If you google my name, you will see that in 2016 I ran for president as a write-in candidate hoping to bring attention to the Restoration Party through a book I was considering publishing titled, The Restoration Party Manifesto: Pre and Post Apocalyptic Alternatives for the Future. This page provides a follow up report and outlook. I’ll start with the book.
Book Draft
The following links offer many, but not all, of the final draft. The book was never published. The purpose of linking it here is for commentary by friends and supporters and for archive purposes. You will see that it was posted on notes pages on Facebook.
- Preface
- Chapter 1: When Old Systems Don’t Work
- Chapter 2: Solution A
- Chapter 3: How to Slay the Giant Monsters
- Chapter 4: The Most Powerful Position
- Chapter 5: What is a Tax Policy with Restorationist Values?
- Chapter 6: Restored Health Care
- Chapter 7: Defending America
- Chapter 8: Solution B
Book Summary
The Restoration Party Manifesto outlines two alternatives to the future. Either (1) we address our spending crisis and systemic problems with aggressive policies to save the present system (Solution A), or (2) suffer total economic collapse and worldwide chaos and have to restore all things (Solution B). The bulk of the book focuses on bills I would personally propose if I was elected president to implement Solution A.
Campaign
I never made any attempt to raise funds as this was not my goal. I simply worked on writing the book by paying bills as an Uber driver in Tallahassee. I enjoyed chatting with students. They are my primary Uber customers. There are also many politicians and lobbyists and their staff who work here at the state capitol, but to be honest, interest in the opinions of Uber drivers running for president, it turns out, is relatively limited. In any event, I did get some modest attention organically even on my zero dollar budget and was interviewed by a reporter from the Tallahassee Democrat. Here is a link to that interview.
The Three Axis Political Spectrum
Let me return to my summary of the contents of the book. The Restoration Party Manifesto begins by pointing to a third political axis. There are three axis on the political spectrum. Most people fail to understand this. They are mainly obsessed with the X axis – “left and right” on the political spectrum. The interviewer from the Tallahassee Democrat assumed I was on the left because of my rainbow suspenders, I suppose, or because I indicated I wanted to tax the wealthy. Well, so you’ll know, I wear the rainbow because it is a symbol of mercy and hope, not just because I’m a friend of LBGTQ+, (which, I am). The rainbow is a Biblical symbol, and it is also a symbol of light. More on that another time and another place. Here, my point is that gay rights are not a left-right issue. A description of each of the three dimensions on the spectrum will show more precisely where LBGTQ+ issues actually belong …
X Axis: The X axis places progressives to the left and conservatives to the right. Conservative values are traditional. That means holding on to proven things rather than experimenting with new ones. True conservatism, as I see it, follows the thinking of Edumund Burke. It seeks to preserve religious institutions and looks to original intent when interpreting the Constitution. Progressivism is apt to want to change the intent of the Constitution and want to dismiss or even rail against the values of older institutions. Conservatism is tight on spending. Liberalism or Progressivism isn’t so “fiscally conservative.”
Y Axis: The Libertarian Party loves to talk about the “Y Axis.” This is where gay rights come in. This is where sexual freedom comes in. At the low end of the Y axis is government intervention and restriction. At the high end of the Y axis, on the positive side, is less regulation, more freedom. Greater separation of church and state is a libertarian value. Libertarians are likely to be in favor of unrestricted abortion for this reason. Let the individual decide. They may think drugs should be legal too, maybe all of them. They will likely want to simplify the tax code with things like flat taxes. They are likely to support less regulation on gun laws. There is also freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is not a progressive or conservative issue. It is a Y axis issue. If you are okay with the government stepping in to police speech and don’t worry so much about the protection of the first amendment, then maybe you are lower on the Y axis than you think.
Z Axis: This is the axis that is new and unique and makes the Restoration Party so vital. It is populism (on the positive side) versus rule by a few (on the negative side). It is integrity, accountability and transparency on the positive side, and corruption and rule by an unelected administrative state on the negative side. It is the elected state versus the deep state. It is the many who vote versus the oligarchy, plutocracy, cleptocracy, an elite political class in control of education, giant corporations and a military industrial media complex. Donald Trump actually played on the Z Axis to win in 2016. Draining the DC swamp is very much a Z Axis value. At the time I added #NeverTrump to my business card in 2016 I was unaware that “drain the swamp” was going to be a mantra for MAGA supporters. At tht time, I assumed he was much like me – honestly not qualified to be president, simply doing so to gain attention. He got attention alright. I think he was surprised to win. In 2020 I voted for Donald Trump. I did not run myself. The reason I voted for him was not that I thought he was ideal, but because he was decisively strong on the Z axis, which is the core value of the Restoration Party.
Solutions
I’m not a complainer. When I talk about urgent problems and emphasize how dark and critical they are, it is to preface a necessary discussion of a solution worth pursuing. Not everyone will agree with my solutions. I only ask that they consider them with an open mind. Here are a few problems I’ve addressed, some of which were covered in the book.
Spending: spending and war making are the two most prominent points of pain the book addresses. Several proposals are brought forward to pay off the accumulated deficit and keep it down forever. Here are the three main proposals…
- A proposal to freeze the cost of living ajustment for all federal and state employees until the average wage of American workers is equal to the average pay of government workers. This will not only reduce costs but eliminate the tendency government has to keep expanding. Smaller government is both cheaper and easier to manage.
- A proposal to reduce the role of the IRS to that of collecting state assessments under a neutral tax plan that puts each state in charge of managing how it will collect its federal assessments from its residents. Each state decides what rates to charge, what deductions and so on. This creates a competition between states for tax paying residents. You can read more about the neutral tax at https://neutraltax.com
- A proposal for a one-time progressive net worth tax to pay off the entire accumulated federal deficit in a single day. To prevent capital flight, assessment would be based on a retroactive screen shot of net worth. Payment would be managed through assignable liens that would help liquidate solid assets until the debt was paid off by those assessed. At the time the book was written, the accumulated debt was about $20 trillion. It is not above $31 trillion and growing exponentially. The proposal involves complex problems involving net exports and US dollar values and addresses some of the common objections.
Media: the relationship of the media to large corporations and an unelected, deeply entrenched administrative state is at the heart of the problem. The way to address this problem is to provide better channels of communication to those with minority viewpoints. Fact-checking is also critical but must be accountable. The only way to accomplish this is through an oppositional framework such as the CounterChecker. I have purchased this domain in order to protect it and to demonstrate the ideal design for investors.
Economic Boom Formula
The book addresses the unemployment problem, noting the difference between an employer market and an employee market. A market is an “employee market” when job-seekers have the advantage and an “employer market” when employers have the advantage. We were enjoying an employee market only very briefly during the Trump administration prior to the pandemic. The majority of American history has otherwise been an employer market. An employee market creates an economic boom for average Americans by raising salaries and benefits and opening up options for those who wish to advance in their careers and increase their leverage. Low unemployment below a certain threshold is what creates an employee market. Employers have to compete for employees to hire and keep good help.
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: One important way to create an employee market is to assist small businesses and new startups because these hire more employees than larger established corporations. The majority of my own life has involved struggle searching for startup capital for my invention concepts and designs. The CounterChecker is just the most recent example of this. The first venture I had that I was unable to start was the Ghost Machine. You can read about that at https://ghostsurfers.com . The struggle is real. What has been particularly frustrating to me is to have not just great money-making ideas, but ideas that would have a very high positive social impact if they were implemented. Without exception, I can’t get passionate about an idea unless I see that it has a very high positive potential social impact.
The Pamalogy Society solution: As a result of my frustration as an entrepreur wannabe, I started a non-profit to fund, incubate and support high potential social impact concept-stage ideas. Please let me know if you would like to support this. Pamalogy itself is a philosophical system of my own invention, so I teach philosophy. It is the philosophy of awesomeness, or awesomeology. One very awesome thing, is for people with awesome ideas to see their dreams and visions fulfilled. So, high positive social impact concepts will receive not just what a typical accelerator program will do, with teaching and advice, but also those things that no incubators or startup accelerators presently provide – material support – financing and the professional pro bono assistance assistance needed to bring a concept into a state of startup readiness. Let’s consider the reality here. Nine of ten startups fail in their first five years. This is why the startup ecosystem grows so sluggishly. But have you considered how many great ideas never got to the startup stage in the first place? For every startup, there just be a thousand concepts that never became startups. What would happen to the economy if we had a thousand times more qualified startups? GDP would go through the roof while employees enjoyed a never before experienced employee market. But those are just raw numbers. Remember, I am talking only about high social impact concepts. These endeavors would change the world.
The CounterChecker example: The CounterChecker is a perfect example of the sort of program the Pamalogy Society would be likely to support. Let’s consider the positive social impact and what that might mean. Presently, there are literally hundreds of fact-checking organizations. Mostly, these support progressive media. Some, such as RealClear Politics Fact-Check claim to fact-check the fact checkers, because they believe the fact-checking organizations are left-biased. The result is bias in the opposite direction sourced by an organbization that has its own unique reach. The CounterChecker approach is more disruptive. It is a gig platform for journalists and fact-checkers to have civil discourse in mutual accountability. It undoes the echo-chamber effect by bringing sides that disagree together into one place to check each other’s facts and statements. Counterchecks also can be countered until issues are fully addressed. The result is the entirety of the story made available for the world to see. Inconvienient facts are not buried. And this means healing a currently very divided world and addressing the comfort media tendency that has been such a cancer for us all. Additionally, by keeping journalists accountable, it will restore the Fourth Estate to its original function. It can’t stop media enterprises from not reporting things that don’t support its agenda, but it will at least keep it from misleading the public with what it does report. In short, the CounterChecker would serve a core restorative function by restoring the media to accountability.
Abortion
Everyone always wants to know what my stance on abortion is. Almost every student in my Uber asked. I explained that the Restoration Party was a Z axis, rather than Y axis party. Therefore, both pro-choicers and anti-abortionists (pro-lifers is the preferred pronoun here, by the way), would be at home in the Restoration Party unless they were one issue voters, abortion being all that mattered. This response was not satisfactory. My riders wanted to know what I really thought. Well, what if both sides on the issue had good points to make? I think they do tend to both make valid points to some degree. I talked about this issue extensively in the Season One Podcast when discussing women’s rights in the multiverse. The only things I didn’t cover there was a solution nobody seems to have considered before – an incentivized vasectomy program.
Incentivized Vascetomies
Presently, we consider abortion a women’s issue. This is because women are left with the burden of caring for a child should they choose to keep it. Men, if they are identified at all, have the option to take no responsibility. A woman not only has to deal with a nine month pregnancy and the pain of labor and disruption of her career pursuits, but a lifetime of caring for another human being should she choose the difficult path of single motherhood, or an often emotionally tortuous decision of giving her baby up for adoption as another alternative, in the best interest of the newborn she loved enough to guard and sacrifice for not just during her preganancy but even after birth by letting go of her maternal instinct to love her own child for the child’s ultimately better interests. Wow. Just wow.
But what if … what if the system was very different? What if just before puberty, children were required to take a sex education course, and during that course they were warned that if they ever got a woman pregnant that they would have to pay paternity benefits for the next eighteen years? Then on the positive side, what if they were told that if they got a certified vasectomy, having learned what it was, that they would enjoy tax benefits and government money? If such a system existed, then any who chose not to get vasectomy certified would be liable for paternity payments that would help fund single mothers. I’m not going to go into details regarding all of this. I just want to pose a solution that is seldom discussed. If this proposal was implemented, the entire discussion of abortion would change. It would be just as much a men’s issue as a woman’s issue. It should be. It is a human issue. The fetus is a human. Presently, they have no voice.
Solution B
I have reserved Solution B for the end even though it truly belongs up front. None of our economic problems would exist if we simply employed Solution B. However, I realize that we don’t have the political will to make it happen. Solution B ends homelessness, makes education available for free, ends hunger, saves the environment, improves living standards, ends unemployment, makes it easier to do research and start businesses, reduces crime, improves mental health, solves the problem of rising health care costs and inflation and ends all debt and threats from creditors. I know this sounds too good to be true. And you are free to think me naive for thinking it could ever ben implemented or succeed, but I think it would work and that we are foolish for not trying it. Solution B is the HAND System – the Human Availability and Needs Database System. It is a computer managed incentivized asynalagonomy program. You can find out more about this by clicking on the “asynalagonomy” links on the menu of this web site so I won’t repeat any of that here. I’ll simply point out that a very good time to try it would be in the event of a worldwide economic collapse and that the mechanism for getting it started is the building of a simple web site where people can sign up for it. No revolution is required.
Visionary Party
I gave over the seven starred dophin mascot to the Visionary Party after the 2016 election. Neither one of these parties is anyting but a name. I didn’t incorporate anything. This is important to know because as the founder of the CounterChecker, I want it to be clear that I am not a political candidate and that no political office holder or political party is funding the CounterChecker or the Pamalogy Society. These are not political entities and don’t receive any funding from them. I used the Restoration Party name in 2016. Some people didn’t like the name. They thought it supposeds that America was at some point in time a great nation worth restoring. I tried to be specific about the what I hoped to see restored – the American government back to the service of the people. That is what the Z axis is for. It stands to reason though, that if the Restoration Party is all about the Z axis, that to define its platform we need to look not to me and my viewpoints, some of which are very rare, and to the viewpoints of the majority of Americans. My own ideas, I view as very futuristic. And you may think that some of them are flat out bad ideas. But since I personally stand by them and since I didn’t want to get in the way of the Restoration Party, I decided to give it up. You may have it. I personally am an independent. I reserve the Visionary Party name, and the seven starred dolphin mascot for myself and the vision that I actually have. You may therefore make a distinction between what I believe and an actual platform for the Restoration Party that might possibly evolve and grow. And it is free to define itself based on the decisions of that organization. Run with it. I’ve stepped aside. I hope you like my ideas. And if you really do like my personal ideas, then feel free to start the Visionary Party. I won’t be active in it myself. I have to focus my attention on the CounterChecker and the Pamalogy Society and its specific endeavors, none of which are political in nature, even if some enterprises that evolve from it may touch on political questions.
Do-It-Before-You-Die Lists
At the heart of Applied Pamalogy, is the “Do-It-Before-You-Die List”, sometimes referred to as a “Bucket List.” As the name suggests, it’s a written statement a person makes that lists the things they want to make sure they do before they die. Mine is posted on the front page of JamesCarvin.com for everyone to see. You can see that the CounterChecker and the Pamalogy Society are on that list. You will find some other things, as well. A number are journalistic enterprises – the HatredIndex is on there, for instance. So is GreenTechNews.org . If the Pamalogy Society does what I hope it will gradually do, these concepts can become realities. That is why I think they are achievable. I ask on my podcast for listeners to submit their own Do-It-Before-You-Die Lists to me. I want to know what the vision of others is like and I want to see if we can harmoniously and strategically work together to make as many dreams come true as possible, including my own. Political programs are excluded but journalistic enterprises are not excluded. Strategy and timing also matters. If the CounterChecker is developed first, then the API from the CounterChecker can be used to improve journalistic endeavors. It’s good to know that your claims have been vetted.
Maximizing Awesomeness
I’ll end here. If you’ve read this far, then you may just understand that while I do have my hand in an exceptional variety of things, there is something that ties it all together. That thing is my personal list. Life is short. I could have lived it for myself, but I realized that if I did that, I would have missed out on something else I could have done – namely, leave behind a legacy for many future generations to come, wherein all that I had learned could be duplicated and shared for the profit of others. The net good made this choice seem worthwhile to me. I didn’t just want to have an impact in the world that I could see. I wanted it to last for many generations to come. If I can get a start on just one or two of the enterprises I have on my list, I will have at least made some progress towards that goal. I don’t know how much of it I will have time to get to. I just think that it is all potentially achievable. It’s an ambitious list. This I know well. But it might be achievable with the proper leverage. If you helped, you would be doing a tremendous amount of good – perhaps more than you realize. Please join me.