Question: Hi, Mr. LaRouche; I'm from San Leandro. I was wondering exactly how issue-based politics has been destructive. I mean, is it just that people aren't taking the right approach to the right issues? Is it enough to have just kind of an over-arching, epistemological philosophy in tackling the Presidency?

LaRouche: Yeah, it is, partly that. The problem is, issue-oriented policy in the United States is disgusting. It's immoral. What it means, it's actually, it works like single issues: You take some beef, by some group in the population, and you say, that group in the population will support a certain candidate, who supports that beef. Another may be in a community; it may be in a local area; it may be in a category of sexual preferences, or whatever.

Therefore, what happens is, you divide the population into a zoo, of different kinds of animals. Each animal has its own cage, its own single issue, or two or three single issues. Some animals have related issues; they gang up. So, you no longer have a national policy. What you have is, people squabbling over scraps, instead of solving the problem.

For example: The general problem in the United States is, what? General health care: In 1973, the Nixon Administration, under the influence of a Democrat who was a pig--Moynihan--introduced what was called the HMO Bill. The HMO Bill, which has killed probably more people than AIDS, was a replacement for the Hill-Burton legislation, which had worked in the postwar period, and had served us well.

So then, you had this crazy thing of Hillary Clinton, who, in an absolute act of mass idiocy, produced a health-care bill which is a monument to insanity, in terms of legislation--thousands of features, and it all must be voted up without amendment. A piece of insanity! All we have to do, is go back and look at the Hill-Burton legislation, which is a few pages, which set forth the principal policy of the United States on health care. It worked! The monster that Hillary Clinton passed, almost destroyed the Clinton Administration. It was just too much to swallow.

So, these attempts to deal with health-care issues, and other issues, on a single-issue basis, is insanity. What we have to have is, number one, a policy, on any area of problem: a policy. Then, you have to elect people, and employ people to implement that policy. Then you have a monitoring device, to determine how well the policy is being conducted. Now, in our system, the Federal government, this works generally in two ways: You have the agencies of the Executive branch of government (or, we used to have them). Those agencies were supposed to implement the law. In other words, as the law went down--say, health care: So, you would have a department of government, which was responsible for health care. The Hill-Burton legislation would be the basic law. In that department, you would also have a monitoring capability, which would go out to the people in society, different parts of society, and determine how the law was being implemented; how efficiently, or effectively it was being implemented.

So, you had a Federal government responsibility. You then had a Congressional responsibility: permanent standing Congressional committees, with oversight over these areas, assigned oversight, would also investigate, to see how well the law was working: Was it enough? Was it too much? Whatever. Or, if it was failing.

You would then have, also, on the state level, and on the local level, you would have corresponding agencies, who would be participating in the implementation of this law, and they, too, would be involved implementing the law, and also in determining how well the implementation was performing.

So, that generally is the approach to sound government. You make broad definitions of law, clearly understandable--not too many pages--four, five, twenty pages. Remember some of the greatest, important scientific papers or discovery ever produced, consisted of only a few pages, or a couple dozen pages of writing. So, you make the basic statement, not simple, but concise, short, to the point. Everyone should understand it. Now, you put it into departments of government, or private sector, if that's the agency involved. You then follow up on that, in administration, both in positive administration, regulatory administration, and also in auditing. And that's the way good law works.

For example, we have homeless people in the United States. In my impute, the law should be, there should be no homeless people in the United States. You do not require a whole bunch of single issues, on that issue. We know what it means to have people have homes. Therefore, we say, we're not going to have homeless people. We say that nobody's going to be denied necessary health care.  It will happen. And people are going to be assigned to carry that out. We're going to make broad guidelines on how it's going to be carried out.

So, if you go through all the things that government should be responsible for, and you find that you can reduce that--and I've been doing this for a long time, in terms of proposals, and looking at other people's work at the same time. You make a few broad things, which affect everybody in a whole area of concern, and that is sufficient. Because you're not trying to write a recipe, a mechanical recipe for reinventing the wheel. What you're trying to do, is simply assign people, responsible people, or authorize responsible people, to do something, and authorizing the follow-up on that proposal to make sure it's being competently implemented, or discover if changes are needed.

And, that's the way politics should be made. We should not have these single issues. They're simply ways of dividing people, of confusing them, of setting one group of people against another. Whereas, if we design legislation the way we used, in the best times in the past, we find that relatively simple Federal legislation--simple in terms of number of pages--administered by good Congressional committees, by well-staffed agencies of government, can do the job. And, don't make too many "'causes," and "whereas," and "whereats," because you'll just make a mess of it. And, keep the single issues out.

-30-