The Government-Lobby Liberation Act

Pass this Act, and corporate-government collusion will cease to exist

The 'Government Lobby Liberation Act' severs the blood supply from the heart of legitimate commerce to corruption in government: the exchange of money, power, or position in return for influence. The lobby of every legislative body in this country must be liberated from this destructive practice. This Act will accomplish that objective.

It is the payment for lobbying activity, not lobbying itself, that forms the lifeblood of this cancerous corruption by giving those with the fattest purse the most access to government. This Act cures that cancer without negative impact on the proper functioning of our free society. An idea whose time has come can never be stopped. This idea's time has come!

All the evils of excessive government can be traced to one single practice, and that practice is the ability of mega-corporations and well-financed pressure groups to pay lobbyists for attempting to influence legislation in their favor. Outlaw their ability to do this, and you will save America from this public-private tyranny and its impending destruction of our way of life.

This can be accomplished at both the federal and state levels with the passage of one single piece of legislation. A suggested text for this law is provided just below.

'Lobbyism' is the evil practice of compensating or promising the compensation of any individual or entity for 'lobbying' any government institution to pass, change, or abolish any law.

The act of "lobbying' got its name from the practice of those who want to influence legislation to send out agents who would hang out in the lobby of government institutions in order to meet the key officials they needed to influence to achieve their objectives.

It is this practice that poses the root problem of corruption in government. Holders of government office are elected or appointed to serve the people who elect them. In the United States, the holding of government office is intended to be temporary, and no special privileges are supposed to be conferred for the mere fact of occupying, or once having occupied, any government office.

Compensated lobbying destroys this concept. Compensated lobbying allows the most powerful entities in private life - the large corporations and well-financed non-profit foundations - to manipulate and virtually control the process of government for they own benefit. If America is to continue to remain a free and prosperous country, control of the process of government must be wrested away from corporations and returned to the People.

This objective can be accomplished by one of the shortest statutes ever written. Here is a sample text:

Any person who knowingly gives or receives, or promises to give or receive, anything of economic value in return for efforts to procure the passage, amendment, revocation, or abolition of any statute, regulation, or executive order shall be fined in an amount no to exceed $100,000 for each occurrence and shall be imprisoned for not less than ten years.

That's all it takes. The rest is a matter of correctly defining the operative terms, such as "person", "economic value", and "procure" as precisely as possible without making the enforcement of this law impossible or impractical.

The Lobby liberation Act will remove all current incentives for anyone to try to become a professional or even occasional 'compensated lobbyist'. This will accomplish the following:

• Former government officials will no longer have an incentive to suck up to certain corporations that are active in the business of influencing legislation or government policy in their favor.

• Corporations will no longer have the ability to influence legislatures or other government institutions to pass laws or regulations that favor their activities over either competitors or that deprive the People of any fundamental right guaranteed by the United States Constitution.

Once this is accomplished, individuals- whose rights, property, and liberty are intended to be protected by the Constitution, will no longer be stampeded into that aberrant form of involuntary servitude to the de facto corporate-government aristocracy they now find themselves in.

In one word, no. Citizens and the voluntary lawful associations they form must have the right to attempt to influence the direction of government between elections, and that right must remain inviolate. It is not the activity of lobbying government by private individuals that causes the harm associated with Lobbyism. It is the undue influence over our governing processes exercised by large corporations and well-funded non-corporate entities that distorts and perverts the proper relationship between free, truly sovereign citizens and government officials.

If you want to be free from undue interference by government into your private life, if you want to be or become prosperous by having a true chance to become prosperous by your own effort, this is the law for you.

You can form a local organization that works to exert pressure on lawmakers at all levels of government to pass this Act, verbatim. You can make it known to current and hopeful future office holders that refusal to vote in favor of this law and refusal to work to get it passed is tantamount to a one (or no) term political career.

You can form a Meetup locally and then set up national, regional, and statewide chapters of your organization.

You can go to the OWS protesters and show them how passing this Act would accomplish about eighty to ninety percent of what most of them agree they are protesting about - the severance of the unholy ties between big business and big government - but without the insane idea that the People can prosper by forcing corporations to pay higher taxes. (All that does is force the corporations to pass the higher taxes on to the people in the form of higher prices or reduced quantity or quality or the products and services they so ably provide.

It is not money that lies at the root of all evil in life, but the love of money. Similarly, it is not lobbying per se that lies at the root of all evil in government, but the ability to pay or receive payment inn return for expertise at influencing the process of government.

The 'Lobby liberation' Act kills the Hydra of improper governance by plunging the sword into its heart, no by uselessly slashing away at its many heads.

The chances for actually accomplishing this have never been better. The Internet has been around for long enough to have forever altered the balance of power between those who control the access to information and those who wish to access it. Small government, pro-Liberty crusaders like Congressman Ron Paul have had enough success in presenting the non-interventionist philosophy of government when it comes to lawful pursuits in our private lives. He has also largely succeeded in laying bare the evils of bank-created debt posing as 'money' - an evil that could not exist had it not been extensively lobbied for by the major banking houses of Europe which are, after all, also corporations.

The "Occupy" movements around the world, although to a large degree financed and promoted by by corporate interests without the knowledge of its participants, are proof that the People have begun to recognize that undue influence of government by the world's largest corporations is an evil that must be done away with. Lobbyism is how that evil propagates itself.

Lobbyism provides the environment in which the cancer cells of the "PPP" (Public-Private Partnership" thrive at the expense of the body of Liberty. The 'Lobby liberation' Act cures that cancer with pinpoint accuracy and without negative side effects. Your engagement in the drive to pass such laws at the federal and state levels of government will guarantee that America recovers from her current woes, that true freedom, true justice, and true prosperity will not only survive but expand and prosper and re-assume their rightful place in American life.

If you do nothing but talk about this concept to your friends, relatives, and acquaintances both on and off the Internet until they 'get it', you will have done Freedom in America the biggest favor anyone can do. If you choose to do more, so much the better - but it all starts there.

The greatest thing is that no one can stop you from doing this. Your power is truly unlimited in that sense. Go for it!