02 January 2010

A listing of personal political crusades that will substitute for the notional practice of New Year Resolutions

1) Get the school day moved back to ~9am start times. - For a variety of social "planning" reasons this would help immeasurably. Students, daycare costs, and crime rates would all potentially be receiving net benefits for almost no downside.

2) Get rid of daylight savings time changes. If the schools start at a reasonable time then there's no reason for people to complain about the possibilities of killing students on their way to school, which seems like the traffic fatality issue is the only real stumbling block to this. I like killing as many birds with one stone as you can.

3) Get rid of the office of Vice President and, perhaps more importantly, the accompanying bureaucratic patronage that it has inspired in recent decades.

4) Abolish the distinction between public and private schools and allow funding via property tax or some other levy to follow students (as it more or less does for higher education with one major caveat that interstate collegiate costs are too protectionist to be beneficial).

5) Abolish the war on drugs. Revenue streams alone from "illegal" hemp (unrelated to the drug trade of marijuana itself and effectively required to be imported for domestic use) seems like a perfectly good place to start dealing with our stupidity.

6) Abolish the "war on terror" and reserve our interventionism for situations where it might actually benefit our national security (or possibly other global) interests.

7) Figure out if there is something I am "for" rather than seek to abolish or limit as it relates to political and state instruments. (there are some, such as some basic regulations within the market that I think are lacking or inappropriately enforced, but "more regulation" is not an appropriate response either in my view as much existing or proposed regulation seems like stumbling blocks to competition rather than actual barriers preventing immoral or unfair business practices).

2 comments:

Kyla Denae said...

I could get behind these resolutions.

Sun Tzu said...

I've found very specific and somewhat limited support for #3 at least.