Candidate for
United States Representative; District 19

My fundamental political philosophy derives from the foundational documents of our nation, and as such, it is a typically American political philosophy. It is summarized as:

All men and women are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among them being Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; to secure these rights, the Federal government must derive its just powers from the consent of the governed.

The purpose of the Federal government is to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

We must be a government of laws, and not of men - that is, a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

I add to that basic philosophy two concepts that I believe are essential to a well-ordered government - subsidiarity and solidarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that problems should be solved at the smallest and most intimate level possible, and solidarity is the notion that we are connected with our neighbors, whether down the street or across the country.

In arriving at my political philosophy, I have been influenced by a number of disparate thinkers, but one, E.F. Schumacher, has touched me deeply. The Epilogue from his last book expresses well why I am running for office:

"After Dante (in the Divine Comedy) had "woken up" and found himself in the horrible dark wood where he had never meant to go, his good intention to make the ascent up the mountain was of no avail; he first had to descend into the Inferno to be able fully to appreciate the reality of sinfulness. Today, people who acknowledge the Inferno of things as they really are in the modern world are regularly denounced as "doomwatchers," pessimists, and the like. Dorothy Sayers, one of the finest commentators on Dante as well as on modern society, has this to say: That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectibility, we find it easy enough to recognize the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of a living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism; violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including one's own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercializing of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people's minds by mass-hysteria and "spell-binding" of all kinds, venality and string pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all the means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidest mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kinship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are the all-too-recognizable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilized relations. What an array of divergent problems! Yet people go on clamoring for "solutions" and become angry when they are told that the restoration of society must come from within and cannot come from without. The above passage was written a quarter of a century ago. Since then, there has been further progress downhill, and the description of the Inferno sounds even more familiar. But there have also been positive changes: Some people are no longer angry when told that restoration must come from within; the belief that everything is "politics" and that radical rearrangements of the "system" will suffice to save civilization is no longer held with the same fanaticism as it was held twenty-five years ago. Everywhere in the modern world there are experiments in new life-styles and voluntary simplicity; the arrogance of materialistic Scientism is in decline, and it is sometimes tolerated even in polite society to mention God. Admittedly, some of this change of mind stems initially not from spiritual insight but from materialistic fear aroused by the environmental crisis, the fuel crisis, the threat of a food crisis, and the indications of a coming health crisis. In the face of these -and many other-threats, most people still try to believe in the "technological fix." If we could develop fusion energy, they say, our fuel problems would be solved; if we would perfect the processes of turning oil into edible proteins, the world's food problem would be solved; and the development of new drugs will surely avert any threat of a health crisis. And so on. All the same, faith in modern man's omnipotence is wearing thin. Even if all the "new" problems were solved by technological fixes, the state of futility, disorder, and corruption would remain. It existed before the present crises became acute, and it will not go away by itself. More and more people are beginning to realize that "the modern experiment" has failed. It received its early impetus from what I have called the Cartesian revolution, which, with implacable logic, separated man from those Higher Levels that alone can maintain his humanity. Man closed the gates of Heaven against himself and tried, with immense energy and ingenuity, to confine himself to the Earth. He is now discovering that the Earth is but a transitory state, so that a refusal to reach for Heaven means an involuntary descent into Hell. The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing. Only if we know that we have actually descended into infernal regions where nothing awaits us but "the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilized relations," can we summon the courage and imagination needed for a "turning around," a metanoia. This then leads to seeing the world in a new light, namely, as a place where the things modern man continuously talks about and always fails to accomplish can actually be done. The generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all mankind; we know enough about ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the Earth, and there are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; we are quite competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery. Above all, we shall then see that the economic problem is a convergent problem which has been solved already: we know how to provide enough and do not require any violent, inhuman, aggressive technologies to do so. There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been. But there is a moral problem, and moral problems are not convergent, capable of being solved so that future generations can live without effort. No, they are divergent problems, which have to be understood and transcended. Can we rely on it that a "turning around" will be accomplished by enough people quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but no matter what the answer, it will mislead. The answer "Yes" would lead to complacency, the answer "No" to despair. It is desirable to leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work."

Finally, I understand that many Californians and Americans are disappointed in our elected officials - they believe that there is not a dime's worth of difference between any of the candidates and they are frustrated and angry. I had felt myself thinking that often. But criticism is easy. I have decided to take the approach of "Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."