We tend to waste time, money, and energy attacking the symptoms of problems and ignore their root causes.

What is the root cause of most of America’s problems? I believe it is government corruption. Moreover, I think that happens because we don’t know how to separate money and politics. The love of money is the root of all evil. And government corruption is so widespread because most of it is perfectly legal. And obviously it’s legal because politicians write the laws!

These thoughts led me to spend numerous hours over most of my life searching for solutions. In particular, I wondered how our government became so corrupt. So I searched deeply into the volumes of writings by America’s second, third and fourth presidents: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. And they revealed some amazing answers to the problem of separating money and politics!

Furthermore, I found a mountain of related ideas (both agreement and disagreement) among the writings of many of history’s other great thinkers about how to separate money and politics. And I’ve organized some of their names below by time period, and in birth order.

These are some great thinkers whose views amplify the ideas of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison:

• Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and Jesus Christ;
• John Milton, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Montesquieu;
• David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blackstone, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke;
• Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton;
• John C. Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Alexis De Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Henry David Thoreau;
• Mahatma Gandhi, Woodrow Wilson, G.K. Chesterton, J.B.S. Haldane, Friedrich Hayek, and Robert Nisbet;
• Jane Jacobs, Thomas Sowell, Gordon S. Wood, Ron Paul, Robert D. Putnam, Robert Reich, Charles Krauthammer, and Mike Huckabee.

I learned a great deal about these thinkers from a number of great books and great websites. As a result of all this research, I’ve written a book explaining the answers I found. And I’m now starting the long, slow process of getting it published. Meanwhile, I’m looking for conversation with others who share my concerns.

This site is for discussing how to improve our political system. It is NOT for discussing party politics or political figures. So if you have a non-partisan question or comment, feel free to leave it below.