Quik Thinking

Miffed at Facebook for expecting me to squish my sophisticated political views into a tiny text field, I decided to lay them out exhaustively. They follow for your general education.

Immigration should be easy. Immigrants are key to a thriving economy and society. Making us feel unwanted because you fear that we'll steal your jobs or erode your culture is a knee-jerk reaction but won't serve you well in the long run. While immigrants do compete with citizens for jobs, we also work hard to make money that we then spend or invest, thereby stimulating the economy. That said, I certainly don't think for a moment that immigrants should be able to get a free ride; we should definitely have to pay taxes in order to take advantage of government services. As for culture, the diversity introduced through immigration prevents national culture from stagnating into blandness. Just think how boring your diet would be without the cornucopia of ethnic foods available to us. In addition to the current patchwork of immigration quotas, I recommend a swap plan that allows citizens to trade places with citizens in participating countries for any length of time agreeable to both parties. That will promote workforce mobility without threatening to overwhelm the national infrastructure with a sudden influx of immigrants.

Guns don't belong in cities. I used to be opposed to civilian possession of firearms entirely but have since come to realize that they make sense in rural areas where the cops aren't able to turn up within minutes of a call to 911. However, the rationale behind the 2nd amendment to the US constitution (i.e. civilians could rise up against a tyrannical government) has been relegated to archaic irrelevance now that the modern military and police force have weapons that far outclass anything available to civilians. Even if the masses wanted to rise up against the government, they wouldn't stand a chance, bearing arms or otherwise. Instead, proliferation of handguns amongst civilians ill-trained to use them responsibly has resulted in many accidental injuries, some of which have been fatal. Worse still, stolen firearms are widely used in violent crime throughout urban USA to a degree unmatched by any other industrialized democracy. Ergo, I think that municipalities should be able to ban guns within their jurisdiction.

THC should not be less legal than nicotine. The "war" on drugs has been an unmitigated disaster. Despite colossal expense and much meddling in foreign countries, drugs are even more of a problem in the US now than before. Human actions often have results that weren't quite what desired. For instance, US pressure on Columbia to reduce marijuana production forced Columbian marijuana farmers to replace it with something else: cocaine. Unlike marijuana, which is safer than tobacco, cocaine can be turned into the society-wrecking derivative we know as crack. I'm not advocating that we let people purchase and consume mind-altering and potentially addictive drugs willy-nilly but I think that treating possession of under 5 grams of weed as a criminal offence is clogging our criminal justice system to no discernible advantage.

Capital punishment should be abolished. Trial by jury may be the best thing we've managed to come up with so far and it's avowedly better than a lynch mob but there are still sufficient deficiencies in it that we periodically convict innocent people of murder. Under such conditions, I'm not comfortable putting anybody to death. Some people think that life imprisonment is a waste of taxpayer money but the fact is that the current regulations surrounding the death penalty actually make it more expensive to execute convicted murderers than to have them live out their sentences.

The government should get out of the marriage business altogether. The recent fuss about gay marriage made me realize that marriage as a legal status was grandfathered into law as a convenience but doesn't really hold water in its current form. Many people seem to be up in arms about the sanctity of the word marriage being somehow defiled by extending it to couples of the same sex, despite much of that sanctity having been thrown to the wind decades ago when divorce became commonplace and Nevada made instant weddings feasible. My proposal is that the marriage cease to be recognized as a legal status entirely. Instead we should just have legal contracts between consenting parties that can confer upon each other any subset of the rights traditionally associated with marriage. Marriage itself should be treated as a religious and/or social status with no legal recognition and every religious group can administer it as they see fit without bothering anybody else.

The tax code is absurdly complex. We badly need to dispense with the existing mess of IRS regulations for personal income tax. Even just using the AMT for everybody would be better than what we have now. However, I think we should approach things from an entirely different angle: tax consumption instead of income. Not only will that encourage a return to the thriftiness of yore but it will give the government a powerful tool with which to shape consumer behaviour for the common good. Items and services that contribute to a healthy society (e.g. fresh produce and preventative healthcare) can enjoy low taxes while those that pose a danger to or outright detract from public welfare (e.g. gambling, gas-guzzling vehicles) can bear the brunt of high taxes. The lack of complicated tax deductions will prevent the wealthy from using sophisticated accounting to decrease their tax burden at the expense of the middle classes.

Deregulation and corporate welfare should be mutually exclusive and used carefully. Deregulation is usually good for consumers as it promotes competition but activity that may harm the common good (e.g. pollution) should be limited via a cap and trade system that uses the market to make the "best" use of the harm we're willing to endure as a society. Subsidizing nascent industries (e.g. solar energy) is sometimes necessary but it can easily get out of hand and end up being a crutch for industries that are no longer exhibiting rapid innovation en route to maturity (e.g. aerospace and agriculture).

Minimum wage reduces liquidity in the labour market. If I'm unemployed and getting $100/week from welfare then I have a disincentive to accept work that would earn me no more than $100/week. Furthermore, if minimum wage is $5/hour but a small business can only afford to pay me $3/hour for a fairly easy job that needs to be done then that work will end up having to be done by an overworked business owner. Clearly, it would be better if I could earn $3/hour for 10 hours/week of this work without entirely losing the income I have from welfare. Unfortunately, that's not the way things work right now. Instead we have an overworked business owner whose taxes pay me to be idle all day: pretty inefficient. What I propose is that every adult citizen is guaranteed a certain base stipend that does not depend upon them being unemployed. As long as this amount is sufficient to eke out an existence, there will no longer be a need for minimum wage.

Imposing economic sanctions on Cuba is counterproductive. The Cuban people are not being helped by the US refusal to trade with them. The cold war is over; get over it already.

Representational democracy has fallen prey to lobbyists and needs to be overhauled. Unlike just about every other democracy, the USA is faced with the challenge of needing to take a system that works well enough for a few dozen million people and scale it to a population that is approaching 300 million. Because the US is so wealthy, the benefits of influencing the legislative branch of government are sufficient to make the efforts involved pay off handsomely. The best way to fix this is to give the people direct control over their legislative process whenever they feel that their elected representatives may not be aligned with the interests of the country at large. We can use currently available technology to overlay liquid democracy over the existing system so that the system would work as before by default. But instead of having to petition their congress members with lists of signatures and hoping for the best in the face of lobbyism's corrupting influence, citizens would merely have to convince their friends to vote on issues directly.

Abortion should be legal but only after counselling. Abortion can have nasty psychological effects on women so it really ought only to be used as a last resort and not as a form of birth control. To a large degree we can minimize unwanted pregnancies with good pervasive education about prophylactics. For the remaining cases, women seeking to abort should be provided with professional counselling to ensure that they aren't making a rash decision and, if they still want to go through with it, be allowed to do so.

Healthcare and Education are too complex to deal with here so I won't even try.

Loading mentions Retweet