How to Understand Budgets and Treaties – Oliver DeMille

The feedback is coming in, and a lot of people who are newly reading treaties and government budgets are asking some really great questions. Mostly they boil down to two main things.

First
A lot of people are struggling to really understand how government finances and currencies work.

This isn’t surprising. Lenin is credited with saying that capitalism can be destroyed through the money system because not one in a million people understand how it works.

When most people start reading budgets, they quickly realize that they don’t quite understand everything.

There is an excellent solution for this: Read the book The Mystery of Banking by Murray Rothbard. This will teach you to understand government money and finance. This will open all kinds of doors to really understanding what you read in budgets. (Thanks to Orrin Woodward for pointing this book out to me recently.)

Second
When you first start reading treaties, it’s easy to get bogged down in the words. The key is to read every treaty with the following two questions in mind:

1. Does this sentence give any power to a government entity?
2. If so, what government is given the power?

These two simple questions will make all the difference. For example, say you are reading The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court treaty, and you come to Article 4, Section 2, which says:

“The Court may exercise its functions and powers, as provided in this Statute, on the territory of any State Party and, by special agreement, on the territory of any other State.”

Now, ask the 2 questions. Number one, does this sentence give any power to a government entity? Answer: Yes, it does. It gives the International Criminal Court power over any nation that signs the treaty, and also of “any other” nation under certain circumstances.

Second question, what government is given the power? Answer: World level government, specifically the International Criminal Court.

So, what does this tell us? It tells us there’s a serious problem, because the U.S. might be under this treaty even though the Senate hasn’t ratified it.

These two questions cut away the fluff and get to the essence of every treaty (and also of every constitution and law, for that matter).

Finally
Try the Rothbard book and these two questions. They’ll help! Oh, and congratulations that you’re reading the fine print of what the government is doing. This makes you a SuperCitizen! (Or, in the Founders’ day, a regular person who cares about freedom.)

Oliver DeMille is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling co-author of LeaderShift: A Call for Americans to Finally Stand Up and Lead, the co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd.

Among many other works, he is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, The Coming Aristocracy, and FreedomShift: 3 Choices to Reclaim America’s Destiny.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.