Utopian States: Striving for Perfection

With the next US presidential election looming in the fall, we should look to practical short term solutions rather than the long range utopian solutions.

Ever hear of the fallacy of too few choices?  This fallacy is also called the fallacy of the false dilemma?  It would be a fallacy of too few choices if one party gave the choice of having a huge military budget and the other party gave the choice of having a tiny military budget.  The given options are too few.  Most people would prefer options that allowed for a military budget that was slightly stronger or slightly less strong.

The fallacy of too few choices also applies to clustered choices or packaged choices.  Having to choose between the cluster of proposals preferred by the Democratic Party or the cluster of choices preferred by the Republican Party is a logical fallacy; it gives the voter too few options.  The real choices are infinite in any choice between packages with several options.

I will not give the long range utopian solution for this problem in this post.  I will, however, suggest the shorter range solution is that the USA should have more viable political parties.

That solution creates an enigma.  How does the government create more viable political parties?  Ultimately the solution will require changes to the voting laws.

A short term solution to the problem of having more political parties would be instantaneous and not too painful.  The solution would neither be a complete solution or a final solution.  A solution that could put the USA on the path to having more political parties and thus more choices would be to require that each candidate belong to two different political parties.  A candidate would have to belong to a major party and a minor party.  A Republican or Democratic candidate might belong also to the Tea Party or the Libertarian party, for example.  Two totally independent parties would support each candidate.

Once there are four or more political parties sharing the political responsibilities in Washington, further changes could be made.  This solution would be an interim solution and should be automatically retired after a short trial – perhaps five years.

 From http://www.lcurve.org/

Quoting from a
recently-published book by political philosopher David Schweickart,

According to the Federal Reserve board the net wealth of Americans is 59 trillion dollars.  The top one percent have about 20  trillion in assets.  The next 9% have another 20 trillion in net wealth.  The bottom 90% have 20 trillion in net wealth.

Shouldn’t the national debt be proportionately distributed according to wealth?

Shouldn’t the national expendatures be distributed proportionately to wealth?

Logically, all the lower 90% should pay for is social security, unemployment, medicare,and medicade.  The lower 90% should not have to pay income taxes.

The state of the state in a nutshell:

• American (US) bureaucracies and institutions do not help the average citizen; they are merely facades.
• American laws avoid protecting the natural rights of American citizens.
• American police frequently file charges only to prevent their own misconducts from being brought to the attention of the courts or the media.
• The police usually never help solve crimes.
• The police usually entrap ordinary citizens with vehicle related incidents in order to extort money or give the illusion of crime prevention.
• The police criminalize the average citizen because criminals are too dangerous to pursue or difficult to catch.
• The courts only grant a person a constitutional right if they have paid their lawyer a lot of money.
• Prison and trials are cruel punishment.  Only circuitous reasoning justifies the process as not cruel.
• Government bureaucracy deceives the politicians to give the illusion of valuable service.
• Government gives the illusion that it protects the natural rights of their citizens.
• Government thinks the economy is a perpetual motion machine.
• The economic profession is broken.
• Allowing a trade deficit is equivalent to thinking that bloodletting is good medical treatment.
• Deficit spending is equivalent to thinking that bloodletting is good medical treatment.
• Government and the banks ONLY decrease the money supply to varying degrees.
• Social Security taxes are cloaked reverse progressive taxes (the middle class pays at a higher rate).
• Most billionaires and CEOs are thieves.
• Government sacrifices soldiers to their War God.
• American jobs are sacrificed to the Gods of Wall St.
• Timeshares are worthless as investments.

Typically citizens of other nations will say that these generalities apply to their own country as well.