What political label should I wear?
We humans want to label and categorize everything. This is likely a natural consequence of the way our brains operate — a combination of binary classifier and Bayesian heuristic engine that arises in artificial neural networks modeled on the structure of the human brain. Labels allow us to overcome limitations on the number of things we are able to care about simultaneously — Dunbar’s number, or much more humorously, The Monkeysphere. The world isn’t black and white but we subconsciously seek to simplify it to make reasoning about it and discussing it simpler. In reality, most things involve overlapping bell curves with no neat borders between one thing and another.
Some labels we embrace. Some labels chafe because they don’t really fit or are used in a derogatory way. I have yet to find a political label that doesn’t grossly misrepresent me in one way or another. I find the current US political parties, in practice, to be internally inconsistent, self-contradictory, and corrupted by corporate greed and other special interest; though at present, the Democrats appear to be the least offensive of the two viable choices.
Below are basic and selected derived principles I personally think should apply to everyone and informs my political life. They aren’t dogmatic in nature and I’m liable to adjust them on occasion as evidence and arguments persuade me I’m mistaken. There are shades of libertarianism, social liberalism, fiscal conservatism, progressivism, and secularism but they all chafe. Do not bother throwing your uncritical dogma, fallacies or easily debunked ‘common sense’ or propaganda at me if you disagree; but I’m open to well reasoned, evidence-based arguments.
Laws should be as few as possible but no fewer, derivable from basic principles and contradictions should be avoided. Laws and sentences should apply equally to everyone and never discriminate (intentionally or unintentionally) on the basis age, intelligence, heritage, culture, language, place of birth, phenotypic traits (skin, hair or eye color; face or body morphology), ability, sexual preference, sexual identity, beliefs, location, choice of adornments, choice of career, wealth, fame, choice of hobbies, choice of entertainment nor any other means of categorizing people. Activities that harm no one physically or mentally but the actor (or genuinely consenting co-actors), performed in private, should never be illegal. Reasonable limits on capacity of genuine consent should exist to protect certain individuals (especially minors) from coercion. Laws should always seek to target a problem, not symptoms of a problem. Evidence-based efficacy should always be given heavy consideration in the formulation and perpetuation of laws, regulations and sentencing. Extended incarceration should be a last resort, not the norm, and the percentage of the population incarcerated at any one time should be kept to an absolute minimum. Prisons should not be private, for-profit endeavors. No one should be incarcerated for inability to pay a debt, fine or taxes as it is counterproductive. Any fine, debt payment schedule or garnishment should not be allowed to reduce a person’s net income below the poverty level.
Freedom of Thought, Speech, Expression and Association along with Privacy are essential fundamental rights. Everyone should be able to say or do anything they like in their own private space or a public space so long as it doesn’t unjustly defame a living person, incite violence, cause unfounded panic that could lead to injury, endanger or harm others or their property (including public property) without consent, or perpetrate a fraud. Nobody should be required to listen to, watch, interact with or give a private platform to anyone but neither may you insist they stop expressing themselves anywhere but your own private spaces. This necessarily includes Freedom both of and from Religion and a strictly secular government. No religious organization has the right to deprive you of your rights or prevent you from leaving the fold. These rights should not be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, but individuals and businesses don’t have to put up with you expressing it in their space.
You do not have the right to specific employment if you refuse to perform the required duties based on your personal beliefs. Employers should allow reasonable accommodations for beliefs and disabilities where feasible. Your workplace is not necessarily a freedom of speech or expression zone.
Your right to cause harm to a person or property, or pollute the environment ends where your person and property ends unless you are given informed consent to abuse another’s person or property. Any significant pollution must be contained to your property in perpetuity or cleaned up before the property is abandoned or sold to prevent future violation of this principle unless a buyer consents to shoulder that burden. You are responsible for mitigation of any such deliberate or accidental harm to others, their property or public property. This applies to individuals as well as businesses and governments. Polluting industries should be required to maintain insurance or surety to cover such harm even in the event of bankruptcy and dissolution.
All citizens have a right to vote in free and fair elections and referendums. Polling places must be distributed and staffed in such a way that every citizen has easy and timely access to vote. Accommodations like absentee ballots should be made for individuals unable to travel to a voting place. Employers must allow individuals sufficient time to vote while polls are open without fear of reprisal. No individual or organization should be allowed to impede any citizen’s access to voting places. If identification is deemed absolutely necessary and reasonable to prevent voter fraud, acquiring such identification must be free and places to acquire such identification must also be distributed and staffed in such a way that every citizen has easy and timely access to such.
Government should not operate at a deficit. Debt can be raised for capital infrastructure projects but it must be amortized over the service life of any construction or maintenance and repayment included in future balanced budgets. Likewise, debt can be raised to cover the costs of responding to external threats, disasters and disease but must also be reasonably amortized and repayment included in future budgets. Budget items, benefits, penalties and thresholds should be adjusted automatically for inflation.
Social safety nets should be available for children, expectant mothers, the elderly, sick, disabled and temporarily unemployed as it is in the nation’s interest to care for those in need. No person should suffer death, preventable health deterioration or bankruptcy due to want of healthcare. Universal healthcare (single payer insurance, not nationalization of healthcare products and services) is likely the most fiscally responsible when considering the nation as a whole rather than just the government’s budget. Given the trends in offshoring, industrial mechanization and machine intelligence, it may very well be necessary to also attend to the basic needs of the permanently unemployed. To that end, businesses that make use of such advances that reduce the need for laborers or knowledge workers, or export jobs to cheaper labor markets should bear those societal costs. Exceptions for small businesses are allowable.
Education, both academic and trade, should be freely available to everyone as it is in the best interest of the nation that everyone be allowed to better themselves and every voter be informed enough to understand policy and cast rational votes. To that end, certain minimum standards of literacy, history, civics, mathematics, science, sex education and general reasoning should be compulsory for minors. Religious education should not be funded by the government in any way except if part of a comprehensive and unbiased comparative religion curriculum. Availability of public funding for specialized education can be limited by reasonable projections of job availability but allocation must be non-discriminatory.
Taxes should be minimized and simplified when possible but no more. Income tax should never, under any circumstances, reduce a person’s net income below a reasonable and automatically inflation adjusted poverty level. Poverty levels should be evidence based and set at a level that avoids food, health and housing insecurity. Extremely high income individuals and businesses should bear the brunt of progressive taxation to mitigate massive accumulation of wealth and an ever widening gap between the rich and poor. Prices for necessities such as food, hygiene supplies, medicine, clothing, housing (homestead, not vacation and investment property), utilities, transportation and education should not be taxed on values below a locally reasonable and inflation linked threshold for each class.
Organizations that provide charitable services should be tax exempt but only for reasonable costs associated with those charitable services. Donations should be tax deductible if earmarked for charitable services. Exempt organizations must not endorse or criticize candidates or parties unless they wish to lose their exemption. This should include religious organizations and would make many of them mostly or entirely non-exempt and most or all donations to them non-deductible if they operate primarily as a social club or political activist group.
Governments should not dictate behavior deemed unhealthy or aberrant (but not illegal) but evidence based sin taxes might be levied to offset increased costs associated with healthcare and lightly discourage the behavior. Punitive sin taxes should not be allowed.
Discovery and innovation should be cultivated. A combination of free market capitalism and government funded pure research and exploration (where market forces are an insufficient driver) is absolutely necessary.
Evidence-based regulation of business is necessary but it should not be unnecessarily onerous. Businesses must not be allow to defraud, or, through negligence, indifference or malice, harm people or despoil the property of others. No business or industry has the right to dangerously deplete or destroy any public resource or species. Unnecessary cruelty to animals is not acceptable, even in the face of religious beliefs that require it. Consumer rights and privacy must be respected.
Free trade should be the norm except to counter gaming, economic warfare and protectionist practices instigated by trading partners. To the extent possible, a ‘tit-for-tat with forgiveness’ strategy should be actively and responsively practiced and trade agreements should be written to encode such rules. Trade sanctions may be utilized against nations that rule without consent of or regard for all of its people but humanitarian concerns must be considered and care must be taken to avoid significant harm to the people. Direct humanitarian aid may be provided to mitigate such harm if the target nation allows it.
Nations have a right to defend themselves but no nation should seek to conquer and keep another nation. Empire building should be replaced with voluntary mutual trade and defense collectives. A collective organization of nations like the United Nations may intervene in cases of extreme oppression or genocide when diplomatic and trade sanctions are ineffective but it must assist with stabilizing and rehabilitating the country and return power to the people within a reasonable time frame. In light of this, excessive military spending is unnecessary and where possible should be shifted to other endeavors since it becomes little more than a make-work jobs program and subsidy to defense industrial sectors. Excess spending should be shifted to social safety nets, education, infrastructure, research, exploration, humanities and arts.
Abortion, up to viability and occasionally after, is sometimes necessary and should be legal for health, welfare and economic reasons. As no want wants it to be necessary, a government should seek to reduce the necessity through sex education and free availability of various birth control methods for both men and women. Objection to both, simultaneously, is unconscionable and cruel. No one has the right to force a woman to carry a fetus to viability and the mother should never be forced to jeopardize her life to carry it to term. Scientific research, even government funded research, and medical treatments derived from fetal tissue explicitly donated by the woman should be legal — just as it is legal to donate your own body or your children’s to science, for organ transplants, or other treatments but is illegal to sell them.
Marriage has two distinct meanings that are inappropriately conflated. One is a religious ceremony to bless a union between two (or sometimes more) individuals that may or may not be equal and has absolutely nothing to do with government. The second is an equal contractual civil partnership that allows the government to handle equitable dissolution and custody, inheritance, power of attorney over health decisions when one partner is incapacitated, and various other benefits. Equal protection and non-discrimination means the race, sex or orientation of the parties involved should not be an issue under the law. Government should stay out of the first entirely. Religion should stay out of the second entirely. It might be simpler and less objectionable to rename the second as the first implies the second but the second does not imply first. I see no valid fundamental objection to partnerships of more than two, individuals involved in two partnerships simultaneously and even mergers of existing partnerships using rules of formation, merger and dissolution similar to those for business partnerships. Businesses and governments should strive to provide equal total value of benefits to a person’s estate or one or more partners unless the employee has the cost of additional benefits deducted from their pay. That neatly avoids unequal compensation and expense. Partnerships are only valid with informed consent which makes the usual objections of a slippery slope invalid.
If you actually read all that, 1) you may need to seek professional help and b) you deserve a cookie.
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