Hi! I’m Dean Clancy.
I’m a health freedom advocate, policy analyst, consultant, opinion writer, and public speaker. I have more than twenty years’ high-level policy experience in Congress, the White House, and the U.S. health care industry. I work as a senior policy fellow at Americans for Prosperity. I’m also president and founder of HSAs for All, and a partner at Adams Auld LLC, a public policy consultancy. My hobbies are vaping, watching old movies, listening to pleasant music (special fondness for Dixieland and Louis Armstrong), and playing with my grandchildren.
I have some policy passions, which dominate this admittedly odd little website. The most important, I call ‘renewing the promise of American life.’ I want to see our country happy and united again and without coercive conformity. And I think it can happen. But only if we restore the principles of the American founding to the center of our national life.
We already know the formula for happiness. We just have to follow it.
In political terms, I describe myself as a ‘decentralist,’ rather than using a more familiar label like ‘conservative,’ ‘liberal,’ or ‘libertarian’ — terms that have lost their usefulness through overextension. I am a small-d democrat and a small-r republican. I oppose monopoly, and I prefer the little guy and common sense.
I believe in equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none — a government of laws and not of men. I am not a utopian, but I do believe that virtue is possible, and thus happiness. I hate corruption, but I’m not naive. I regard the rights of conscience as sacred, although, to be sure, your rights end where my nose begins. I think people should be tolerant and open-minded, but not so open their brains fall out.
As for religion, I view it as more beneficial than not, and the separation of church and state as best for everyone. It seems to me the idea of a creator of some sort can never be disproved because there has to be an uncaused cause. And until science can prove beyond doubt that the universe is infinite in both space and time, reasonable people can be forgiven for viewing it as someone’s handiwork.
In the mundane realm, I think we can never be truly happy without personal and local self-government. ‘Small is beautiful.’
I am not a socialist, because men are clearly selfish by nature, and have natural rights, and because I can read history. Without property, we can’t be happy. Without property rights, we can kiss our freedom goodbye, and with it a good deal of our human dignity.
I am not a progressive because, while principles can be wrong, they can’t evolve. Historical relativism is bunk. Moral relativism makes me shudder.
I strongly support civil rights, understood as individual rights, not group rights. I’m grateful the Constitution is color-blind.
On economic matters, I support what I half-jokingly call McKinleynomics, the traditional and highly successful policy mix of balanced budgets, honest money, and no income tax. I regard the income tax as the ‘root of all evil’ and government money-printing as a polite word for theft.
These views, and my passion for reform, have led me to compile what I somewhat pretentiously call my ‘American renewal plan.’ It’s not so much a plan as a sort of compendium or catalog of about eighty reform recommendations (and a few rules of thumb) that together, I humbly believe, would reinvigorate the body politic and renew the promise of American life. The plan constitutes my personal answer to the question, What would it take to make America America again? — I mean America in her best and noblest sense.
In a nutshell, I am betting that, if we revive the constitutional principles of James Madison and the tax and monetary policies of William McKinley, we will make possible the decent and flourishing America of Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra. Does that sound naive? I suppose it must. But why not? Is there a better idea?
Speaking of ideas, I think we’re all influenced by the ideas of ‘defunct economists,’ and for me that includes a pair of peculiar thinkers, E.F. Schumacher and Orestes Brownson. I don’t agree with everything they say, but they’ve forced me to wrestle with hard questions about the law, economics, politics, and society. And a trio of English Christians with initials for first names — C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien — have lifted the roof of my imagination, and offered me a glimpse of Christendom.
My favorite Bible verse is ‘I will be glad in the Lord.’
James Madison is my homeboy, Walker Percy is my spirit guide, and Toshiro Mifune is my favorite samurai. And I’d rather be George Smiley than James Bond.
I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and grew up in Aurora, Colorado. I’ve spent most of my career in Washington, D.C., and since 2016 have had the luxury of working remotely from sunny Florida. My wife and I have been married for more than thirty years and are blessed with four children and, so far, three grandchildren — all of them amazing, and living proof of evolutionary progress.
For what it’s worth, I think the happiest kind of life is the one in which you forget yourself in the service of others, pursue justice without fear, and let yourself be moved by wonder and beauty.
There’s always hope! Life’s an adventure. Each new day is an opportunity. And every person is a miracle — even the annoying ones.
Dean Frazier Clancy
Florida, 2024