Repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments. Go back to the Senators being appointed by the state legislatures. Replace the income tax with the Fair Tax.
Slam the borders shut. Build the fence. Round up and run out the illegals in the country already.
Term limits on the House and Senate - maximum of 12 years in Congress, period. Two terms as a Senator, 6 terms as a Rep, or a combination thereof.
Congress is not exempt from its own laws. No retirement fund for them.
Constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget. In any fiscal year, Congress cannot spend more than 99% of the figure collected in revenues for the preceding fiscal year, unless at war or severe national emergency.
That’ll do for a start. I’ll be back later with 6-10.
Wow, where does one start? My first inclination is to address the accountability of our elected officials, but that would be a terabyte worth of typing. I’ll start simple and add more as time goes by.
Repeal the Patriot Act and it’s progeny.
Stop the collection, storing and dissemination of private information of a non-criminal nature belonging to the people. (Surprisingly, WE are not the enemy.)
Cease the implementation of acts such as the REAL ID Act, the PASS Act and make no future attempts at instituting a national ID card or authorizing any funding associated with said acts.
Repeal all laws that collect blood, fingerprints, or DNA upon birth.
Basically start by repealing any law that is repugnant to the 4th, 5th and 9th amendments.
They do not have a constitutional right to violently overthrow it, except in New Hampshire. That’s not a bad thing - nine violent revolutions in ten end up with the installation of military juntas or other forms of equally unpleasant dictatorship.
Anyway, the principle of violent overthrow of government is inherently undemocratic. The Founders had to do a lot of politico-philosophical tap dancing to create a stable and lasting system of government while acknowledging the fact that they had just destroyed the existing system of government.
I agree with you. And I agree that a ‘violent overthrow’ should not be considered. I just looked up the definition of ‘seditious treason’ and see the difference. I suppose to abolish or change the government SHOULD be a peaceful act. (But… ALWAYS be vigilant of tyranny. In any form.)
But when you say inherently ‘undemocratic’, I thought our Founders set us up as a Republic, and not a democracy. Wasn’t it democracy they were trying to avoid?
“Democratic” and “undemocratic” don’t necessarily refer to true democracy as a system of government, but of any form of government in which the power is vested in the people.
Call it inherently unrepresentative if you prefer.
Here’s a conundrum. US Code 2385 states that it is unlawful to use violence OR force.
But The New Jersey Bill of Rights expressly states:
But what does it mean when the term ‘force’ is applied? How could the people of the state of New Jersey exercise this right without force, if needed? Wouldn’t they be violating the US Code? Should it only be interpreted as in using the power of voting only?
This is the standard mix of the useless & the unworkable that’s been passing for populism on the right since I was a young rightie.
You’ll never get rid of direct election of Senators, even if would accomplish anything you wanted. The national sales tax would be ashes in your mouth (yes, this one would actually be counterproductive). My state has had term limits since the mid-1990’s; voters still don’t pay attention to their state legislatures enough to hold anyone accountable. The balanced budget is a nice idea, but stops short of actually storing up surpluses in good times.
#4 is a small thing but one worth pushing for–too bad in the real world it’s unenforceable.
It’s not an either/or proposition. You can still make a huge difference by enforcing e-verify and cutting benefits for illegals. When the money source dries up they leave on their own accord.
That the public is not being served sufficiently is based on introductory microeconomics. First semester stuff. The effect of barriers to market entry on market power, consumer surplus, and deadweight loss is well understood. What I’m advocating is a new balance between ensuring the competence of professionals, and not creating excessive deadweight loss from the process.
Markets generally have the presumption of effectiveness. They’ve earned that much. You can either take the Friedman route and argue that their presumption of effectiveness is so great that we shouldn’t have licensing at all (an argument which I mentioned, but did not personally advocate myself), or alternatively you can argue that if you want to have licensing, it’s best to make that regulation as unburdensome to new entry as possible, for the sake of economic efficiency, even while keeping the original policy goals of that regulation in mind. It’s a balancing act, and there’s a different fulcrum which would work better than what we have now.
The policy goal here is to ensure competent professionals. It is not to give excessive market power to those professionals. And so my point is, in reality, quite limited: The testing procedure should be not be excessively complicated, and in order to make that so, we should test those who already have qualifications as stringently as we test new applicants. The reason for this is to better guide the incentives of the test writers.
Because the evaluation process would not be specifically designed in a way to maximize the failure rate, as is the case now.
Who do you think writes these things, anyway? There is no heavenly delegation of perfectly impartial saints who are trying to sift the wheat from the chaff. Instead, they’re written by people who are already knowledgeable in the field, because knowledgeable people are the only ones qualified to create an evaluation process. The necessity of relying on professionals to test new entrants thus results in the perverse incentive of those professionals having the authority, with the full coercive powers of the government backing them up, to restrict their own potential competition for no reason other than to make it financially easier on themselves.
It’s a sad truth of public finance (public sector economics) that industries have a tendency to “capture” the regulatory bodies that were initially designed to bring them to heel. Captured regulatory agencies then proceed to crush new entrants for the sake of old established interests. In the case of licensing, though, it didn’t even require capture. Professionals are just handed the power without question. It is an absurd system. It is never efficient, because their primary motive is not the lofty ideal to fairly and impartially test the trainees, but the much more human desire to reduce the number of future competitors. Inevitably, most of the hurdles that they put up are unnecessarily complicated. They don’t primarily test competence. That gets subsumed in the effort to reject as many new applicants as is feasible.
But these perverse incentives could be countered. If you mandate that professionals periodically retake their own test, you will balance their incentive to maximize the failure rate with their incentive to make sure that they will be able to pass. They will still want a difficult test to keep out the competitors, but it will be no more difficult than it has to be for currently practicing professionals to demonstrate their own most commonly used and essential knowledge, the sort of knowledge they rely on most regularly, the sort of knowledge that is most relevant to the successful practice of their field. They will see to that themselves.
So yes, revocations of the license would be rare. The writers of the evaluation process would ensure it would be difficult enough to adequately test the highly technical skills they most directly rely on (and wouldn’t have to study so much for), while not making it unnecessarily burdened with irrelevant material which they would have trouble understanding themselves, but are happy to dump on new entrants in the present system even though it isn’t necessary for their jobs. They would cut the crap and leave the core material if they had to repeat the process themselves. If your counsel was competent, they would be able to pass.
It’s already there. I already wrote that. But it’s not enough on its own.
You have to mandate the same burdens for the current population of professionals as for new applicants, or the people already in the club will be sure to make their evaluation process more convoluted than it needs to be by including hurdles that aren’t actually necessary to perform competently in their profession. Their normal perverse incentive is to put up a high wall. This happens every single time, without exception.
This is the basic law of monopolies and other monopoly-like organizations, such as cartels and, yes, the guild system.
That is not what I wrote. That is not even close to what I wrote. That is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what I wrote. I’ve seen asinine straw arguments before, but they’re usually stupidly off topic. I don’t ever recall seeing one which was so perfectly contrary to what I actually argued.
Lawyers do benefit the common good by providing the grease that makes the gears turn. I specifically noted that. I wrote those words. You ignored them. Still, even though the law benefits us, the guild system is not synonymous with the practice of law. They are not the same thing. They are different things. They happen to coincide here, yes. That they coincide does not make them the same thing. That the current practice of law uses a guild system does not mean that the guild system as it is used in law contributes to the common good. It does not. It is a detriment.
All of this is unrelated to my point.
I cited the single case at the beginning of chapter 3 to get an example of costs, not to open a debate on copyright. What I said in a previous post: “The kid did not copy music. The kid did not pirate music.” That is entirely true. But my point still didn’t relate to the specifics of the case.
The specifics don’t matter to me, except as a demonstration of the costs of litigation, even for potentially innocent defendants. But for a brief rehash: He did not pirate music. He altered a search engine. He didn’t create the engine, but he did alter it. And that act, which he was doing to practice his IT skills, might indeed have been an infringement of US law. His gain from the search engine was not illegal pirated tunes, nor any money since he wasn’t paid for his tinkering. His benefit was simply the attempt to learn a trade. Perhaps that was an infringement of a statute, but that still wouldn’t be music piracy, just as publishing a crack of the encryption on a DVD is a violation of the DMCA, but is still not an actual act of movie piracy until the crack is actually used. This college student did not copy or use the illegal files himself. He was busted for the search engine, according to the complaint.
I do think that case was highly unjust, yes, and said so, but I did not comment on the legitimacy of the RIAA’s suit based on the current law, other than noting, correctly, that his alleged violation was not in fact music piracy. My specific complaint was that the defendant could not afford to spend a quarter of a million dollars in order to defend himself, when the only charge (whether it was actually a violation based on the law or not) was that he had tinkered with his college search engine. Regardless of the statutorily determined violation, the student’s actions were relatively simple to outline, and any system that would require a quarter mil to determine his fault in the case, if fault it was according to the relevant statutes, is a miserable system. I don’t know if the student was in the right based on the law, but even if he had been in the right, he couldn’t defend himself. Even if he had been in the right, defending himself in the case would have bankrupted his family. That was the point.
My cite didn’t prove that the student had been unlawfully sued. I made no comment about how lawful the suit was. But my cite did demonstrate that his entire family would have been bankrupt even if he’d been in the right.
And yes, there is something fundamentally indecent with such a system.
You have now proceeded to the ad hominem. You pile fallacy on fallacy.
This isn’t even about intellectual property. As I’ve demonstrated, the cost to a potentially innocent civil defendant can be exorbitantly high, so much so that it’s beyond their ability to defend themselves. This is true regardless of whether we’re talking about the RIAA bruising up the youngsters, or a tech start-up with barely sufficient capital for operating expenses getting hit with a false patent infringement claim that it can’t afford to fight, or any other situation where the big money players can level strategic lawsuits against their enemies, not necessarily because they have the better case, but simply because the defendant can’t afford the legal defense.
If the student did violate a statute with his tinkering with the search engine, then that is a bad statute and should be changed. And if OP gives us a hypothetical with 15 changes instead of 10, I would, after considerable deliberation, think about reform of such potential problems in intellectual property. For now, though, that’s off topic. What’s on topic is a more efficient legal system generally, one in which potentially valid legal defenses can be argued without it costing 250,000 dollars to those who can’t afford to pay such ludicrous fees.
And as I stated from the beginning, I don’t know for sure how to solve this particular problem. For now, I just have ideas to throw out there.
Yes, firms will hire non-degreed labor with technical skills. That does happen, and I never said or implied otherwise. Neither of my parents have any formal education beyond high school, and yet both of them managed to work their way up to the upper income-brackets.
But you’d have to be living in a cave not to realize that, on average, degreed people earn significantly more than those without the fancy piece of paper. Giving people free online education is well and good, and I’m fully supportive of it. But giving people an opportunity to earn their degree more cheaply will also help. It will not only provide useful education, but it will also provide the parchment with the university seal that demonstrates proof of that education, which will in the average case lead to much higher remuneration.
This is especially important in a time when the costs of higher education, degreed higher education, are increasing faster than inflation. For whatever reasons, the cost for that fancy piece of paper is rising quite quickly, and because of the salary advantages of people who have it, we’d be wise to come up with ways to bring that price back down, so that even poorer folks have an opportunity to get their degree more easily and thus have a better chance of gaining access to higher paying jobs.
What I said: A degree as “status marker” was the belief of some libertarianish types that I’d read. It was, as I quite explicitly stated, not my own opinion but the opinion of other people. If I failed to develop their arguments enough for you to follow, that should be somewhat understandable since their arguments are not my own. I sometimes offer other people’s arguments to provide a basis of comparison, but that doesn’t mean my summary will be comprehensive.
You’re right, though, that it is not a status marker if everyone is the same. And this is (in their opinion) why more people are now pushing to get even higher degrees, as markers of extra super status, instead of all of us actually concentrating on future needed skills. I don’t agree with them, but their argument is at least consistent, as far as I understand it.
I want to bring down the costs of degreed higher education, whose price has been increasing faster than the rate of inflation. I want to do this because a degree, regardless of whether it’s a demonstration of real value or an empty status marker, gives the opportunity for people to earn significantly higher wages, on average. I want to subsidize an experiment in which this sort of education is to be more available to more people in a better format at a lower price than is currently being provided.
I’m not sure I quite get what you’re implying, but here’s what I wrote: “I’m not here making a Milton Friedmanesque argument that these licensing procedures should be done away with completely…” Not. That is, I was not claiming to follow in Friedman’s footsteps.
He would advocate that the government completely remove itself from licensing, which would mean that I could, if I so wanted, open a new law firm tomorrow out of the trunk of my car. That’s Friedman. As with the vast majority of people, I happen to believe that the balance is a more toward the government regulation side of things–only more efficiently implemented than it is now, which is a markedly minority view.
Amending is a pretty huge leap from abolishing. The right to abolish has been a maxim of law since before the Magna Carta (signed in 1215) that “the creator is always more powerful than the created”. We the People created Congress, and we can obviously disband it to try something else.
