Rational Action

Here is a list of my priorities for the next president.

• A foreign policy that promotes the United States as a positive world influence and as an ideal worthy of replication. That means a greater focus on our alliances with other democracies (A democracy should never be treated as an antagonist; see America vs. France, America vs. Germany). The message must be: all freely elected democracies are friends of the United States, so come join the community. We must make a massive commitment to “soft power” (The power of our ideas) instead of “hard power” (The power of our military).
• The continued lowering of barriers to trade. For the United States, that probably means putting agricultural subsidies on the table, and then subsequently pushing those subsidies off the table, into the trash. If American companies need government checks to produce food profitably, then they shouldn’t be producing food. Since outsourcing is a form of trade, lowered trade barriers would likely encourage it. That’s okay: we have lots to gain from outsourcing. Yes, there will be losers, but the government can help them by e.g. providing incentives to learn new skills and assistance during this retraining period. In this way, most Americans will get small gains from increased globalization, and although there will be losers, they will be able to change for the times and find new jobs.
• The balancing of the federal budget. It’s a pipe dream — both candidates only promise to halve the deficit by 2008 — but any current debt just gets tacked on to future budgets. Whenever we run a deficit now, we’re making it harder to run a surplus later. If we find ourselves in need of a large fiscal stimulus in the near future, large deficits could make that stimulus very difficult to deliver.
• A foreign policy that confronts the Middle East by acknowleding the complexity and interrelatedness of its actors. Iraq was the wrong place to start; our invasion has only made things worse, and the more-or-less true perception that the war was a unilateral act has damaged our credibility. Peace and democractization are heavily linked to the Israel-Palestine question. No more blank checks for Israel — demand an end to settlement creation, demand the beginning of settlement destruction (Gaza is a start). If the U.S. can give itself the appearance of being more even-handed on the conflict, it will have more diplomatic influence on other Middle Eastern nations. (This is probably too optimistic. It may be impossible for any Israeli PM to rein in the far right…)

Here are my secondary priorities:

• Some kind of health care reform that decreases the number of uninsured. That doesn’t necessarily mean any huge programs, but we do need to get these people on some kind of basic coverage.
• The lifting of NIH stem cell research restrictions. This is blindingly obvious.
• Support for pro-choice organizations. Allow government money to fund institutions that teach more than abstinence, especially those institutions based abroad. Stop trying to ban partial birth abortions, and stop trying to make a fetus and a baby legally equivalent.
• Civil unions for same sex couples. Don’t call it marriage, it angers too many people and makes any progress politically impossible.
• A renewed focus on civil liberties. Thankfully a lot of people have latched on to that.
• Decreased censorship of the media — filtering at the client level (e.g. you tell your TV to block shows with sexual content, instead of the government prohibiting sexual content from being broadcast). No mandates for libraries to filter content. No regulation of basic cable.
• Copyright reform. Protect fair use in digital content, allow for reverse engineering. It’s impossible, but I’ll say it: reduce the term of copyright protection, since it makes no economic sense for the term to last so long.
• Patent reform. Reevaluate our position on software patents, and hire more people at the US Patent and Trade Office so that fewer bad patents slip by.

Okay. Comments?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2004 at 1:50 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.