My Ideal Form of Government

People sometimes ask me something along the lines of “What would you do if you’re president?” or “How would you run the nation”. Well my personal ideas on governance are pretty unconventional even among people with similar ideals to me, so I decided to make this post to explain everything.

My ideals can be described as “soft-libertarian” where I think that people should have a lot of the individual freedoms that libertarians often fight for, but less of the political freedoms. This is simply because of the self-destructive nature of politically-free libertarianism, or as I call it “The paradox of liberty”.

Essentially, the vast majority of people don’t really want the individual responsibilities that individual liberty entails, thus they will “vote it away”.  For example, if you legalize all drugs, there would probably be some addicts who lobby government to make it criminal again because they got addicted. Not only that, but the masses often don’t see the long term consequences of their actions and lead a country into the path of destruction. A good example of this is rent control. Pretty much every economist on the left and right universally agrees that rent control is a terrible idea, but the average person doesn’t know that. So they constantly vote the government in for more and more rent control even though it ends up only hurting everyone in the long run.

Don’t believe me? Well have some sources then:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/08/economist-explains-19

http://www.businessinsider.com/does-rent-control-work-no-it-actually-increases-rent-prices-for-most-people-2015-9

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

http://www.nmhc.org/News/The-High-Cost-of-Rent-Control/

This is why I’m extremely suspicious of giving too much voting power to the average pleb. There should be some controls to ensure the people who are voting are smart enough to understand the consequences of their actions.

This brings me to the first set of laws I would write, which are about voting.

1. Everyone who is voting has to pay more in taxes than they get benefits from the government with the exception of disabled people and veterans.
2. They have to pass a basic literacy and math test. To make sure this isn’t discriminatory or biased, all states/provinces/principalities/whatever the name of a subsection of federal government is in a country  have to agree on one standardized, universal test that also has to be agreed upon by a board of educators in the federal government.
3. They also have to pass a test on basic economics, government legislation, and current issues. This time, the test has to be agreed upon by the economists and political analysts of all 50 states and the federal government and has to be updated every year to keep it up to date.
4. Everyone who has a salary greater than or equal to 100k a year, people who own land, people who own a business, and people whose net worth (including solid assets) is greater than 80k all get two votes. This is to ensure there is a strong balance of power against the plebeian masses and so that the country always has a slight pro-business leaning. Veterans also get 2 votes because they fought for the country so they deserve to have a better say in government. Also because veterans might get angry that they don’t have 2 votes despite losing a limb for the country, and the last thing you need is a displeased army (plus more than likely veterans would lobby for it anyways).
5. A none of the above option for all polls so if the none of the above option gets the majority of votes the primaries will be done again.
6. Independents should be allowed to vote in party primaries
7. Felons get to vote if they spend 5 years without committing a crime.

The next few points here are around the structure of government and lobbyists.

1. Congressmen can only serve a maximum of 3 terms.
2. There will be a complete ban on foreign lobbyists to ensure the nation’s interests always come first on the legislation table.
3. A ban on former government officials lobbying the government to stop encumbered politicians from continuing to have power over government.
4. A ban on corporations lobbying for a legislation to stop corporate interests from taking over government.
5. All declarations of war have to be approved by a board of the nation’s top generals to ensure that we don’t get into any tactically unfeasible wars.
6.  The government can only take on 1/4 its GDP in foreign debt (i.e if a country’s GDP is 20 trillion, it can only take on 5 trillion dollars in foreign debt)
7. Districts will be calculated mathematically to avoid gerrymandering
8. Alternative vote

Otherwise it would basically be identical to how the US government works currently.

Also due to this being just one point, I’m not gonna dedicate an entire section to this but immigration should be on a point-based system like Canada.

Finally, the bill of rights in my country would be identical to the one here in America, but with a few changes.

1. Hate speech is protected under the 1st amendment
2. There will be a clause in the 2nd amendment that ensures that there can be no government legislation dictated what firearms the citizens can buy (however private companies can refuse customers if they want)
3. There will be a new amendment added called “Freedom of Association” that will let private businesses pick whatever customers they want and discriminate if they wish to. That being said government cannot discriminate as its meant to be an institution for all citizens.
4. There will be a new amendment added called “Right to Bodily Autonomy” that would effectively legalize abortion, drugs, gambling, dueling (as long as both parties agree) and gladiatorial death sports (as long as the parties agree)
5. There would be a clause added to the 4th amendment that says digital data not publicly available (i.e facebook posts), metadata and communications logs cannot be seized without a warrant and corporations can’t sell data for money.

These are pretty much all the changes I want with the basic underlying structure of government and the bill of rights.

Here’s how my administration would run the government:

1.  It would generally support the free market and let private businesses do as they please
2. It would remove state borderlines for health insurance, thus dropping the prices a lot.
3. It would deregulate a lot of industries in general
4. It would abolish the minimum wage but give unions more power so workers aren’t completely screwed.
5. I would remain as neutral as possible in foreign policy.
6. I would completely gut welfare with the exception of disabled people and veterans.
7. I would lower taxes but get rid of a lot of the loopholes people use to avoid paying them
8. I’d decrease gov spending
9. I’d give subsidies to corporations to explore and colonize space.
10. I’d support offshore drilling of oil
11. I’d support fracking