I am wrestling with and may change my position on legalizing drugs, which I never would have imagined just a few years ago. Let me explain. Addictions, when acted upon, usually hurt people, cost a lot, and destroy relationships. The worst addictors today appear to be drugs, alcohol, pornography, and gambling. For different people each of these can be debilitating and destructive. The addict knows it. But he or she goes ahead anyway—that is the definition of an addiction—unless transformed...
How Government Policy Impacts Our Lives
The Time Bomb of a Nation without Fathers
Over the last several years I’ve worried about the underappreciated critical value of fathers to families, but a recent experience has multiplied that concern exponentially. Up until now I’ve been concerned about two situations: 1. In societies where multiple current wives are permitted, the problem is the competition between the children of the various wives, all vying for the attention and approval of the aloof father. Some are pegged as winners in this contest, and others as losers. In our...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Ten
10. Enact term limits for the House and Senate of three consecutive terms, to eliminate the current tendency toward a permanent political class which is out of touch with the rest of the nation.
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Nine
9. Focus decisions for primary and secondary education back to the local level, and fund them in the same way as colleges and universities, with a mixture of direct local government funding, vouchers, grants from foundations and businesses, etc. Let decisions on expenditures, teacher retention, etc., be made by those closest to the students.
Tax Leadership Begins at Homes
My career focus has been on commercial real estate for almost forty years, and I am therefore tangentially interested in the housing market—and I also own a home with a mortgage. I must be missing something about the home mortgage interest deduction (MID). Real estate people are supposed to stand for free enterprise, individual initiative, and fair dealing. How does a vested-interest tax break help further those ideals? I’m disappointed in our industry’s business-as-usual reaction to the...
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Eight
8. Repeal Obamacare, start over, and replace it with a grant for individuals and families to shop among healthcare providers, allowing the consumer to choose his or her plan but providing funds for everyone to be covered by a minimum comprehensive plan, if they choose to be.
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Seven
7. Within six months perform a cost-benefit analysis on every federal department which has been created in the last fifty years, like Education, Environmental Protection, etc. The goal should be to prove why the department’s budget should not be cut in 2012 by at least twenty-five percent, or eliminated entirely.
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Six
6. Increase retirement ages and contributions for Social Security over the next five years so that the program is “fixed” for the foreseeable future, and no longer a source for political debate.
2020 Vision: How to Fix the Next Ten Years in Ten Steps: Step Five
5. Instead of “Cap and Trade”, in 2011 add a ten cent federal tax to each gallon of refined gasoline, and then increase that tax by five cents every year for the next twenty years. Use the funds to do energy research, to provide seed capital for viable alternatives, and to build other forms of mass transit.
How Public Policy Can Affect Almost Everything
For those of you who have studied F. A. Hayek for years, my recent epiphany (see earlier post) must seem almost laughable. Like a music historian who, after forty years in the field, suddenly discovers Tchaikovsky. Though written almost seventy years ago, The Road to Serfdom is rich with truth. Hayek focuses on economics and government, but the repercussions of policy spill over into areas far removed from their original narrow intent. He correctly predicts in Chapter 14 how government actions...
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