 Empowerment, as covered in this lesson, is based on public ownership of both our economy and our government. We orient it to human performance with discovery of where we find agreement, and it is such an agreement that we become a corporate body of volunteers that can direct our public management of our economy for our own We the People purposes. The keys for this are inherent in our performance vision of costs and benefits, so that we can find where people will choose to initiate such change actions, as will be to our benefit. We start with the performance tool we know, the black box. By our founding documents, the United States was created by and for We the People of the United States. We are both creators and customers for that national government created through our agreement. By the nature of ownership, we are the ones who give purpose to our government. The only purpose it has is our purpose. More specifically, it has the purpose that we put upon it. It is also fact that this government, through the people who exercise authority on our behalf, has consistently worked to avoid this simple performance understanding. Instead of embracing our heritage, our leaders have consistently worked to establish personal privilege in leaders in the older mold. This has included a consistent and intensive effort to prepare the people to accept the government as a sovereign authority that would train and educate people to accept the authority of leadership. By performance orientation, we see that establishing government sovereignty required disempowering the people, and that has been a self-defeating direction when it comes to performance. The purpose of this course is opening the way to personal empowerment by establishing our national performance vision. We start with the simplest analysis. There is a single purpose, and it is our purpose. There is a single customer, and it is the citizen, or it is citizenry, when gathered as a public. There are no corporate customers. There are no businesses or special interest gatherings as customers. The political parties are not customers. There is just us. None of these corporate bodies are entitled to any voice in our government, to any representation, or to any benefit that our government might deliver. Our black box model has the government, us, and our symbiotic relationship with each other. Those many corporate entities, even those created by active government, are all inside the box where they will no longer be distractions. The economy, the environment, the world governments, none of these has any part to play in the performance of our national government. The appropriate rule is before us. The input that government operates upon is what it gets from us. The output from government is what comes to us that we receive in value. This is one of the reasons that we have spent so much time and effort in studying how this potent black box tool is applied. This is one of the points where it becomes a citizen's weapon against all those who would deny our ownership or symbiotic customer relationship with our government. We are truly the only party in interest. You are truly the only party in interest. The appropriate performance rule is if the output from our government is not delivered to us and for us to value, it has no value. We as customers are the only ones who get to value what our government generates. There is no true value in what our government does, only in what it delivers to us. Our natural purchase decisions address what it costs us, costs in terms of our commitment to operation of our government, to gain what our government delivers to us. That is the performance cycle that defines operation of our government. With taxation, the flags go up immediately. The rule is already well established. If you have to be ordered to provide, then your contribution is no longer your choice. Your status as owner and customer is being denied. What it collects includes a significant amount of waste. It will be expended on delivering things to those who are not customers and it will be at your expense as a citizen and part of the public. Actual performance will require a stark reversal of common attitude and approach. We are urged to satisfy the needs of government for operating resources. In the strictest sense, the government has no needs of its own. The only needs it has are those we gave to it. If it is not our needs, then it is not our government's needs. And this is just like what we have with our economy. The economy only does what people do. It has no operating resources except what come from us and no output from it has real value except what comes to us as owner customers of our economy. We the people also own this nation and we ultimately own everything in it. There is no other party in interest if the economy is functioning to any other purpose. It is creating waste. The function of our government concerning the economy is our purpose. It is to manage our economy on our behalf. It is to so manage it that it provides value through serving economic purposes. Our economic purposes. It is to so direct our commitments that government performs that management effort on our behalf. As a fairly new understanding for most, we are the only party in interest that everything that the government consumes in its operation comes out of our pockets. Building business is just a way to hide what is being seized from us. If it comes from our economy, it comes from us as owners and customers of our economy. The power of this new vision isn't seeing the waste so clearly that we can come to agreement on actions that eliminate it. We the people are the United States. With the introduction of performance orientation, we have two diametrically opposed visions for the operation of the nation. The one now urged on us, the one that now governs operations and activities in our government, is that of a government sovereignty. The alternative is that we the people are the nation and the government is the way we exercise our ownership of our nation. The first is that effective foundation for our current society and government. It is presented to us as common knowledge. With this our government speaks for the nation and for us and we are called into service to the nation. The second is urged by our historical beginning and the service our nation can provide to us. With this our government represents us and serves our need for central management over the elements of our nation. With the first orientation, we have a crime defined as an offense against a state. Anything that the leadership finds offensive can be defined as a crime. This supports a government such as we have, one that can seize private property for almost any purpose, that taxes people and businesses to do whatever leaders see to be wrong, one that prosecutes those who get out of line. With the second orientation, we have the documented constitutional agreement as definition of an inherited government. The crime is what is offensive or disruptive to people. This supports crime as an interference with the rights and protected privileges of citizens. We see a hint of the second in the historical founding of our nation, but it is a light too soon smothered at what leaders have set to be their goals and objectives. What we have is regulatory law. We have government issuing orders and directives to its rightful owners. We have financial regulations to promote highly regulated businesses to support government seizing of tax dollars. We have investment laws that support privileged leaders at the expense of common citizens. We have corporate business laws that protect the privileged leaders of corporate entities so that they can support the political leadership in their exercise of privilege. I know that it works. Like all feudal systems founded upon a class of privileged leaders, it is able to function and keep the general support of the peasants. It is able to get some things done when it has to, even if it causes massive damages to peasants or citizens. The proposed alternative based on a return to personal freedom, prosperity, and support for the trust-based relations approaches government as a source of supporting services. In this approach, government does not have purpose of its own, but works to satisfy the needs and wants of we the people. In specific, it includes delivery of justice and welfare services. Our working example is the citizen who needs to move to a new place and has a house to sell. He deals with private claim of ownership, which is somewhat offensive to private privilege and government over the nation. Government typically seizes rent, we call it taxes, from those who claim to actually have property rights in there. You can note that the expenditure of the rent is largely used for non-property purposes like public education. In order to sell the property, you have to transfer a deed, gaining official documents where government recognizes your private contract. Leaders want to know who is going to be responsible to pay the rent. You have to hire professional lawyers and real estate experts to perfect the transfer and hire the title insurance to secure the transfer effect. This is necessary due to the challenging mesh of regulations that deal with such transfers. The performance alternative points out the waste. Performance is government serving its citizens instead of regulating them. It is not governance acting to stay an effective ownership over what citizens think they own. For a performance alternative, the buyer and seller show up at the office of the Deeding Authority and they sign the transfer. The authority checks records to assure compliance with requirements and issues the new deed. It is the authority who is regulated, not the citizens who shift ownership. There is no employment of others to complete a simple sales transaction. The government provides a transfer service instead of trying to put endless requirements on citizens. And when it comes to quieting title, that becomes a function of the state, a part of the service it renders. I would suggest that any adverse claims be accepted only on required repayment of previous taxes to those who had paid them. This would, in fairly short number of years, effectively remove any need to take on additional title insurance. When it comes to giving, there is the witness and teachings of Jesus praising the effort of a widow, a typically impoverished person, in giving what she had to serve others. With performance orientation, we approach charity as an investment. Giving charity is a witness to personal prosperity. It is a personal choice that the object of charity is of greater immediate value than other available opportunities for what is given. Prosperity is having the choices and accepting the value of the consequences. In the poor widow's story, the value she has in this money is less than what she values as the result of giving it away. In this section, we are addressing governance or economics. We are addressing the potential for leaders giving charity with other people's funds. The American Common Law has already addressed this effectively. It is the law of agency. It includes how one person can represent another. It is a body of law that approaches representation in a way that supports the teamed efforts of a person and the one who represents that person. It is a set of legal understandings addressing the basic duty and responsibility of one person who does represent another. The legal agent is authorized under authority of a signed agreement to take action that would otherwise be done by the one who is represented. The legality of what the agent does is limited to what the person represented could legally do. I understand how strange such a statement must be, but we need the positive to also address a negative. If the person represented would not be authorized to do something, then the agent is not authorized to do it either. In a like way, the agent is also limited to the actions authorized in the signed document that establishes the agency. We again find ourselves with the current privileged leader approach to governance that they are authorized by their office rather than by any responsibility to common citizens. It is that privileged leaders are not subject to the limits of legal agency, but have sovereignty and government as their source of authority. Common citizens, by electing them into office, are approached as giving them permission to exercise our nation's sovereign authorities. In performance orientation, they are just agents of the public, with the written constitution as a signed authority to act in accord with the limitations of their agency. In today's sovereignty-based government, leaders feel free to give away public money whenever and wherever they feel it to be right, expecting common citizens to support their public largesse. The performance option is very different in orientation. What they collect from the public is public money. It was collected for known purposes for operating the government. Giving the people's money away as charity is a breach of trust, giving it to where citizens would not give it on their own is seen as criminal behavior. Sovereign representation is seen as a denial of agency, a denial of having to actually represent those peasant citizens whose money has been taken for the rightful operation of the sovereign government. Again, we are the owners in fact. We are the owners in terms of establishment of this government. We do not have to put up with misrepresentation, theft, or embezzlement. This is the money that should be running our government for us. All it takes is coming together with others and setting that liability upon our leaders. They will answer to us as the owners should we have sufficient agreement on what we would require of them. There is a legal approach to this situation, and that is the legal liability of agents who go beyond the authority granted by the ones they represent. If they take such actions, they could be held personally liable for the consequences. If an agent gives away a client's funds outside of the agency, they are liable for the results unless it is separately approved by the ones they represent. It is just that simple a concept. If the agent gives a thousand dollars to a needy person using the client's funds and the client takes offense, that agent is on the hook to return the thousand dollars on paying a prosecution for embezzlement. We do not have a well-established legal basis for public representatives, but the law of agency is pretty clear on this. We also have looked at a possibility or an alternative that of having public management services applied to support private giving. Then, leader liability is no longer a threat. Leaders are not going to make such a change. They will not give up privilege unless the people require it of them. This is a potential direction for citizen-initiated and directed change. I have stated time and again that modern leaders are able to do things, but are very poor at getting things done. It is time to give this greater definition of what is possibly the greatest source of waste we have. We call it political leadership. We start with Congress with more than 500 dedicated representatives. We multiply these by 10 to add essential congressional staffers and support people. This is an annual expense of 5,000 man years of committed leadership effort. The performance question is, what do 5,000 dedicated political leaders accomplish? And that is just a lead-in question. We have the bendy people and who are the only party in interest with performance orientation. We know that the only values that these dedicated public employees generate by their efforts is inherent in the value we receive from their efforts. To be fair, much of what they do addresses the operation of the nation and our economy. Our leaders spend a great deal of time and energy in assuring their effective operation. After all, they are intent on running things. But then again, there is great potential value in bringing the resources of government to coordinated efforts based on delivery of value to us. That is the performance of governance. Running things properly is not performance. We have recently been privy to senior executive branch employees who won't even talk to our congressmen. There have been findings of contempt of Congress for public employees who represent no citizens. And so we turn to the definition of performance that is appropriate to managing an organization. How much does it cost to gain performance through those who do performance? Guess what? Performance of government is defined by a value cycle with we the people. A simple starting point. The business of government is effectively defined as what we receive in comparison with what we have to commit to receive it. We measure management in terms of how much it costs to gain performance through those who are completing that value cycle with us. Is it any wonder that modern leaders insist that there is no way to measure their performance? And then we have the endless conflicts in Congress, trying to figure out who is most in need of their actions and who is needs to be regulated or taxed for the benefit of others. How many citizens really feel they should be benefited by our leaders raiding the wealth of other citizens? How can representatives in Congress find themselves in total disagreement with the President who represents the same people? It is then that you realize just how incredibly wasteful government is in its operation. But it just gets worse. Political leadership is sharply focused on taking sides on issues, on things where people are not in agreement. Representing some of the people and overcoming the rest is the worst sort of waste with congressmen leaving both sides on the issue. They are creating waste instead of performance. And there is still more. There is the political promise to go to Washington to fight for you. Just who are we fighting against in Congress? You find that you are urged to fight against other Americans and their representatives. It is hard to even speculate on a more wasteful operation. The pernicious nature of what we have only becomes clearer by reference to the well-written Constitution as it arranges a government structure where people are to work together to benefit we the people. This is what we have to work with at our start to the 21st century. The opportunity for improvement is incredible. Those who have been set into authority in government have so divided themselves as to be impotent with only their grasp on privilege to bring them together. Almost anything that can bring us together to put a harness on leadership for our public purpose will succeed because our leaders are unable to accomplish much of anything except waste and division. That has become the product for which they seem most proud and it is preventing one another from accomplishing much of anything. So where can we find agreement? Don't it possibly bring people to such a level of agreement that we can step in and direct corrective action? The preliminary answer is that we have been taught not to look. We have a culture that educates us to look away, to seek out and find issues and arguments instead of seeing the obvious. We are customers. We can agree that we are not just the beneficiaries of government. We are its owners. It is ours. We are its customers. Its purpose is serving we the people. What it produces is to have value to us and it is to be provided for a reasonable cost. We are naturally agreed on the value relationship when we accept ourselves as customers of our government. We can agree that we are to be represented by those we elect. The very idea that 500 representatives of others, others we did not elect, get to decide where our taxes are spent is ludicrous. We can agree that the one we elect to Congress is given the checkbook for our contributions and that he or she is personally answerable to us for where it is spent or not spent. It is called management, but it is management by we the people of those who are elected to represent us. It is setting financial agency upon our congressmen, telling them to do the job they are elected to do. It is also empowering our representatives to represent the people who elect him or her into office. And we only have to get agreement in just one congressional district to start this action. When our agreement is published, you can expect it to be picked up by citizens in every district. It is a win-win change. The tantrums in Congress will be terrible to witness, but are unlikely to be effective. The last thing any congressman wants to do is to tell constituents that he doesn't want to be responsible to them and would prefer someone else be their financial representative. Whenever and wherever we the people find our agreement, we are the only authority through our being the real owner of this nation. We have the lesson of congressional mismanagement to guide us. It doesn't take much of anything to rule over a people who are divided against themselves. Congress has been ruling over us with just that understanding. It is why they find importance in focusing on issues instead of delivering value to us. And even more, we the people can assume exception level management over our government whenever and wherever we can agree on the value of doing this. Basic management is not a mystery. Citizen management of leaders can be implemented as a combination of initiating an action to gain something we value, empowering those who will complete our action and receiving the result we value. Congress is supposed to be managing our government for us. That is why they have been given access to our funds in the U.S. Treasury. It is about time for us to insist that they actually start doing the management that we pay them to do. Again, there is nothing mysterious about what they should be doing and insisting that they do what we put them there to do is not really a matter of contention. What we can agree upon probably includes Congress taking fiscal responsibility for what they authorize other parts of government to do. For a first concept, this is a directed change, not what Congress chooses to do. It is citizens assuming exception management and directing a change to our financial and political agents. When we are gathered and agreed we do not need their permission nor do we answer to them as some higher authority. A good potential for direction is that no spending bill be passed without a valued result that is returned to Congress when the authorized action is accomplished. Now doesn't that sound like management? The agreement should include wide publication of the spending authorized and the results that are pending or achieved. That publication supports our higher level management over our government. Our management feedback includes the amount spent, the purpose for spending it, and the track of a success in delivering what is such value that Congress funds it. It will probably be shocking to see how much waste is simply eliminated by this. The idea of being accountable for delivering something of value changes the entire nature of government from some isolated group performing their function to a centrally managed government operation. That is what management does. It brings resources of the organization together to gain a valued result. When the valued result has not returned, the funding goes away. A few simple changes like this can have massive effect on the operation of our government. Each congressman will, to some extent, become directly accountable to we the people for spending of public money. And that is a massive change that would minimize influence trading among representatives. Each would be answerable to the people who elect them for any promise to spend on someone else's project, should they spend on his or hers. Spending the people's tax contributions to the benefit of others first is likely to cost the representative dearly at future elections. So why would congressmen put up with this sort of change? The answer is in the authority of we the people. If a representative refuses to represent the people, voters do not have to wait for the next election. The one who is hired as an agent can be terminated. The agency can be terminated at any time and for any reason sufficient to their purpose. If we the people are sufficiently disturbed by lack of representation, we can come to agreement on declaring the office vacant and initiate replacement. We can fire a representative who refuses to represent us and there is nothing that even a gathered congress can do about it. The initiation of financial management in our government would have a ripple effect throughout the entire system. The requirement to manage and to return value for the resources committed would impact every area of government. Consider as a stunning example that the 2016 cost of the internal revenue service was around $11 billion. That is $88 per taxpayer and I challenge anyone to describe what a taxpayer receives from this expenditure. It is the cost of an agency that does nothing for we the people. The waste is incredible, putting an expense upon the taxpaying public instead of delivering anything of value. The pressure to find a less expensive way to fund government would be intense. Consider the Department of Justice function. What is it delivering to us? Where is the value that we can receive? It has valid and valuable mission in assuring that the laws of our nation are enforced. It also has a number of functions like defending public officers who are challenged by citizens. That creates damages not services. Such functions would probably be hidden or simply be terminated when there is focus on what it delivers to Congress and to the people who pay the bill. Groups like the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency would have to find a public product to deliver that people would value. Without something to produce for the public, it is likely that their funding would be in threat. I would expect a significant and ongoing shrinking of government to result with a corresponding reduction in what costs are put on the public. How much does it cost for our government to manage our nation? In the ultimate understanding that we are the only customers, it is a question of how much it costs us and what we both receive and value. The average federal tax burden is somewhere around 13%. Then there are the state taxes. To these, we add indirect taxes, and fees charged to business that also come out of our pockets. This is what it costs us. Then we ask the customer question, what do we receive for what we pay? The financial aspect of modern government provides an environment that is filled with wasteful practices and unrepresentative spending of our national resources. We have many opportunities for major economic improvements from relatively minor efforts as in establishing financial management within Congress. Finance is not our only challenge that arises in modern privilege-based national leadership. We also have an amazing internal misrepresentation through refusing to even recognize certain large areas of government as effective parts of our government. We have empowered certain right people to operate outside normal management. Having a few special exceptions might be justified, but we are spending over $50 billion on operation of federal agencies that are unwilling to answer effectively to congressional management. What we are told is that our representatives with we the people as owners are somehow not authorized to know what they are doing. Secrecy from even our elected leaders is our next challenge.