I have an interesting set of political views, I lean to the right, but consider myself a liberal in many ways. Liberal is a loaded word, it used to mean free market liberal, back in the days of the neoclassical liberals. Now it has a left wing connotation, although it alternately has a literal meaning “open to new behavior or opinions and willing to discard traditional values.”- which is different than my own interpretation of the term.
I thought of it like this: In my political mindset I want to walk the dog without the dog wearing a leash. I used to always do that, I could walk my dog down the street with no leash, and I could trust the dog. I had a more obedient dog, it had more respect for me, and people knew I knew how to train my dog properly. I am liberal in this respect and it bleeds over into other areas of my thinking. The dogs leash keeps it safe from possible harm, and shields the owner from liabilities, including the hassle of having to chase down the dog when it runs away. Citizens are like dogs on leashes in a way, there are barriers everywhere to what they can do. Speed limits, drug laws, college education requirements, professional license requirements, extensive driving requirements, proof of identity requirements, healthcare requirements, zoning laws, mandatory monetary contributions to various funds (SSI, Medicare). I don't hold the belief that these restrictions and mandates are inherently bad, but I am always looking for ways to set the dog free from the leash, or at least loosen the collar.
I thought of it like this: In my political mindset I want to walk the dog without the dog wearing a leash. I used to always do that, I could walk my dog down the street with no leash, and I could trust the dog. I had a more obedient dog, it had more respect for me, and people knew I knew how to train my dog properly. I am liberal in this respect and it bleeds over into other areas of my thinking. The dogs leash keeps it safe from possible harm, and shields the owner from liabilities, including the hassle of having to chase down the dog when it runs away. Citizens are like dogs on leashes in a way, there are barriers everywhere to what they can do. Speed limits, drug laws, college education requirements, professional license requirements, extensive driving requirements, proof of identity requirements, healthcare requirements, zoning laws, mandatory monetary contributions to various funds (SSI, Medicare). I don't hold the belief that these restrictions and mandates are inherently bad, but I am always looking for ways to set the dog free from the leash, or at least loosen the collar.
If we call America an advanced democracy, we would assume people would be reliable to a high degree to uphold the rule of law and be trusted off the leash not to make a mess of things. The cost of unreliable citizens spreads itself across the board so that we all pay a little (or big) price for ‘dogs’ that can’t be trusted off the leash. For example, having a lock on our homes, our cars, security systems, renters insurance and identity protection, is indication that we are all investing in a kind of ‘blanket leash’ that we put on the ‘dogs’ of our society that cannot be trusted.
SO we pay a price for dogs who are not reliable off the leash by submitting to the leash ourselves as well. Many people advocate for the legalisation of drugs, which would be a novel way to liberate responsible people and trust them to act appropriately. The trouble is you would hook so many people onto drugs that they would be willing to break laws to get more drugs, and the collar would tighten on all of us, theoretically.
I look at ways to liberate people of things like an over expensive education. Are there not ways to get that information into your head without paying $40k a year? Of course there is, but if you try, say reading a bunch of books, you are not going to get the recognition from employers, and won’t get any good jobs. That leash keeps us from pursuing this avenue. Look at getting a cavity filling. You are taking up the time of a dentist whose time is extremely valuable, and he is the only one who is able, by law, to give you that cavity filling. It doesn't take a grand wizard strategist to drill your tooth and give you a filling, is a technique that can be learned in less than one year of school, practicing on fake teeth. But the leash keeps us from doing this, and you cant just take off the leash, you have to go through so many channels and take so much time to allow for the cheaper, more effective, and more humane treatment of the dog, that the inevitable throwing up of the hands ensues. The leash is locked onto the collar, and the dog has to expend more energy than it should have to.
SO we pay a price for dogs who are not reliable off the leash by submitting to the leash ourselves as well. Many people advocate for the legalisation of drugs, which would be a novel way to liberate responsible people and trust them to act appropriately. The trouble is you would hook so many people onto drugs that they would be willing to break laws to get more drugs, and the collar would tighten on all of us, theoretically.
I look at ways to liberate people of things like an over expensive education. Are there not ways to get that information into your head without paying $40k a year? Of course there is, but if you try, say reading a bunch of books, you are not going to get the recognition from employers, and won’t get any good jobs. That leash keeps us from pursuing this avenue. Look at getting a cavity filling. You are taking up the time of a dentist whose time is extremely valuable, and he is the only one who is able, by law, to give you that cavity filling. It doesn't take a grand wizard strategist to drill your tooth and give you a filling, is a technique that can be learned in less than one year of school, practicing on fake teeth. But the leash keeps us from doing this, and you cant just take off the leash, you have to go through so many channels and take so much time to allow for the cheaper, more effective, and more humane treatment of the dog, that the inevitable throwing up of the hands ensues. The leash is locked onto the collar, and the dog has to expend more energy than it should have to.
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I look at the federal debt as a leash locked onto the American people, and I look at the extremely complicated nature of bills as the spectre of governmental administration being taken out of the hands of the people. Nobody knows what kind of shady deals they are being forced to pay for in a 7,000 page bill. I remember when Obamacare passed they changed the laws (while I was attending school) so that I could not work over 30 hours at my part time job because it would be considered full time, that was a tightening of the leash. And I also was forced to enroll in Medicaid, even though I didn't want to be on government assistance. But say I stayed on Medicaid maybe I would have voted democrat so that I could keep that free goody. That definitely did not happen.
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Please allow me to another example that I have written about previously regarding housing and employment of the homeless. The cities have many run down buildings that are not the subway, and not the entrances to gas stations, where they can house some of the vagrants that tend to accumulate. Zoning laws restrict housing the homeless in these areas because they are not up to city codes, and this is taking away a very important source of low income housing. If you look at some of the public housing in this country it is way over the top in terms of costs and fanciness. Public housing should not be something to grow overly comfortable with, and wait lists often time outlive the usefulness of the arrangements. In Rochester NY they have “section 8” which is basically a program to receive free rent. So low income people and families wait on a 4 year wait list to receive free or heavily subsidised housing for life. This should be discouraged, but in a way it is an insult to injury to the simple reality that low income housing is way too expensive in general, too much so for low income people. One of my beliefs is that a lot of times bureaucratic do-good actions inflate costs so much that they end up hurting the people they were intended to help.
I’m also liberal in terms of abortion, so much so that I don’t think people relying on welfare should be allowed to have kids until they are self sufficient. They (freakonomics) correlated a gigantic drop in violence in Los Angeles some years after abortion took hold there, there were a lot less would be vagrants born. If an unwanted child is born, they are that much less likely to learn the arts of the leash, and more prone to act in ways that spread the cost of their actions to the rest of us; IE, employing more police, more locks, more tax money, more public education money, etc.
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Lets now look at the employment of the homeless as I wind down this essay. Many homeless people have mental and physical disabilities that make employing them difficult and unprofitable. While we would like to help these people with employment, it's often times not feasible under our current system. Say you are a one armed dyslexic person with diabetes. You are not that hard of a worker, either. Well, maybe in a factory you can produce $5 worth of products an hour. Well, you are costing the company $2 to employ you instead of making them money, because you are making $7 an hour. Not to mention you are driving up the cost of the companies health insurance because you are always seeing doctors. So you are dumped off to the government to take care of because you are too much of a liability. What we like is a reciprocal benefit, There is a very healthy and rewarding aspect to finishing a hard days work, it gives you the motivation to better yourself and a great sense of independence and strength. It would be a good deed to employ that individual for $4 an hour, and make $1 in profit. But the leash is tugging at the neck of the company, and the owner leans in to smack the dog. So the person cannot work anywhere because he is only capable of producing less value, through no fault of his own, than the law states he has to be paid.
So I am liberal in the sense that I want to allow for the transmission of resources and information in a more lenient way, and loosen the collar on all people. But I’m also realistic and want to simplify some of the absurd abstractions reflected by pieces of governmental policy that are in some respects a mockery of public participation in lawmaking.
Lets now look at the employment of the homeless as I wind down this essay. Many homeless people have mental and physical disabilities that make employing them difficult and unprofitable. While we would like to help these people with employment, it's often times not feasible under our current system. Say you are a one armed dyslexic person with diabetes. You are not that hard of a worker, either. Well, maybe in a factory you can produce $5 worth of products an hour. Well, you are costing the company $2 to employ you instead of making them money, because you are making $7 an hour. Not to mention you are driving up the cost of the companies health insurance because you are always seeing doctors. So you are dumped off to the government to take care of because you are too much of a liability. What we like is a reciprocal benefit, There is a very healthy and rewarding aspect to finishing a hard days work, it gives you the motivation to better yourself and a great sense of independence and strength. It would be a good deed to employ that individual for $4 an hour, and make $1 in profit. But the leash is tugging at the neck of the company, and the owner leans in to smack the dog. So the person cannot work anywhere because he is only capable of producing less value, through no fault of his own, than the law states he has to be paid.
So I am liberal in the sense that I want to allow for the transmission of resources and information in a more lenient way, and loosen the collar on all people. But I’m also realistic and want to simplify some of the absurd abstractions reflected by pieces of governmental policy that are in some respects a mockery of public participation in lawmaking.