by Jacob G. Hornberger

August 31, 2026

Conservatives, progressives, and even some libertarians are coming up with “solutions” for the federal government’s $40 trillion debt, which is climbing by the minute. The “solutions” range from cutting spending to raising taxes.

There is one common denominator in all of these conservative, progressive, and libertarian “solutions”: saving, reforming, and improving America’s welfare-warfare state way of life.

But the question naturally arises: Why save and reform immoral, dysfunctional, and destructive systems that have obviously failed to achieve their purported ends and, in the process, have served to destroy the liberty of the American people? The question is especially pertinent to libertarians, given that genuine libertarianism is about freedom, not attaining some sort of warmed-over, improved serfdom.

Here is my libertarian solution to the massive amount of federal spending that undergirds the federal government’s rapidly growing $40 trillion debt that now hangs over the American people like a sword of Damocles:

Immediately:

1. Repeal Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, subsidies, education grants, food stamps, and every other welfare program.

2. End the drug war by legalizing all drugs. Abolish the DEA. End the Pentagon’s drug-war assassinations.

3. Dismantle the entire immigration-control system and the deadly and destructive immigration police state that comes with it, including ICE and the Border Patrol. End the deportations and close the deportation camps. Destroy the Berlin Wall along the border and privatize land that has been stolen through eminent domain. Open the borders to the free movement of people.

4. Repeal all tariffs and unilaterally dismantle all restrictions on the free flow of goods and services into and out of the United States.

5. Dismantle Homeland Security and end the war on terrorism.

6. Dismantle the national-security branch of the federal government — i.e., the Pentagon, the vast military-industrial complex, the ever-growing army of “defense” contractors, the empire of domestic and foreign military bases and installations, the CIA, and the NSA. Bring home all troops in foreign lands and discharge them into the private sector. Restore America’s founding system of a limited-government republic with a small military force.

7. Abolish all federal departments and agencies except State, Treasury, and a radically downsized Defense Department limited to defending the United States from foreign invasion.

8. Abolish the FBI.

9. End all sanctions, embargoes, coups, invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, state-sponsored assassinations, torture, and indefinite detention.

10. Abolish legal-tender laws, the federal paper-money system, and the Federal Reserve. Separate money and the state.

11. Prohibit any governmental management or regulation of economic activity. Establish a free-enterprise economic system, one in which economic enterprise is totally free of government control and regulation. Amend the Constitution by eliminating the Interstate Commerce clause. Separate economy and the state.

12. Abolish the federal income tax and repeal the Sixteenth Amendment.

I don’t know exactly how much all this would reduce federal spending and taxes, but my hunch is that the reductions would be substantial. Most important, though, is that it would mean that Americans would finally be living in a genuinely free society.