governance
a few thoughts about how to build a better world 

Most people of good conscience would like to see a world with less violence, less poverty, and less injustice. But different people have very different ideas about what the blueprint for a better world might look like:

• anarchists tend to want to do away with government entirely
• libertarians mostly want government to  focus on providing a judicial system, a policing system, and some form of national defense
• socialists often advocate that  the means of production be governed by worker run cooperatives
• georgists would like to tax only land use, rather than employment, production, consumption, or investment

Like most people, I'd love to live in a world in which all people have their basic needs met, have some time and freedom to pursue their own interests, and live free of the unsanctioned threat of violence. Here are my ideas about what a blueprint for this sort of world might look like:

1. increased legal equality of all people, regardless of attributes of birth like race, sex, parentage, and location of birth (note that this one goal has huge implications for all sorts of rights and freedoms, from immigration to education to health care)
2. decreased military spending
3. decreased spending for first-world style heroic end-of-life healthcare
4. increased funding for education, and for food and basic health care for kids
5. increased uniformity in the distribution of funding for education and basic health care for kids
6. increased transparency and accountability for all individuals and institutions (public, private, and governmental), hopefully leading to decreases in graft, corruption, crime, domestic violence, child abuse, etc.
7. governance based on uniform and predictable rule of law
8. social safety nets based on transfer payments rather than provision of services
9. increased worldwide legalization of free speech and the exchange of information, and increased illegalization of advertising
10. open competition among service providers for all services
11. systems of taxes, tariffs, and regulations that cause the monetary prices of goods and services to account for their underlying economic and social costs and other externalities
12. systems of taxes, tariffs, and regulations that do not create disincentives for employment, trade, transactions, and investment
13. systems of taxes, tariffs, and regulations that create disincentives for things like pollution, consumption of natural resources, making babies, secrecy, and familial transfers of wealth
14. transfer payments that reward the work of parenting
15. mechanisms that serve to prevent usury and exploitation but that do not greatly limit the ability of consenting adults to enter into agreements that they think are win-win arrangements
16. greatly decreased legal rights for corporations, such as decreased rights regarding privacy and free speech, decreased liability protection, and decreased patent and trade secret protection for "land-grab" intellectual property
17. decreased levels of incarceration, and increased focus on rehabilitation and payment of reparations
18. continued rapid progress in science and engineering, and continued use of knowledge and technology to solve material problems

You can copy freely from this site. This work is dedicated to the Public Domain.