size and scope of government intervention into the lives of Americans, enabling those who create value to keep their property  while increasing the amount of social services to all.

Big government advocates appreciate Network America’s ability to provide every American with a high baseline (floor) of social services and makes it extremely simple for the people to decide whether they want the state to finance more services or less.  Network America has room for government run public options as well, as long as that option competes fairly with others.

Traditionalists appreciate how government has less influence on local culture.  Nationalists appreciate how boarder security is of paramount importance.  Internationals appreciate our formula for principled international engagement.

Network America is not about politics: it’s about whether Americans believe that free individuals using networking technologies can produce a more efficient and equitable society.

Properly networked and financed, nonprofit organizations can provide a more comprehensive set of social services to the American people than the government.  The technologies we need to create Network America are readily available and widely used.  What we’re lacking is a vision for an integrated nonprofit service network and a standard framework that organizes our use of these tools so each autonomous nonprofit organization can contribute to a more comprehensive whole.

Network America’s backbone is our network communication infrastructure (internet, cell phones, GPS).  This infrastructure enables organizations to use open source software that call on shared databases to deliver essential information on demand. Collaboration tools eliminate the barriers between individuals and organization, allowing people to work on projects instead of ‘for’ institutions.  Since services compete in the marketplace for donations and government vouchers, they must be efficient and transparent.

These organic organizations can only emerge under certain conditions:

1. Locally organized in response to the needs of the community.
2. Free from the corrupting influence of resources coercively extracted from one population and distributed to another.
3. Included in a collaborative network of similar organizations.
4. Entirely transparent.