In Out of Touch: The Elite One Percent and the Battle for America’s Soul, Scott W. Rasmussen, has studied voters who hold postgraduate degrees, live in zip codes with at least 10,000 people per square mile, earn at least $150,000 per year, and talk politics every day.They’re way different from the rest of us. Most of these politically active elites think we have too much individual freedom. Most of them trust our governments and imagine that we do too. Rasmussen brings valuable receipts from polls.Fortunately for us, politically active elites lag many years behind the rest of us in understanding when we are moving on to doing better things. Pivotal conflicts in the American colonies unfolded over time; later, local politicians experimented with declarations of independence; and then only after that, national politicians finally wrote the Declaration of Independence. Rasmussen offers lots of illustrations from history — long-past through current, and both government and private.Such anecdotes flesh out readers’ mental models of how elite-controlled, centralized governments that parasitically extract spoils can be overpowered by decentralized governments, organizations, and individual actions, freeing individuals to focus on the tasks they consider the most important.On solutions to specific structural or policy problems, Rasmussen is relatively silent, but otherwise can be accommodatingly progressive.Social Security and Medicaid are described in passing as essential, not as parasitic Ponzi schemes empowering government people and enriching cronies.Our half-million-person army of local elected officials is presented as imperfect but a key solution, not as still more government that it will be equally important to replace with voluntary cooperation (which in other contexts Rasmussen rightfully praises highly).That army’s large contingent of school-board members is looked to as a source of problem solvers, and vouchers are treated as unalloyedly good, rather than all government schooling and funding being understood as being instruments for political influence that we need to dismantle.Term limits, long advocated by Rasmussen, are said by some to wash out good people. Rasmussen summarily discounts this argument. Actually, these good people are key to the main systemic solution we need: to build at least one good party whose people directly use their constitutional powers against others to limit politically active elite control.Detailed solutions aside, Rasmussen offers much hopeful content. He shines when he points out that although voting runs up against a gerrymandered brick wall that keeps returning incumbents to office, voting with our feet offers strong (and reasonably fast) control over state and local governments, incentivizing both the government people we leave behind and the government people who attract us to relocate.More broadly, Rasmussen’s overall proposal is practical and vigorous: always ask who decides? This memorable question deserves to become a mantra-like prompt to question elites’ edicts, consciously choose our actions, and often not follow elites’ edicts. People who appreciate freedom will move decision-making to be ever more local — and won’t stop at state and then local governments, but ultimately will move decision-making to individuals, where the resulting freedom will maximize options, increasing the resulting benefits.Americans are heirs to a shared heritage of outcompeting nearly all politically active elites across long time periods. Out of Touch is a 250th-anniversary call to muster our latest responses, taking good advantage of today’s radically empowering, decentralizing tools, including AI.Scott Rasmussen brings helpful receipts, complementary historical understanding, and a first-rate overall proposal. Readers will end up reinvigorated and will take it from there.This article was originally published at American Thinker.The post Bypassing Politically Active Elites appeared first on LewRockwell.