@JJ:
If you’re impatient for progress towards liberty in your own life, I think your best bet is to follow Doug Casey and move to Argentina - work to get multiple residency, spread your bank accounts, open up holding corporations in Panama or whatever, etc. But that’s a game for the upper-middle class and above, a status I haven’t yet attained but I can’t speak for others.
Well, of course not, the change is in the doing. But human action resides entirely within the mind. The physical consequences of human action are just the unfolding of what has already happened in the mind. So, the entrepreneur who invests in Widget X and builds a fortune already acted the moment he committed in his mind to follow this course of action.
This fact has immense consequences to social action. Political reality is determined by what people do, that is, by the culture. If you want to bring about political change, you have to change what people do, and to change what people do, you have to first change their minds because the human mind is where human action occurs.
Changing how people think is changing how they act. It is the only way to change how they act. The point is that you cannot change the status quo by simply adopting a different political strategy. The political structure is already “finely tuned” to what the people will bear. We have income taxes because the people are not strongly opposed to them. We have a social security tax because people are not strongly opposed to it. We have a central bank because people are not strongly opposed to it (though, hopefully this one is beginning to change).
As far as your ranking of most important political problems, I do not believe that education is the most important political problem. That’s a long-run strategy anyway, you’re talking a full generation until changes in the education system can begin to matter. And even your preferred strategy (putting people on school boards) is wrong-headed. Better to advocate for parental choice, including home-schooling. I was home-schooled. It’s a big part of the reason that I was able to make the journey to liberty. I can see that most of my public-schooled friends will never make it out of the Matrix, so to speak.
The biggest problem is the central bank and it is also a political jugular. It is extremely difficult to paint a central bank in populist colors. They constantly handle trillions of dollars of transactions with fat-cat capitalists and they are just a banking cartel/monopoly. Opening up currency competition anywhere in the world spells disaster for the entire global central banking complex. So, we don’t even need to succeed in the US per se, any country that is reasonably independent and can keep from being bullied over by the world powers and who chooses to go the Utah route and allow gold and silver to be legal tender could potentially ignite a global domino collapse of the central banking system. How’s that for action?
Clayton -