SGnTN Casey Fleser / Some Geek in TN

Today I was going to explain to someone exactly how it’s possible for my political beliefs to be composed of mostly libertarianism with a touch of communism thrown in for good measure. I’ve been meaning to post something about this for quite a while but I’ve been putting it off because I expect it to be many words and I’m not the best at assembling words into the correct order and making them make sense. Oh, and I have this problem with procrastination.

First the libertarianism. My litmus test for determining if something should be restricted by the government is this: If an act committed by an entity or individual does not intrude upon certain unalienable rights which are supposedly self evident, those being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then the government has no business restricting this act. We’ll call these “The Big 3”, and perhaps a few examples will better illustrate the idea.

Drug (il)legalization: Couple problems with this one. First, whatever I want to ingest, inhale, or absorb in the privacy of my own home, is of no concern of the government or anyone else for that matter. As far as I can tell it in no way infringes on anyone else’s Big 3. Now you might say that someone’s drug use causes you emotion distress and therefore interferes with your pursuit of happiness. It might make you unhappy, but doesn’t hinder your pursuit of happiness. Of course this doesn’t apply outside of your home. A person impaired by biochemical imbalance, artificial or otherwise, shouldn’t be allowed to endanger others by operating a vehicle, performing surgery, etc. And the second problem is the problem I have with the arbitrary definition of drugs. Caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, theobromine and so forth are all legal “drugs” that alter your mood and yet they are perfectly legal though regulated in some cases. How does the government determine which are the good drugs, which are bad and which are bad, but we’ll allow you to use them? When they are addictive? Those mentioned above can be addictive. Mood altering? Deadly? A woman died recently from water intoxication, but I haven’t see anyone call for a ban. I figure if all drugs were made legal (but regulated) the problem of figuring out which one’s are bad for you would be just as easy as it is currently.

Marriage: Specifically gay marriage. It seems to me that marriage as defined in our country anyway, has its roots in religion and as such I don’t feel that the government has any business creating laws defining it. If a man and a woman, two men, two women, or three men and four women, whatever, want to commit themselves to one another then I cannot see where it causes a conflict with the Big 3. There are questions to be answered with regards to say medical decisions if a partner is incapacitated and needs a medical decision made, inheritance, etc. It seems to me that it should be possible to make these arrangements without regard to marital status.

Abortion: This is more tricky. So polarizing. Ah well, here goes. The trick to me seems to be to be able to determine when it is that you consider life to begin isn’t it? There is the whole notion of “viability”, which is pretty ridiculous as far as I’m concerned. On the one hand, medical advances continue to shorten the gestation period needed for a child to live outside the mother’s womb. Eventually this time will reach 0. But I can’t quite bring myself to say that life begins at conception (mostly because it’s then not much of a stretch to say that sperm are “alive” and I am therefore genocidal). On the other end of the spectrum, a child can’t truly be considered viable after a full gestation period and the cord is cut. Try turning a newborn lose on its own immediately after birth with no outside assistance and see how that works out. So “viability” isn’t a consideration. If I had to settle upon a non arbitrary date it would be at the point the heart begins beating. I might revise that to when the somatic nervous system begins to function, but I’m going with heartbeat for now. That puts it around around 5 weeks. Of course I believe certain exemptions are acceptable such as when the mother’s life is in danger and such. But I can’t get behind exemptions in based on purely emotional reasoning such as rape or incest. For all the women out there that are of the opinion that “it’s my body and my choice”, I agree wholeheartedly (unless your pregnant for more than 5 weeks) and so I can also say that prostitution should be legal.

Boy I’m totally losing any future election I might wind up in. So anyway, there are a few examples which boil down to if it ain’t hurting nobody (and defining when it is that a somebody comes into being) then it oughta be okay. The communism bit is the part I really wanted to talk about though.

Taxes continue to edge ever upwards. Tax Freedom Day is now 4 months into the year. And every year we see the promise or tax relief or the threat of tax increase used as a carrot or stick in an effort to get some politician elected. Of course after the election, taxes simply continue their inexorable climb higher. They are never ever going to go lower. People have simply become too used to entitlements as well as the other services the government provides.

But, are all entitlements really evil? Maybe a few, but not all I think. At their heart there are valid attempts to try and solve real problems and not just provide a “free ride”. Normal people, I think, don’t truly to want to see anyone suffer from lack of the basic necessities of life. Those being: food, shelter, and such. So we have a smorgasbord of programs in place to try and address these necessities for specific situations such as unemployment compensation, Social Security, Medicare, etc. These ideas are, at the heart, good things. Helping people that need help is good. But the costs associated continue to increase in no small part to the inefficiencies inherent in the bureaucracy of these individual programs.

A solution to these problems? Short of a complete redo of the United States government, an amendment to the Constitution permanently fixing the national individual income tax (income includes capital gains, interest, etc) to 50%. Did that make you gasp? Not to worry, the amendment would also state that, of the money collected, 60% would be redistributed evenly amongst all citizens over the age of, oh let’s say 17. The remaining 40% would be divided evenly at the federal, state, and county levels. This would also mean the elimination of state and local taxes. *

Using these numbers, and some information from wikipedia, I came up with this little chart (it’s late so it’s probably all wrong, but you get the idea):

If this impossibility were ever to come to pass, it would eliminate all of the entitlement programs from the government budget and seriously scale back the IRS as well. The government would be forced to live within its means because the ability to generate additional revenue would be extremely limited. And politicians wouldn’t spend 75% of election campaign dialog on what they or their opponent was going to do to your taxes.

But wouldn’t this mean that some people would simply choose not to work?! Well, yes it does. Those people happy to live near or below poverty level would be free to do so. Of course as the number of people choosing this route grew higher, the amount of money going into the system, and therefore coming out of the system, declines and hopefully serves as motivation to benefit themselves and society. At some point it would reach steady state. Doesn’t seem like a bad trade for the elimination of so many bloated programs, not to mention the total elimination of guilt for not giving panhandlers my spare change.

On the other hand there are situations where this would not totally provide for the needs of some people, the elderly and disabled come to mind. I’ll admit I don’t have a ready solution for that. I would hope that family, friends, community, and charities could make up the difference but this is probably optimistic. The government could also step in and create another entitlement program for those with catastrophic financial difficulties if it could be made to work within their income restraints. I dunno, but I imagine a solution could be found within this framework.

I’m not sure if this idea is technically “communism”, but whatever you want to call it, it makes sense to me. It also doesn’t conflict with my libertarian ideas because I feel like I can tell the government you’ve got your money now go keep the roads paved, build a missile, make the water safe to drink, whatever it is you do, but leave me alone for a bit would’ya? I could go on and on, but I’m not going to. Mainly because I’m getting sleepy, but more-so because I’ve probably made you sleepy as well if you’ve actually managed to read this far. Anyway, there it is. Out of my brain and into positively charged electrons. My blog will now go dormant for another month in all likelihood. See you then.

* – All these numbers might need a bit of tweaking to make the math work, but you get the idea.