Questionable Source

“The spirit that sustained this nation for more than two centuries lives on in you.  It’s people.” (Barack Obama, 1/27/10) Never before in the history of humanity have we, the people, been able to unite comprehensively to solve our collective problems.  There is no longer any need for us to organize the deployment of social services through the coercive force of the Federal Government.  We can do it ourselves.  If we shirk our responsibilities and chose to rely on government to solve our problems, then government will create more problems so it can continue to grow.  The more it grows, the less work there is for the people to do until, there is nothing left for us at all.  We become children of the government.  That is not the destiny of a people in pursuit of happiness, it’s the destiny of a people trying to escape fear.

“The secret of happiness is freedom.  The secret of freedom is courage.”(Thucydides, 460 BC)

America was populated during two rounds of mass immigration.  The first was during the first ice age approximately 13000 years ago when people from Asia crossed the glaciers that connected modern Russia to Alaska.  The second round began in the 1600s and continued until World War Two.  Much of this immigration was legal.  Since the 1940s, however, most immigration into the US has been illegal and poorly unregulated.  This is problematic from both a national security and a human rights standpoint.  Our immigration policy must:

1. Legitimize every immigrant who enters America.
2. Attract the highest quality immigrants to America.
3. Provide sanctuary to those in need.

It’s important to separate boarder security from the debate on immigration.  Our boarders must be secure: if that means deploying 100 US soldiers on every mile of our boarder then so be it.  Unlike security, immigration is a question of national wealth.  The fact is more people create more trade which creates more wealth. The continental US is nearly three times the size of India with about one third the population.  Why aren’t we focusing on wealth creation?

Currently, the US is still a highly competitive nation in terms of immigration.  People from around the world very much want to work here.  We should evaluate the type of people we need and then test immigration applicants for those skills.  We determine quotas for each test and provide entry and a path to citizenship for those individuals.  If we were adding 7-10 million usefully skilled people to America every year, all Americans would become wealthier and our domestic marketplace would become more efficient.

One of the central tenets of economics is that trade creates wealth.  Any restriction on trade reduces people’s capacity to create wealth.  People who can’t create wealth through trade will inevitably try to steal wealth through violence.  Thus, everyone in the world has an incentive to enable others to create wealth.  Truly wealthy people view their world as abundant and thus, never steal.  Our trade policy must help people to live in an abundant world.

The term ‘free trade’ has been adopted by neoliberals to describe corporate trade policy.  We don’t advocate ‘free trade’, we advocate truly free trade (true trade) which is unregulated trade between entities in two similarly regulated economies.

The primary reason many American workers aren’t competitive in the global labor market is that their foreign counterparts are often under paid and over burdened.  This exploitation can only take place because the foreign worker’s  government has failed to protect its citizens.  Failed governments can’t win elections so the people within the country must be disenfranchised.  This disenfranchisement is caused by a lack of transparency in that nation.

Transparency is the intersection between foreign and trade policy.  If we gave every nation a transparency rating and then based all of our tariffs off that number, we would solve our trade and labor problems.  Cheap goods from nations that lack transparency would become more expensive, enabling free American workers to compete with inexpensive, exploited foreign workers.  This is the foundation of a pro-freedom trade policy.

Our criminal policy must find the two correct balancing points between order and freedom, imprisonment and rehabilitation.  Finding these points requires compromise.  On one hand, we could ensure that everyone was safe by placing everyone in a cage guarded by the state.  On the other hand, we could ensure everyone was free by eliminating all laws and letting people organize themselves.  To find the right balance between order and freedom, prison and rehabilitation, we must first understand our own motives.

Government is defined as the entity with the right to the ‘legitimate use of force.’  The people will only support the government when it imposes laws that they people want enforced.  Government’s become corrupt when they no longer represent the will of the people by enforcing their laws.  When the government enforces unpopular laws, it creates tension between the government and the people.  The people will at first break the law in secrets but, as the distance between the law and the order it seeks to create widens, the people will begin to flout the law in public.  This creates a state of noncompliance in which everyone is breaking the law and no one is safe from the government.

Right now the American people are in a state of mass noncompliance.  Between our nation’s antiquated drug laws, complex tax code and myriad of regulations, a majority of Americans break the law everyday.  Some of them will be caught and penalized and many others never will.  This state of noncompliance has created a culture of disrespect towards government and authority.  This culture delegitimizes the government.  Illegitimate government is mafia.

We must do everything in our power to live under a legitimate government and that requires reducing and simplifying our nation’s legal code.

The implementation of a simple, clear and consistent carbon tax plan will spur investment in alternative energy sources.  The proceeds from a carbon tax could could invested in government infrastructure projects that reorient our society for a low carbon future or pay for voucher programs.

Developing and deploying smart grids so communities can share energy resources is of monumental importance.  The government must also invest in rail with the assumption that a climate or fuel crisis could make air travel impossible. Just as the auto industry bought public rail lines and turned them into roads, the government must turn public roads into light and heavy rail lines.  We need to invest in rail like we invested in our interstate system.  The longer we wait to make this type of investment, the more vulnerable we will be to food, fuel and environmental crises.

The government must also create a legal framework that encourages distributed energy solutions.  In a low-carbon scenario where fossil fuel is in short supply, individuals and communities must have the capacity to produce their own energy.  The technologies exist – wind, solar, geothermal and biomass are all distributed energy solutions – but the legal framework needed to deploy these technologies does not.  Inconsistent regulation of the energy market, uncooperative utility companies and erratic government incentive packages are preventing the mass adoption of distributed energy solutions.

We must create a standardized, national political solution that enables every community to invest in their own energy production capacity.  When a community generates it’s own energy, it becomes more prosperous, secure and stable.  Worst case scenarios become much less frightening.

No one knows if humans are are contributing to global climate change.  Both sides have legitimate fears about the effects of climate change on society.  We can pursue a middle course that satisfies all parties.

Climate change believers fear that our rapid release of hundreds of millions of years of carbon stored in coal, oil and other fossil fuels is going to disrupt our climate, making earth less habitable for plants, animals and humans.  They demand the implementation of an international mechanism to reduce carbon emissions to prevent potential massive ecological disaster.

Climate change skeptics fear that authoritarians are attempting to use the climate change issue to take control over the world’s economies by forcing everyone to get ‘authorization’ to emit carbon.  They’ll resist any scheme, especially an international one, to regulate people’s production of carbon.

Cap and trade is a disastrous policy for both sides.  Governments have no incentive to lower the cap enough to seriously reduce carbon while myriad of government agencies and industries will spring up to pressure both individuals and businesses to pay for their carbon.  The policy is terrible.

A carbon tax is the obvious solution supported by nearly all the world’s economists.  A carbon tax would be levied on the fossil fuels that produce carbon.  This tax is easy to implement and requires virtually no government expansion.  It creates incentives for the government to tax carbon and for the public at large to develop alternative energy sources.  We can solve the carbon problem by steadily and predictably increasing this tax over the years.