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Ed Feulner  — The Victory NH Interview
Part II

In part two of our exclusive interview, Dr. Feulner takes on the questions that need to be asked and answered to ensure our prosperity, our safety, and our unity as a country.

We hope you enjoy the interview, but be sure not to miss the links sprinkled throughout to some of our favorite sites on the web.

© 2006 Chas Geer

VNH: In part one of our interview, we covered the first 3 of the 6 questions you ask in your new book,
Getting America Right. That brings us to...

4. Does it make us more prosperous?

VNH: You layout a strong case that our position of global leadership is receding due to 3 principle problems: taxes, trade barriers and business regulations.

Now when Steve Forbes was here, we kicked off a petition drive to make it clear to the Presidential candidates that New Hampshire wants to know what they will do to replace the 9 million word tax code. You talk about 5 broad goals that must accompany any tax reform. Take us through them.

Feulner: Too many politicians try to do too many things with the tax code. There are five broad goals that must accompany any reasonable tax reform: 

(1) Ordinary American citizens should be able to comprehend the tax code. Right now, at more than 9 million words, it is eleven times longer than the King James version of the Bible. 

(2) The tax laws should be a tool for raising revenue not changing people’s social behavior or social engineering. 

(3) Tax laws should not punish work, savings or achievement. 

(4) Tax rates should be as low as possible to encourage economic growth. Lower taxes means more incentive to work, save and invest; and that means a growing economy. A growing economy means more people will have higher paying jobs and greater income.

(5) Tax rates, exemption rates, exemptions and all provisions of the tax code should be transparent.

All those basic principles should be considered every time that we talk about meaningful or serious reform of the tax code.

I would favor either a flat tax or a fair tax since the flat tax is probably more achievable as Steve Forbes outlines in his excellent book. The reason I say that is because a fair tax depends on repeal of the 16^th Amendment. If the 16^th Amendment is not repealed, I cannot support a fair tax, because it is too likely that the politicians would then give us a fair tax in the form of a national sales tax in addition to, rather than instead of, our current income tax.  If you get rid of the 16^th Amendment, I’ll go with either one!

VNH: As you point out, the battle between free trade and protectionism is not a new one. What's the best route for America to maintain its global leadership position?

Feulner: The United States is the global leader. Today we are not only the major market for overseas companies, but more to the point and too often forgotten, we are also the world’s largest exporter.

In that regard, we have to remember that we are part of the world economy, we are the leader in the world economy, and we have to set the standard for the whole world’s economy.

That means we must keep our market open and push for others to do so, as well. While we are happy at Heritage that there are eight bilateral trade agreements that have been signed and put into law by the last several Administrations, we also believe that the best way to advance real global leadership would be through a Global Free Trade Alliance. This would be a rules-based free trade area that would not be geographic based but rather would be based on the principle that any country that subscribes to the basic principles of an open economy and meets the criteria basically outlined in our “Index of Economic Freedom” would be eligible to join.

VNH: On the Business Regulation front, you go into detail on the Sarbanes Oxley Act. Explain a bit about what it was meant to do as opposed to the unintended consequences it led to.

Feulner: Sarbanes-Oxley well exemplifies my law that the Congress “does two things well: nothing and overreact.” It was an overreaction to the excesses of the Enron and Worldcom scandals. They are admitted scandals. There was wrong-doing. However, all of the wrong-doers have been brought to trial and have either been punished, or are in the process of having their cases heard under pre-existing legislation. In other words, Sarbanes-Oxley was nonessential from the beginning.

More recently, Congressman Mike Oxley himself has admitted that there are parts of Sarbanes-Oxley that went too far but that there is basically nothing he can do about it at this stage because the Congress is not ready to revisit that subject. In other words, we overreacted, and now all of us are stuck with it.

This is not the way to have good and effective government policy set.

VNH: Which brings us to the question that relates to why Victory NH began...

5. Does it make us safer?

We couldn't agree more that a strong national security must be Washington's primary concern . The question is, what are the key steps we have to take -- both at home and abroad -- to ensure our security?

© 2006 Chas Geer

Feulner: The President has taken many of the key steps to make us safer. We are living in an unstable and insecure world as we fight the “Long War.” We have to be willing to confront our real and potential adversaries and confront them when they do the wrong thing. That means that, for example, we must remind the Chinese that they have an overriding interest in making sure that North Korea does not obtain nuclear weapons and that it is in their interest (as well as the interest of the United States, Japan, and South Korea) that North Korea not obtain them. 

We have to maintain our defense capabilities and make sure that money that is allocated for defense appropriations really goes for defense appropriations and does not just go into a defense bill to be used for non-related and really counter-productive items such as the list that appears on page 170-171 of Getting America Right, ranging from money to study mariachi music for Las Vegas schools to money to restore Alaska’s Woody Island, population zero.

When the Federal Government gets involved in too many low priority tasks, it does the highest priority things it should be doing – especially that of national defense – much less well.

VNH: You have a marvelous section called "The Lessons of Weakness" where you contrast the likes of Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson with Ronald Reagan. Given that you worked so closely with President Reagan, tell us how he, like President Bush, approached national security so differently than Carter and Johnson.

Feulner: Ronald Reagan, like President George W. Bush, had a vision of what the potential for America really is. He wanted America to live up to that potential and he saw the potential in a positive sense, whereas both Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson could micromanage, but not look at a big picture. Thus, Ronald Reagan could define an “evil empire” and George Bush could define an “axis of evil” and decide those enemies were worth knocking down and/or fighting. In the section on the "Lessons of Weakness" (page 174) Doug Wilson and I note that Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson fought the Vietnamese war tentatively. Tentatively and incrementally, they went forward in very small steps and we were gradually sucked in on the least favorable terms for ourselves.

Militarily, we always could have exercised the upper hand, but in the meantime, we basically lost that war on the home front. Jimmy Carter proved his weaknesses when he dithered about his relationship with the Shah of Iran, then when an unruly mob invaded the U.S. Embassy (itself a violation of international standards), he permitted the 52 American hostages to be held by, in effect, the government of Iran for 444 interminable days until the very day that Ronald Reagan was sworn in when it became clear to Iran’s leaders that they were dealing with a new kind of American opponent and that the United States would no longer tolerate this kind of behavior. President Reagan also intuited (and was eventually confirmed in his analysis) that the Soviet economy was much smaller than that of the United States and that the United States could basically spend the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and win the cold war in that manner ; which he did and which basically brought the Soviet Union to its knees. This he only achieved after great tribulation from both his allies and his adversaries in the Congress many of whom cautioned a “go slow” approach. In effect, Reagan and George W. Bush both approached national security from a position of America’s strengths and power rather than from her weakness and a position of vacillation like the other Presidents.

VNH: Finally, given the recent protests over immigration, you conclude with a very timely question...

6. Does it unify us?

Lets go through the 3 firm principles you believe we should be guided by: securing our borders, citizenship is not a right, and those who join us must do so wholeheartedly.

Feulner: Securing our borders is absolutely essential. The nine points that we call for in our book on immigration control and which are absolutely essential are: 

(1) A secure border (for real security reasons, not just to control illegal immigration).

(2) A temporary worker program with "Kelly Girl" agencies in Mexico and other countries to pre-clear temporary workers (with felon lists checked, etc.)

(3) A pre-cleared temporary worker program that would require workers to provide a Retina scan and carry a chip-embedded, foolproof ID (ideally managed by the likes of Visa or American Express).

(4) They sign that they will pay taxes, learn English and obey laws or be sent home without a right to a legal appeal.

(5) Employers will be heavily fined if they employ anyone without their new ID.

(6) No amnesty.   

(7) The demand for illegals dries up and they go back to their country because no one will hire them. They must wait their turn.

(8) We develop a real assimilation program for the immigrants we want.

(9) We introduce a quantum increase in visas, so we have enough temporary workers, and that anyone with an MA or PhD (especially in the sciences) gets automatic preference for the brain drain INTO the U.S. from all over the world.

© 2006 Rich Frasier

Citizenship includes the need for use of the English language and the fact that individuals must not be coming in as “hyphenated Americans,” which Teddy Roosevelt warned us about.

VNH: As you know, Victory NH is not an activist group, but a network of activist groups. Given your years in the trenches, what are some of the things citizen activists can do to have the most impact.

Feulner: The first thing that Victory NH should be urging its member groups to do is download the discussion guide from our website. It gives you a format and a series of questions to ask in order to bring you up to speed on the issues and in order to come up with coherent viewpoints that can then be used to challenge candidates across the board politically in terms of their perspective on what the priorities for the government should be. 

We must all stay involved. And we must be involved not only in electoral politics, which is very important particularly in New Hampshire, but also in policy politics. We define policy politics as what happens to elected officials once they come to Washington, rather than merely getting themselves elected to Washington. That is, we all get excited about electoral politics running up to every November of an even-numbered year or to a primary election especially in New Hampshire. But the question really should be, what are they doing in between those elections and what are they doing with the day-to-day policy issues that they have to confront routinely? Are they voting conservatively in Washington as well as speaking conservatively in New Hampshire?

VNH: Your co-author on this book was Doug Wilson, the Chairman of TownHall.com. For folks who don’t know, what is TownHall.com and how can citizen-activists use it, especially the Town Square program to help spread the truth?

Feulner: Townhall is the conservative site on the Internet. Townhall has both 130+ conservative organizations linked directly to it so you can find out the latest and best research from those organizations.  In addition, the Town Square component enables individuals to organize local meetings and the developments that will move us ahead at the grass roots level.

Town Square is a way for citizen activists to become much more effectively and directly involved in the policy process and I encourage everyone to visit Townhall.com and make sure that you are plugged in through the Town Square system.

VNH: You’ve worked with many of the movement's leaders over the years. Who has influenced your thinking and are there some leaders folks may not have heard of that have been responsible for the movement's successes?

© 2006 Chas Geer

Feulner: Of course, for modern conservatives, the greatest hero of the era is the late President Ronald Reagan.  He understood and explained the principles we believe in and the challenges we face better than anyone else. Internationally, Lady Thatcher proved to all of us that freedom is an aspiration for people around the world.

Edwin Meese, the 75^th Attorney General of the United States, deserves a special mention as a leader of the Conservative Movement, always willing to help and guide, and having an unsurpassed understanding of the importance of the rule of law.

Among the many media heroes of the Conservative Movement, one must lead with William Buckley, the intellectual icon of so many of us and the person who started it all; Rush Limbaugh,
who built on the legacy of Paul Harvey to make conservatism understandable around the nation; and his colleagues like Sean Hannity and so many others.

© 2006 Bill Fish Photography

Newt Gingrich is arguably one of the most influential individuals not only on me, but on the entire Republican revolution of the 1980s and 90s. A visionary, he is always full of a million ideas, at least a few thousand of which turn out to have real merit to them! And that’s a far higher batting average than most people who say that they are full of ideas!

Dick Armey was a laid back, low-key economics professor who understood the real world economic impact and who, by designing programs like BRAC (Base Realignment and Closing Commission), was able to surmount
the political difficulties of closing excess defense facilities. Similar efforts in other areas of the Federal Government (such as programs that have outlived their usefulness, etc) can be modeled along the BRAC line. These are the things that we should be talking about and following with our conservative leadership as we push ahead with sunset provisions and oversight of other programs we discuss in the book. 

Of all the Congressmen I’ve worked with, Phil Crane probably had a better philosophical understanding of the proper role of the Federal Government and how it should work. His early book, The Democrats Dilemma, written when he was a college professor, foretold the splits that the Democratic Party would later have to confront. 

Then, of course, there's Paul Weyrich, who has done so much to organize the grassroots; Dave Keene with the American Conservative Union and what he has done nationally to continuously invigorate and reinvigorate conservative activists around the country; Milton Friedman with his understanding of economic policy for more than 40 years where he forecast things like freedom of choice in social security, school choice, etc.; and the late Bob Bartley who did so much to popularize the supply-side economics (following up on Art Laffer, Jack Kemp and other political leaders on the supply-side economics movement).

VNH: Finally, you begin and end Getting America Right, talking about the American Dream and how the blessings of that dream have been purchased with the sacrifices of our ancestors. I can think of no better way to wrap up than a few words from you about why you have devoted your life to repaying those ancestors.

Feulner: The key point I would make in terms of the blessings that we all enjoy is that, as David McCullough pointed out at a recent Heritage Foundation lecture, reading history from our current vantage point is a little bit delusional, because we have to always remember that the people who are living history don’t know how it’s going to turn out!

Similarly, we, the leaders of today’s political environment don’t know how it will turn out. We don’t know how Iraq or Afghanistan will turn out, or the whole world-wide War on Terror, let alone specific battles in it. And we don’t know how to change every specific aspect and what should be done in terms of the overreaching Federal Government. What we do know is that because our ancestors were willing to give their life, their property and their sacred honor for the cause of freedom, we should be willing to do no less.

Download a free chapter

When we have mortgages of $187,000 that we are going to be passing on to our grandchildren in the form of their unfunded share of the welfare state that they will be inheriting from us, that’s simply not fair to future generations and it is not what we should be doing. We owe them better than that and we must do better for the future.

Hopefully, the six basic questions that we encourage every citizen to ask their elected representatives about every vote that takes place, will be a new Mandate for Leadership for the country as we face both the 2006 midterm election and the run-up to 2008. Just think what would happen if every candidate were being asked these questions routinely about their votes, their decisions and even their rhetoric on the campaign trail!! It would change the whole structure of the debate and, Doug and I believe, the way that American citizens look at their relationship with their government.
 

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