The Way Home

By Joel Salatin - September 30, 2025 at 09:12AM

How do you find your way home when you’re lost and far away? Where do you start? In wilderness survival training, it’s “head downhill.” That will bring you to water, and water will bring you to civilization.

Let’s look at the last two weeks:

1. Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
2. Bombing alleged fentanyl boats heading to the US.
3. Copycat (from Kirk’s assassin, bullet writing) shootings at ICE.
4. Acetaminophen (in some 500 brands, most prominently Tylenol) links to autism.
5. National Guard deployed to cities for crime control.
6. National reading studies: half of Americans are functionally illiterate.
7. AI partners induce psychosis and suicide.
8. Illinois honors student sues a public high school for her illiteracy.
9. RFK, Jr. fires and reorganizes the ACIP board.
10. Florida stops ALL vaccine mandates.

I irritated conservative friends a few days ago by disagreeing with Trump’s bombing of alleged fentanyl boats. What happens when the government decides compost-grown tomatoes are dangerous? Bombing compost piles? A government that can keep me from ingesting fentanyl and methamphetamine can keep me from ingesting raw milk or homemade charcuterie.

As I head downhill in this societal wilderness, I find commonalities in our lostness. More than 80 percent of first-time illicit drug use occurs in public schools. We’re paying $16,000 per student per year and getting a 50 percent functional illiteracy rate. And now we have pregnant women jiving on TikTok binging on Tylenol, and my taxes are supposed to pay for the consequences of that irresponsible behavior? And I’m supposed to pay for the dysfunction of failing public schools? And AI-induced psychosis? And assassins inspired by “gestapo” and “Nazi” and “Fascists” spewed from the mouths of Godless pagans?

How do we find our way home? I suggest it starts by changing our governmental obligations from care to responsibility. How do you develop responsible people? You do it by making them bear the consequences of their decisions. You don’t exercise discernment muscles by making decisions for them or promising to pick up the pieces for bad-decision collateral damage.

My heart breaks for dysfunction, but as terrible as it is, we can’t find our way home if we keep wandering without a plan. So here’s a plan.

1. Eliminate all government funding for education, from kindergarten to college; no college grants; that drops 80 percent of first-time drug use. Colleges have to fund themselves.
2. Eliminate all government health advice; let folks find their own path. Yes, eliminate the Dept. of Health and Human Services; let us find our own way, thank you very much.
3. Eliminate all government involvement in health care; folks can decide what they want and shop, learn, and share their own findings. Wouldn’t it be neat if TikTok shared various positives and negatives about competing therapies? Think how informed we’d become.
4. Legalize all drugs; if you mess up your life with drugs, you can suffer the consequences. No government agency will help you pick up the pieces. No Medicare; no Medicaid; no doctor licensing; it’s all privatized on the free market; no government manipulation, corruption, fraud, and extortion, no prescription licenses.
5. Eliminate the IRS and go to a 10 percent flat tax. If 10 percent is good enough for God’s tithe, it should be good enough for society.
6. Cut the federal government by 90 percent; pay off the debt; bring back sound money backed by gold; no more government borrowing, period. Like a business, the government must live within its means.
7. Eliminate prisons and institute Singapore’s caning punishment; fast and cheap.
8. Shut down every foreign military base; bring our boys and girls home.
9. Food Emancipation Proclamation–let neighbors transact food commerce without asking the government’s permission.
10. Eliminate zoning laws so folks can generate income from their properties without bribing government officials.
11. Eliminate all government grants, loans, aid, etc. Foreign and domestic, from agriculture to ammunition.
12. Extend voting privileges ONLY to folks who pay more to the governnment (taxes) than they receive in benefits; these are the true stakeholders of a culture and the only ones truly invested in its overall functionality.

This is not a comprehensive list, but you get the overall drift. What we need is MARA–Make Americans RESPONSIBLE Again. How do we do that? We make ourselves live with the consequences of our decisions. That’s the way home. America was great when the government was smaller. The bigger the government, the smaller we as a people become.

What I see instead are rabbit trails of little tweaks here and there, but the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the sick get sicker and the have-nots proliferate because nobody ever told them it’s up to them. Sometimes the best hand up is a swift kick in reality’s seat of the pants. No free lunch. Make your own destiny. I’m glad to help you, but pick up your feet if I’m carrying you. God don’t make no junk, so quit acting like you’re junk. And government, quit incentivizing junk behavior and junk decisions.

What do you consider the first “downhill way home” path?

Reprinted with permission from Brownstone Institute.

from Ron Paul Institute Featured Articles

via IFTTT