National Optimists Party Platform
Following are principles which constitute cornerstones of our Platform and Planks.
HONEST GOVERNMENT
Like Abraham Lincoln, the first great Republican president, the National Optimists Party believes that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Indeed, like Lincoln, we foresee a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth. To that end, we will restore a government as good as the people it serves, starting with real ethics reform.
The National Optimists Party is committed to real ethics reform and meaningful campaign finance reform that protects our rights and ensures that elected officials act ethically -- not just within the law, but within the spirit of the law. We consider it our highest charge to restore public trust in public servants.
It is the National Optimists party agenda to make certain our nation's leaders serve the people's interests, not special interests. For us, this commitment spans our lifetime, as we will be elected to represent the people, not the powerful.
Our goal is to restore accountability, honesty and openness at all levels of government. To do so, we will create and enforce rules that demand the highest ethics from every public servant, sever unethical ties between lawmakers and lobbyists, and establish clear standards that prevent the trading of official business for gifts.
In this area, our National Optimists Party principles are nearly identical to those of the Democratic Party with one significant exception – we solemnly vow to implement them.
DEFENSE
Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as a heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere.
Abraham Lincoln
As long as every generation rises to its challenges and stands up in defense of liberty - as Americans have done in the past and as our men and women continue to do today - our nation will remain free and strong.
That is not to say that we can relax our readiness to defend ourselves. Our armaments must be adequate to the needs, but our faith is not primarily in these machines of defense but in ourselves, generation after generation.
Secure in the belief that we Americans have displayed sufficient faith in ourselves, we National Optimists turn our attention from what our military is to what our military does.
U.S. military forces are located in nearly one hundred and thirty countries around the world performing a variety of duties from combat operations to peacekeeping to training with foreign militaries. Some of these deployments have existed for more than fifty years, as in Japan, Germany and South Korea, while others have more recent origins such as the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The National Optimists Party poses three simple questions: Are we getting value for dollar spent? Are those in whose lands our armed forces serve deriving sufficient benefit from our presence? Is there anything we could do to make our presence more effective? And our answers are no, no and a resounding yes, because our Party refuses to allow pessimism’s views about yesterday and tomorrow to rob us of optimism about the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow.
ENERGY INDEPENDENCE & ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY
For too long we have been looking down for our supplies of energy – beneath the ground, beneath the seas. We now see all too clearly how woefully limited the supplies of the fossil fuels that lie beneath us truly are. Hence, that downward looking stance no longer serves. It’s time to look up.
At present, the Sun is about 70% hydrogen and 28% helium. The Sun’s energy output is roughly 386 billion billion megawatts per second. By contrast, the United States consumes about four million megawatts per year; the whole world, something on the order of 15 million megawatts per year. While wind, tidal (The Pacific Ocean generates more energy as it hits the coast of California in one year than the State of California uses in one year, for example.) and other forms of sustainable energy production are available to us and should be used as appropriate, the National Optimists Party believes that future energy needs will ultimately be met by the immense power output in the forms of hydrogen and helium as supplied continuously by our Sun.
To hasten that inevitability, we propose a program similar to the Apollo Project, inaugurated by John Kennedy and which put man on the moon in nine years from implementation.
A National Optimists Party Administration, in an all out effort in conjunction with public and private research and development facilities and manufacturers, pledges sustainable energy independence within eight years.
Accomplishing this task will restore America to a position of rightful global leadership and constitute a lasting benefit to future generations.
Energy independence is a cornerstone of the National Optimists Party agenda for Environmental Security. Indeed, environmental health and security must go hand in hand with sustainable energy independence.
In this regard, the National Optimists Party notes that there is not a single problem attending environmental degradation for which there is not a proposed solution. The world’s ablest scientists, researchers and inventors are working to devise viable solutions for everything from atmospheric carbon to global warming and from habitat loss to species extinction. We have been remarkably clever to develop such solutions. Now we must be wise enough to implement them.
EDUCATION
Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
Thomas Jefferson
Ageless wisdom tells us that the foundation of the state is the education of its citizens. At a time in history when education is necessary for the maintenance and furtherance of society as never before, we spend more to entertain our populace than to educate it.
Our National Optimists Party objective is that all persons, whatever their age or level of ability, have a right as citizens to a free education of a kind for which they are best suited and to the fullest extent of their abilities. We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves. We must now devote ourselves to the principle that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.
It is the duty of our republic to educate, just as it is the right of the people to expect education.
Further, the aim of education is not knowledge, but action, for education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
HEALTH CARE
We are the land of the free. In health there is the most fundamental freedom
The National Optimists Party believes, as Benjamin Disraeli said, “The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend.” We also recognize that investing in health will produce enormous benefits.
At the same time, we must confront the stark reality that one in seven Americans, including more than 8 million children, does not have even basic healthcare coverage. Health care comprises nearly 20 percent of our national economy, but outdated bureaucracy and red tape have stifled innovation and raised costs. As a result, today more than 45 million are without any health coverage.
The National Optimists Party offers a novel remedy to this condition and the condition of health care in general in America: We are opposed to health insurance of any kind. In fact, we believe health and insurance don’t belong in the same sentence.
What we propose instead of health insurance is a comprehensive, cradle-to-the-grave policy and practice of health assurance. In other words, everyone born in the United States of America is born assured of high quality health care for the duration of their lives.
It is only when every American has access to quality health care that we will create a truly strong and secure America, because of all our cherished liberties in this sweet land of liberty, health is first among them.
ECONOMICS
Though it’s been said that the science of Economics is rendering the obvious in terms incomprehensible, the National Optimists Party has a simple synopsis, a simple equation derived from adding the sum of the five principles listed above. If we are to practice good governance in the defense of liberty, devote our treasure and intellect to becoming energy independent and environmentally secure, educate our populace and care for the health of our citizenry, we will inevitably prosper. Not only will we prosper, but we will regain the respect and admiration of the whole world and make of ourselves what we have long considered ourselves to be - the great hope of human kind. To this end and to quantify the value of the sum just mentioned, a primary goal of our administration is to seed, foster and realize the coming Second Industrial Revolution, designed to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand and usher in the Era of Abundance.
Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.
Jimmy Carter
To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, “Whether they be young in spirit, or young in age, members of the Optimists Party must never lose that youthful zest for new ideas and for a better world, which has made us great.”
I dedicate myself to liberty over power, for liberty is the love of others, while power is no more than the love of one’s self.
Eve Darling
I offer myself as a political candidate in the same spirit that motivated John Adams. I must engage with politics that my children may have liberty to study the sciences. My children ought to study the sciences in order to give their children a right to study the arts. So shall we progress.
Eve Darling
To faith and hope, we of the National Optimists Party add purpose and planning.
Our faith in an ideal future for all and hope for the dignity of humanity is to be implemented by purposefully setting a course for society that requires a dignified citizenry – one that enacts a carefully crafted plan to build the best possible future.
The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing suffices to solve all of the world's problems. This world bears abundance for our need, but not for our greed. Let us wake from this hypnosis induced in large mammals by shiny objects and do our best. It is when we do our best that we render ourselves worthy of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is when we awake and remember to add enlightened to self-interest, as understood by the authors of our Declaration of Independence, that the pursuit of happiness can well and truly result in its durable acquisition.
Eve Darling
We Optimists have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and goodness are as old as the hills. All we have done, all we propose to do is implement both on as universal a scale as possible.
Liberty is to the collective body, what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society.
Thomas Jefferson
The C.I.A. World Factbook estimates global GDP to be around sixty six trillion dollars in 2008. The total value of all financial instruments traded in 2007 amounted to something on the order of one thousand seven hundred trillion dollars.
The National Optimists Party recognizes in this a great opportunity.
National Optimists Party, Copyright 2011, All rights Reserved
