maybe it's time for a politics post

"When in the course of human events" the need arises for a thorough examination of government, and of our government in particular, we ask ourselves what we even mean by a government. What is our ultimate goal in creating restrictions on fellow humans with only indirect consent to such? Is our goal complete happiness for all; as such there is no incentive to work or innovate? Is our goal true morality; as such the basic human right to believe what they choose comes into jeopardy? Is our goal the continuation of our eternal quest for knowledge?

It should be.

For all we know, we are the only intelligent species in the universe. Are we going to let that opportunity disappear by letting evolution kill us off?

We cannot.

We must march along in the pursuit of knowledge hoping that someday, far in the future, we can at last feel that we are done. It is only then that it is even possible to tackle the other great aims that humanity may have. To further this ultimate aim of conquering all of the secrets of the universe, we must focus our government on innovation, as that is the general term for creating new knowledge. We need an innovation economy, and we have one: Capitalism. We need a way for all voices to be heard, and we have one: Democracy. We need a way to extend ourselves to increase the availability and usefulness of innovations, and we have one: the Internet. What we don’t have is a beneficial, reliable, and ingeniously useful way of combining them. We need internet-enabled democracy and an Information Economy. What is interesting to note is that these will develop on their own as a consequence of the very existence of those three pillars. What is more interesting to note is that their very development is being prevented by various laws that do what all short-sighted laws do: protect people from themselves. We have laws that force anyone who develops any new source of energy to perform a complete environmental impact analysis and report it to the EPA before they can even build a prototype. We have laws that cause the FCC to “own” the radio spectrum, and grant exclusive licenses of such spectrum to the highest bidder, effectively locking out anyone who isn’t a multi-billion-dollar telecom company. Effectively, we have hundreds of laws whose unintended consequence is preventing innovation from 99% of the population and yet we aren’t doing anything about it.

Maybe we can start now.

Note 1: I wrote this last year...so yes this is another non-post
I don't have too many of those left...

Note 2: Things have changed since I wrote it 20 months ago, foremost among them the political situation itself. The current Administration believes in a very different purpose for government:

"Our government should...ensure opportunity...for every American who is willing to work"

This is an entirely admirable and respectable belief. However, it is also a naive belief. Obama is arguing for one of two types of "opportunity": if possible, everyone who wishes to be employed should be employed, and if not possible should be supported indefinitely by the government, that is, by those who are employed and therefore pay taxes.
Just as the demand for a good tends toward the supply as the price tends towards zero, everyone in the market for a job would be employed if there were no restrictions instituting a minimum amount a company must pay all employees. If the person in question is not to be employed by a company, they must either be employed by the government at what is by definition an above-market wage (if it wasn't, they would be employed in the market) or paid by the government for doing no work at all (i.e. welfare). In either case, of course, the system is inefficient, that is, wealth that could have been produced is not being produced - if the government pays above-market wages for employees, the more efficient private sector is deprived of the opportunity to hire them, and if the government pays for no work, any and all wealth that could have been created by the person in question is lost.
If we are sure that we want everyone to have opportunity, and we understand that there are trade-offs we must first consider even with that statement, there are better ways to accomplish it. Simply abolishing the minimum wage would ensure nearly complete employment, while also ensuring that each individual contributes the greatest amount of wealth possible to the overall economy. If the government so chooses, it could supplement this amount to ensure that everyone has an income at least that of the old minimum wage. While taxes are the obvious source for this funding, there are better, fairer ways: there are resources that can and should be shared with all Americans: our reserves of energy, from natural gas to uranium to thorium, are distributed randomly and no amount of capitalism can allocate them "correctly". The United States contains over one trillion dollars of each of the three fuels, not to mention either petroleum or coal, which are probably better off staying in the ground. I am not advocating for socialization of the entire energy industry, just the assertion that all natural resources in this country belong to the entire country and not the property owner who was given them by happenstance. Private companies are still better at extracting the resources themselves cost-effectively.