Election Day

A few considered principles

It’s election day as I start to write this. Our ballots are in, or at least in the mail to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters. Most of my choices will be no surprise to anyone who knows me, although a surprising number of offices might as well have been coin flips. I’m a lawyer, if a largely retired one, but I have no idea what separates the judicial candidates from each other. So, I follow the logic that if an incumbent has screwed up, I probably would have heard about it, and since I haven’t heard about it, I should vote for the incumbents.

God save democracy.

Or maybe I shouldn’t put it quite that way, since I have no belief that God gives much of a damn one way or the other. If democracy, or whatever you want to call our form of constitutional government, is to survive, citizens will have to make it work without divine intervention. Voting is a good first step.

It’s about time I set down a few other things I believe about issues of public consequence. I reserve the right to change them, sometimes in the middle of the same sentence, but in no particular order are the top ten as they strike me today:

1. Climate change is real and in the last millennium or two for the first time in 4.5 billion years of geologic time the change is heavily influenced by humans. And, yes, I might as well admit it: I do believe in geologic not biblical time.
2. The war on drugs is a failure, a fact we should have learned from the disaster of Prohibition but did not. Drugs, including alcohol, are dangerous and should be carefully and flexibly regulated, a goal that the war mentality only undermines.
3. Terrorism is a fact of human (mis?)behavior, the tools of which vary over time with changes in technology and the nature of social organization. Trying to institutionalize a war on terrorism is self-defeating.
4. Abortion is none of the government’s business. Nor is anyone’s relationship or lack thereof with his or her God.
5. Those who are concerned about rising inequality in income distribution are right to be concerned and those who think the market will take care of it are ostriches.
6. Taxes to pay for government services are not evil and don’t kill jobs if they are thoughtfully constructed by open political systems fully and fairly accountable to the people.
7. Any citizen that thinks a country can operate in perpetuity without open political systems fully and fairly accountable to the people is delusional.
8. Human society is not a zero-sum game in which anything you get reduces what’s left for me. The history of human progress in the last 500 years, and, indeed, in the 69 years since I was born, is a story of massive, if sometimes episodic, gains in almost every measure of the quality of human life as well as in the sheer number of human lives the planet supports. Coyotes and cockroaches are doing well, too; other species, not so much.
9. Humans who think they can use violence or coercion with a high certainty of achieving a selfish or self-protective goal generally will. The U.S. military has and should retain a monopoly on the ability to project large-scale violence to almost anywhere on earth. Every time the U.S. resorts to the actual use of that violence, it will diminish its ability to retain its monopoly.
10. As every nation and tribe in the world gains in functional proximity to every other nation and tribe in the world, it is ever more necessary to create and nurture effective public institutions that will maximize the ability of all parties to achieve their own goals without violence and at the least expense to the goals of others.

I’d be the first to admit that this is all pretty half-baked. If I thought about it for an hour or a year or two, I’d certainly take out some things and put in other things and reword (weasel word?) each one that remained. But this is the Internet; there’s a deadline every second. So here it is. The democracy will survive it. Perhaps my kids will be amused. Let’s see yours.