We Don't Need Campaign Finance Reform, We Need Campaign Audience Reform

People bitch about campaign money all the time.  An argument that is regularly made can be paraphrased as follows:

The campaign with the most money can buy the most votes so we need to modify how people get funded to ensure their interests align with the people's.

This is a specious argument.  The problem is not that we must control who has the money to buy the opinion of the voting public so that the right opinion is bought.  The problem is that we let people vote who are so easily influenced that an insubstantial, 30-second advertisement can change the course of their actions.

Think about it.  Is it really reasonable that someone who, essentially, votes in accordance with the last advertisement they happened to hear should be given the power to choose who lives and who dies?  Of course it isn't.

...and don't kid yourself.  That's nothing short of what voting is: the power to kill someone who disagrees with your choices strongly enough to not comply.  Sure, it's filtered through dozens of layers of indirection - judges, juries, laws, cops, et cetera - but that doesn't make voting any less what it is: the power to compel under threat of death.

Most people - even really, really stupid people - would agree that one guy shouldn't be allowed to take whatever he wants and kill whomever tries to stop him.  Nearly one-hundred percent of that group would agree that the power should no more be granted to two or twenty such people.

In fact, the public response to organized crime - groups of people who compel under (ultimately) the threat of death - seems to indicate that many of us have an implicit grasp on the non-linear nature of this kind of problem.  That is, everyone seems to know that two thugs are a little more that twice as bad as one thug.  Most of us know that a large organization that takes what it wants and kills those who try to stop it is a really dangerous, bad, and - dare I level a value judgment? - evil thing.

So why is a group of four-hundred million people doing the same thing somehow magically better?  Why do we care about the opinion of someone who just wants to vote themselves money?  Their vote certainly shouldn't count.  Why do we care about the opinion of someone who is persuaded by arguments like "Yuh-huh!" and "Nuh-uh!"?  Isn't that person's opinion noise at best and, at worst, and amplifier for the person who can buy the most ad-space in their field of view?

My dad likes to complain about how we live in a marketing-driven economy.  We all see some huge number of advertisements every day.  Corporations are using those ads to drive people's behavior.

How the hell is that the corporations' fault?  You see the ads.  You choose how (or, I guess in some people's cases, whether or not) to interpret them.  If you elect to be a subject of the media's sway, that doesn't make the corporation at fault.  It's your fault.

If I was playing chess with you, you'd not fault me for exploiting an enormous opening you left me, would you?  It's no more wrong for a company to exploit the weak minds of its potential buyers.  It's no more wrong for a politician to buy an ad spot that says there's no proof his opponent isn't a lizard man who worships the devil and eats puppies.  It's no more wrong for a major lobby group to fund that ad.

If there is any fault to be assigned - and, given the current state of affairs, I believe there is - it must be on the people who are influenced by such things.  If someone is too simple to vote properly, it is their own fault, not the fault of the people who take advantage of that fact.

A simple thought experiment can demonstrate this.  Imagine this scenario:

Ninety-nine percent of the voting public bases their decisions on their own thoughts.  That is, they take their own experiences, values, and judgments and synthesize a model of the world then base decisions on that model.  One politician's promises and track record jives with the model developed by fifty-five percent of those thinking voters - more than half of all voters.  His opponent has ten times as much funding but they both have enough funding to reach basically all of the potential voters.  Who's going to win in that scenario?

Naturally, it would be the person whom the thinking people believe will accomplish what they want accomplished.

Now flip it around.  One percent of the population thinks and the remainder votes in accordance with the number of advertising dollars to which they've been exposed.  In such a case, funding would be almost the only thing that matters.  If you imagine the same funding bias, it's pretty obvious who is most likely to win that election.

Both cases have a huge funding bias but only one has a corrupted election, the one where corrupt and weak people are allowed to vote.

We don't need better campaign financing rules.  We don't need better rules around advertisements.  We just need to start taking responsibility for our actions - including the act of voting - and peeling off the mantle of power the sticky fingers of anyone who can't or won't do that.

Regulation versus recommendation

I have a long drive to get home and it gives me time to think.  Today, I was ruminating on the fact that I am so okay with traffic signals and lanes while I am against government-imposed regulation in almost every other form.

Why?  I think the reason is because traffic control works and it does not impose an undue cost.  Why does it work when, in my eyes, government almost always fails to accomplish its goals?

Why does a stop sign work?

I'll tell you one reason that is definitely not why it works.  Stop signs do not work on account of enforcement for the simple reason that there is not enough enforcement to make them work.

If stop signs worked on account of enforcement, people would come to a full stop every time because they were afraid of the consequences.  People don't because they aren't.

The reason why stop signs and other traffic signals work is because they inform people in a way that is useful to them.  They say "someone has thought about this intersection for a while and they think people should come to a full stop, here, or they'll risk collision."

Different people do different things with that information.  Some people, like me, come to a full stop and look at all the other directions from which vehicles may approach and then proceed through the intersection.  Other people slow down and look around to make sure there is not risk and then roll through the intersection.

Almost everyone, however, pays some level of attention to a stop sign and, really, to almost any traffic sign or signal.  Again, that's because there is a useful recommendation being made that is trusted by its recipient.

This is the direction I think I would like to see our regulations go.  Instead of telling bankers what they can and cannot do, we should provide benchmarks that must be met in order to be a "Grade A Financial Institution" or some such.  Instead of telling people what they can and cannot put on the air based on Christian values, we should provide ratings that Christians can use to regulate their media intake.

Instead of trying to control what food people can eat or what drugs they can consume we should simply say "this has't been tested... knock yourself out but don't come crying to us when things go south."

Why do I like this system better than one wherein regulations occur?  The obvious reason is that, instead of infringing on the liberties of producers, it increases the freedoms of consumers by way of education.  There's another, less obvious reason though.  I bet that yielding recommendations cost a lot less than enforcing regulations; a lot less.

Even less obvious is the fact that ratings probably work better than rules in the first place.  Psychologically, they are positioned as tools of collaboration rather than oppression, which probably helps them get adopted more quickly and thoroughly.  Mechanically, they have the property of aiming markets at problems and markets have conclusively shown themselves to be better decision-makers than central planners.

This seems like a good balance, to me.  Any rational do-good-er should be satisfied with the outcome of government simply recommending what is safe and what is not.  Any rational Libertarian should be satisfied with the increase of liberty and reduction in expense.  Some of us are willing to entertain the thought that there really are "greater good" things where the impact is so high and the burden is so low that it makes sense to couple them to government.

Now, I'm not saying that there is no place for regulation at all.  For instance, there is a real conversation to be had between environmentalists and Libertarians.  My guess is that the two frameworks can be reconciled nicely as (for instance) things like dumping poison into a water table, which is a sin from the perspective of an environmentalist, also constitutes an assault in the Libertarian model.

What I am saying is that, in most cases, there really isn't a useful conversation to be had about whether or not an individual should be told what they can use or a company can be told what they should sell.  If you want to restrict what consenting people do with their own bodies and properties, you are wrong.  Simple as that.  Until you can accept that you have no right to interfere in such things, you have no right participating in the political process at all.

In fact, anyone who believes that it is one person's right to tell some other group of consenting individuals what they can do should really do us all a favor and just shut the hell up altogether.

We still aren't qualified to tell people what to do

I've thought about this some more and I've come up with a scenario in which giving someone the answer works.  It's worked on me and it's worked for me.  In a true mentor/coach type role, you can tell someone what to do if you happen to have experienced a problem very much like what the person you are helping is going through.  You cannot dictate what they shall do but you can tell them what they should do.

This, again, has very to do with intellect or training and very much to do with real world experience.  If you've never ridden a bike before and someone else has, you could possess twice their mental capacity and they would still be able to teach you something because they've done it before.  Furthermore, it's an offering of knowledge rather than a binding of rules.  There is no guarantee that you will follow the instructions but, if  you do, there is a benefit to you.  If you don't, then you get the benefit when you eventually come around.

I've experienced this in the work world.  Those who've taken it upon themselves to help me have patiently explained how to patiently explain things, knowing that I won't necessarily (or even likely) do what they suggest.  Likewise, I've explained how to do technical things to people who refused to adapt, knowing that even though they weren't going to start that day, they may eventually start seeing things my way.

In contrast, the opposite has happened.  I've see brilliant and enthusiastic students try something out right away to see if it works.  Likewise, certain things have clicked with me right away, leading to nearly instant adoption.

In all those scenarios, it didn't matter who was the teacher or how intelligent they were.  It matters a little bit how smart the student is but it matters a lot more how ready to hear the lesson they are.

So if you really feel the need to go out and better people's lives by telling them what to do, you can do a lot of good by picking a topic on which you have experience and mentoring young people.  A hell of a lot more good than you would by trying to get rules made that people must follow.

I'm not qualified to tell anyone how to live and neither are you

I'm a pretty smart guy.  Smarter than most.  I have a lot of natural abilities that allow me to solve complex problems much faster than people of average intelligence and, really, even most people who are significantly above average.

That's not bragging.  Some people are born rich.  Some are born good looking.  Some are born smart.  Some are born with absolutely nothing to distinguish them from the next guy.  It's just the way things are.  If you don't like it, tough.  That's still how things are.

A lot of people are of above average intellect.  By definition, half are above the median.  If you are on the smarter side of the spectrum, it's pretty easy to look at someone who is struggling through a problem and think you can improve their lives by dictating how they should live.  Sadly, people who are on the dimmer side of the scale seem at least as able to imagine that someone smarter than them should be telling them what to do.

It doesn't work that way for a couple reasons.  I'd like to set the stage for those reasons by examining what motivates most people to try and tell others how to live.  There are really two basic reasons:

• To help others by improving the quality of their decisions.
• To help one's self by tweaking the decisions of others in favor of one's own interests.

It doesn't really matter how many people are driven by one of those forces or the other or even how many people have a foot in each camp.  One of those motives is not even worth considering as valid: the latter.  If you want to improve your lot in life, do it by making your decisions better, not by making others' decisions better for you.  So we can safely disregard the self-enrichment motive and focus on the do-gooder impulse.

Why does the motivation matter?  Because dictating how other people live is observably contradictory to the goal of improving their lives.  Ironically, people who have a lot of influence in my life told me this a long time ago and it took me nearly a decade to internalize it.  You'll see why that's ironic in a moment.

The reason why making decisions for other people runs contrary to their interests is that there are more forces involved in making a quality decision than just how smart the decision-maker is.  I wouldn't even pretend to guess at how many favors there are in making a good decision but two that are always present are intimacy and context.

Everyone has a very intimate relationship with themselves.  Few people, if any, truly know you better than you know yourself.  Really, it's not very likely that anyone - even your wife of twenty years or your husband of forty - knows you even half as well as you know yourself.

Why does that matter?  Because there are too many variables in the universe for anyone - no matter their intellect - to pay attention to all of them when making a decision.  We all have an innate sense of what is important to us and that helps us focus on the factors that we think will drive the outcome we desire.  Even a terrible assessment of what matters that based on one's true desires yields a better outcome than decisions made by some ivory tower intellectual who has never met or even heard of you.

Another important factor is context.  It doesn't matter how smart you are, you cannot plan the future.  You cannot even have perfect knowledge of the present.  It's outside the current scope of human intellect to do either of those things.  Because you cannot predict all of the contexts in which someone will face a problem, you cannot know the forces involved in solving that problem.

It turns out that people who are terrible at problem solving but know what the actual problem they are solving is are way better at solving that problem than someone with great problem solving skills but no idea what the actual problem being solved is.  Don't believe me?  Maybe you should run an experiment with someone you consider to be your intellectual peer.  You make up a set of rules to deal with a category of problems and have your friend try to find contingency in which the rules set doesn't work. Repeat that process until one of you gives up and see who wins.

There is yet another reason why telling people how they should live does not work.  Compliance is not the same thing as agreement.  If you make rules for someone that they don't understand or agree with, then they will either ignore the rules or comply with the letter of the law rather than the spirit.  So, even if you are right and do really know what should be done, getting someone to do those things in a way that will help them by way of mandate is extremely ineffective.

This by the way is the source of irony to which I earlier alluded.  Someone told me not to tell people what to do and to let them figure things out for themselves and I ignored that advice until I figured it out for myself.

So what should you do?  Well, if you're the sort of person who wants to make other people do things in order to improve your own life... well... go fuck yourself then jump off a cliff, I guess?  If you are in the other camp, I'm not going to tell you what to do.  I will tell you that improving people's lives - truly improving their circumstances appears to stem from helping people change how they think, not telling them what to do.

If you can persuade someone to understand why you want them to do a certain thing for their own benefit and believe that it benefits them, they will start making the right choices on their own.  If not, all the regulation and coercion in the world will only make the tiniest and most fleeting of impacts before backfiring to make things worse than they already were.

But most importantly, I must reiterate: If you want to make rules for the simple purpose of enriching one group of people at the expense of another, fuck off and die.

I'm so sick of hearing about how unfair the campaign funding system is

People aren't stupid.  At least, that's what I keep hearing.

Yet, whenever it comes to a matter of advertising, everyone gets up in arms about how the person with the biggest advertising budget wins.  It doesn't matter whether it is for a product or a political contestant.  The complaint is always the same "oh, he only won because of all the money he got from X so now he's going to be beholden to that entity."

So which is it?  Are people smart enough to make their own decisions and vote or not?  If they are, then you don't get to blame the advertisements they see for their decisions.  If they aren't, guess what: You still don't get to blame the marketing to which they were exposed.  Being stupid is a defect, not an excuse.

The problem isn't that Johnny Politician gets too much money from entity X.  The problem is that someone can win an election using a lot of campaign funding even when they are a complete douche nozzle.  In other words, let's not blame campaign funding for the bad decisions that voters make.

You may ask "Okay, so maybe people are too dumb to make their own decisions, shouldn't we control the media to which those people are exposed?"  The first and most obvious answer to that question is "You should probably replace 'people' with 'we.'"

The fundamental problem you are trying to address is that people are gaming the system... at least, that's what some of you believe is happening.  I defy everyone reading this to come up with a true example from history wherein adding a layer of rules to a system reduced the extent to which that system could be gamed.

If you want better decisions to come out of elections, your only real option is to try and get the voting population to be smarter or at least to be better decision makers.  You have a lot of options you can try.  Here are a few of them, and I'm not recommending any of them:

• Educate voters in critical thinking so their behavior is more their own
• Provide incentives that entice intelligent voters to activate 
• Provide incentives that entice unintelligent voters to deactivate
• Provide a filtration system that weeds out stupid voters
• Reduce the number of stupid voters to raise the average

Education is controversial if you are teaching the issues.  It's not so controversial to teach critical thinking skills themselves.  The real problem with that kind of education is that most people who think the can teach it actually cannot.  I'm guessing we have something like 1% of our population that can even approach objectivity when considering something.  Maybe less.

I'm not sure what incentives you can provide for intelligent people to get them to vote more.  The thing that would get me voting would be if voting were worthwhile, so maybe just doing other things to get the quality of the voting population up would do the trick.

Incentives to get dumb people not to vote aren't hard at all.  The main obstacle is giving someone the ability to prove with reasonable certainty that they didn't vote.  Once you've done that, almost any trinket would do.  I bet you could keep five percent of the worst voters away from their ballets for $100 a head or less.  The great part is, so long as you don't run out of funding, you don't even care if someone managed to defraud you.  After all, if they can outsmart even the simplest amount of bureaucracy, it's probably okay for them to be voting.

A filtration system is dangerous as anything that is not opt-in would be.  It could quickly convert from a quality-assurance tool to one of oppression.  I can't imagine any system where the government says "no, you cannot vote," that doesn't degrade into something Orwellian in decades.

Reducing the number of idiots in the world has the same problem.  Or, at least, it did until the advent of modern birth control.  Offering free vasectomies in exchange for small prizes would let the worst portions of our population select themselves out of the gene pool while leaving them, the entities that are already born, free to enjoy the rest of their lives.

Whatever the case, the problem we have right now isn't the few who have the funds to buy ad-space for their favorite candidate.  It is the many who are so easily influenced by such parlor tricks.

Republicrats and Democans - A New Way to View Them

...at least, a new way for me to view them.

Everybody with half a brain knows that Republicans and Democrats are basically the same thing.  I've many times said that Democrats are just sheep in wolves' clothing.

Recently, a reason why they might be so similar dawned on me.  They actually believe the exact same things.

I'll start with the obvious case: Republicans.  Most Republicans, not all but most, fit the following description.  They are people who believe in some kind of god figure and imagine that this god figure will always balance the equation in the end.  If things aren't made right here, they will be rectified in the hereafter.  This is why Republicans lean toward financial liberty.  The impulse to make everyone live the "right" way their god wants them to is also why they lean away from social liberty.

Now, I'll propose an hypothesis about Democrats.  A Democrat is someone who knows that he should not need a god figure in his life but still does.  He has lost the battle with his mind and is desperately searching for a replacement god.  After a short scan of what he thinks he knows, he finds an entity large enough and complex enough that he can ascribe magical powers to it without the burden of critical thinking getting in the way: government.

The Democratic god of government then has the same job as the Republican god with only a difference of "when."  That is, while the Republican god grants happiness or punishment, thereby making everything fair in the hereafter, the Democratic one must do it in the here and now.  For this reason, social liberty is promoted (as a form of heaven on earth) and financial liberty is restricted.

Democrats and Republicans aren't just similar.  They are the same broken model for the world: There is a giant, intangible, benevolent entity that will make everything right if you only allow it to do so.  Near as I can tell, they differ only by the stipulations fed into those broken thoughts.

So what's my conclusion?  I don't know.  I just discovered this and wanted to share it with the rest of the world so that you can call me crazy and ignore it like you always do when I'm right.

False Dichotomy - Who is the Bad Guy?

People are divided about this Christopher Dorner thing.  Some people think that he is the bad guy in all this.  Some people think that the LAPD is the villain.

This is typical of human behavior, to try and make a problem simpler than it really is and therefore to make it more complex.

Let's start with the simple analysis.  Regardless of how you feel about police, Christopher Dorner killed two innocent people in cold blood and without provocation.  That's classic bad guy behavior, right there.  So he was a bad guy.

That, however, does not make the police the good guys.  Let's consider how they reacted to this situation.  They opened fire on a couple of old ladies with no provocation.  They rammed some random guy's car and tried to shoot him to death after determining that he was definitely not Dorner.  They tried to assassinate some other dude based on no evidence at all.  Their policy was, objectively, "shoot first and ask questions later."  Finally, they intentionally burned down a building with something they were pretty sure was him in it so they didn't have to do their jobs.  That's classic bad guy behavior too.

So the obvious answer is this: Christopher Dorner was a bad guy.  A real, honest, full-fledged nut job - if the killings didn't tell you that, his political beliefs certainly would.  That said, the police in Southern California have been for many years, and still are, an occupying force rather than keepers of the peace.  They too are the bad guys.

One of the many disservices the media does us, is to train us that the whole yin and yang thing is not the complete load of horse shit it is.  For every darkness, there must be a light.  For every villain, there must be a hero.

It's just not true, though.  There just because there is a bad guy, there doesn't have to be a hero.  The reality is that the world is mostly bad guys and normal guys, with just a scant few good guys struggling their way through a tide of apathy and malice.

Before You Freak out, Read the Executive Orders

I heard that Obama is going to disarm the people with an executive order or something like that.  I was mildly annoyed until I remembered one thing: people are fucking liars.

I think it's pretty well known that I am no fan of the current president.  I really haven't been a fan of any president since I was born.  However, he seems to me to have done this one right.

Great care appears to have been taken so as to create two effects:

1. Avoid violating the second amendment or, really, even treading near its protections.
2. Avoid fixating on guns as the problem and stay focused on gun violence.

I think that last bit is a little dumb.  There is no gun violence problem in america.  There are gun violence incidents and, everyone reasonable seems to agree, there's no way you are going to prevent every incident of gun violence.

Half the executive orders amount to simply declaring he will do his job.  Like nominating a director of the ATF.  Oh no.  Not a director!  Some of them are things like encouraging the states to share information with the federal government.  There's no violation there, of the second or ninth amendments.  If anything, it's more recognition of the latter than I've seen in years.

Some of them are just common sense, like reminding doctors that they are not federally obligated to keep in confidence their concern that a patient might harm themselves or others.  Three times.  Another common sense order is reminding gun stores that they are not obligated to sell guns to crazy people and offering them training on how to spot a nut.

Nestled in there are even a few good ideas.  I'm not going to tell you what they are, though, because I want you to read the orders for yourself.  If you do - if you actually read the orders and evaluate them against the text of the constitution - you probably will realize you should reserve your outrage for other problems...

...like when he tries to push an unconstitutional assault weapon ban through later this year.

Politicians and Leaders

I think I'm a pretty good leader.  I say that based on anecdotal evidence.  When I take up a charge, people tend to get behind me and we all work together to crush a problem.  That seems like leadership.

However, whenever I'm given any kind of management task, I tend to fail and I think I'm just now discovering why.

Management and leadership are perpendicular concepts.

Leadership is inspiring a bunch of people to do something, helping devise a strategy to do it, and participating in getting it done.  Leadership is about looking out for the people who are working with you toward a common end.  It is also about doing what needs to be done to make sure you and your team succeed.

By contrast, what we typically call "management" today, is none of those things.  That's not to say there aren't managers who are also leaders - there certainly are - but the tasks of management are about satisfying managers above you, tracking what's been done, and vying for resources on behalf of your team.

What we call "management" in America, today, is really "politics."  People who are successful managers are invariably good politicians and variably good at leadership.  It is a skill that is more about lobbying for the favor of "higher ups" than it is about getting those around you or beneath you to a goal.

My mind goes back to what my seventh grade French teacher said about math.  He said something along the lines of "Algebra is fine.  There's nothing wrong with it.  Well... I guess there is one thing wrong with it."  Then he hurled a handful of papers over his shoulder and shouted "You have to care what x is!"

That's how I feel about politics.  I don't care what people think of me.  To me, making people who can't do what I do or what the team I'm on could do feel warm and fuzzy about it seems like the biggest waste of time in the world.  Really, I think the evidence suggests I could give a flying fuck about making anyone feel warm and fuzzy if they haven't earned it.

So I'm coming to terms with the fact that the management path is not the one for me.  I may be a good leader - I think I am - but I am a terrible politician.

Like Stereotypes: Cliches Exist for a Reason

One common chant that has well surpassed "cliche" status is the statement "freedom isn't free."  However, like stereotypes, most cliches have a nugget of truth in them.  Freedom is not, in fact, free and everyone wants to use that to justify their personal agenda.

How It's Misused
War!  Don't like it?  Those guys want to kill us all.  I mean, come on: you know freedom isn't free.

Robin Hood!  Don't like it?  Well, you know you live in the freest country on Earth and you enjoy many fruits I would like to recast as part of the common bounty.  After all... freedom isn't free.

Gay marriage!  Don't like it?  Hey!  Protecting freedom of religious views means protecting everyone's perspective.  If that makes you sad, well, freedom isn't free.

Sure, the people who utter these platitudes may not use the exact words.  Sometimes they college them up and sometimes they country them down.  The essence is always there, though, poisoning the argument and rotting away the little nugget's ability to do its job.

The Truth of It
It's true: freedom is not free but it's not the money we spend on social programs that would keep it safe.  It's not the trampling of some six thousand year old religious tradition, either.  The root of protecting freedom is not even the lives we lay down to protect ourselves from our enemies - although that is often a necessary component.  At its core, protecting freedom depends on something a lot more rudimentary than any of those things.

What is actually required is the ability to think and to make the hard decisions.  Mental laziness or plain old stupidity is the greatest enemy of freedom that we have and it lies at the heart of almost every threat there is.  We need to radically rethink the way government conducts its affairs and we need to regain our ability to make the tough decisions.

The Problem
Representative government isn't working.  It seems really hard to argue against that assertion.  The problem with representative government is not, as the Left would argue, that the people's views aren't taken into account.  It's also not, as the Right would argue, that it abandons our traditions.  Also, neither of them are true.

Corporations control government because you and I let them.  Corrupt politicians enter office because you and I let them.  The products you buy are of terrible quality because you accept it.  Your life is the way it is a little bit because of the circumstances around you and a lot because you let it be that way.

Representative government doesn't work because it gives people too much say, not too little.  You get the government you deserve.  You really do.  Don't believe it?  Tough.  It's still true.

One-Vote-Per-Citizen Isn't Working
Representative government is an implementation, not a virtue.  Like all previous means of controlling people's behavior, it is deeply flawed.  We need to radically rethink how government makes its decisions and we need the ability to do the uncomfortable things that allow liberty to happen.

We need the ability to look at someone at say "sorry, you're too stupid... you don't get a say."  However, it's not just people who can't think that are the problem.  It's also people who could think but don't.

Of course, there is no "fair" way to tell someone they cannot vote.  If you give someone the power to decide who can and cannot vote, that person is likely to distort whatever model he is given in order to obtain a favorable voting population.

We need to give people who are better decision-makers more relative voting strength than bad decision-makers and we need a way for people to sort themselves into the right voting-strength category.

A Next Step
I submit that there is a way to do this that simultaneously corrects the signal-to-noise ratio and makes people who care about something the ones who pay for it.  There's a catch, though: you have to give up the easy answer.

You have to be willing to be brave enough to do it.  You have to be willing to say "You can't vote?  That's too bad.  Maybe you should do something about that."  You may even have to be willing to say "I can't vote?  That's too bad.  Maybe I should do something about that."

I propose that people who don't even have their own lives in order should not be telling other people how to live.  It is also my position that, if you, aren't willing to pay for a program or a war, then you don't really care enough about it to stop it.

So here's the solution, broken down into its different necessary components.

1. Prohibit taxation of any kind in any amount by any level or branch of government.
2. Prohibit voting of any kind other than the one specified at end of this list.
3. Donations to the government can be made pending a the satisfaction of a condition.
4. Every legislative proposal is resolved in so as to garner the largest total amount of conditional donations possible.

It's a Big Change

I know it's frightening.  It's tough for a lot of people because it challenges so many of the ideas that are beaten into our heads from birth.  The idea that everyone should get a say in how government works, for instance, is something that most people consider right and just.  For some people, it's even more frightening because they wouldn't get a say in how government works.

The bottom line is this: If you're not able to see why the above proposal would work better than what we have now then you're exactly the reason why it would.

Why Does Everyone Keep Adding Words to the Second Amendment?

In the course of my life, I keep hearing people quote the second amendment as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Then they try to couple the militia clause to the right to keep and bear arms clause.  That is, they frequently make the claim that we only need to preserve the right to keep and bear arms in such ways as to support the creation of a well regulated militia.

First of all, if try to slice things that way, it parses as a comment or a supporting argument, not a constraint.  The constitution is clear: the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.  Period.  There's no "unless" in there.  There's no "so long as" either.  There's nothing that makes it okay to infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

Nothing.

Now, you might say "Hey!  Wait a minute!  There are no other comments in the constitution!"  You'd be right and that still would not justify infringement on the right of the people to keep and bear arms.  In fact, as you'll see, searching for an interpretation of the second amendment that minimizes the amount of comments actually shows our government to be in a far greater state of infringement than merely restricting the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.

The obvious answer is that this is one of the more important issues.  For ages, it has been the case that tyrants start with the restriction of arms.  It wasn't just Hitler.  It's been pretty much all of them.  In one case, it was so bad that the people had to mutate Karate and Kung Fu into Taekwondo in order to dismount the horseback-bound soldiers who oppressed them.

People who fear an armed populace the most usually should have the least voice in how others are governed.  That, I think, accounts for the "being necessary to the security of a free State" bit; which seems pretty in-arguably to be a statement of intent  rather than a prescription or a proscription.

The other amendments in the Bill of Rights are all grants of multiple rights, not a single one.  Even the first amendment works that way.  If you consider that one part to be a comment, and look at how the rest of the constitution is written, you'll see a pretty clear statement that makes a lot of sense.

A well regulated Militia, /*being necessary to the security of a free State,*/ the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

When you strip out the comment you are left with the following.

A well regulated Militia, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In which case the proscription against the people's right to keep and bear arms being infringed is still in tact but there is another proscription that has been repeatedly violated over the course of US history: the right to maintain a well regulated Militia.

"How so?" one might ask.  "We have a National Guard!"

Indeed we do but it has been slowly reorganized to be continuously more "national" and less "guard."  That process is likely to continue until, ultimately, the National Guard is completely indistinguishable from the U.S. Army.  We're not there yet - the national guard still has some ties to its containing state - but we're working on it?

Why is that a problem?  Where in the second amendment does it say it shouldn't be a national militia?  To answer that question, we have to come full circle and re-instate the part of the amendment I earlier threw out as "reasoning" instead of law.  Instead of adding words, like typical Republicrats and Democans want to do, let's try just adding parentheses and color groupings to assist in parsing:

(A well regulated Militia, (being necessary to the security of a free State)), (the right of the people to keep and bear Arms), shall not be infringed.

If you look at it that way, it's really clear - like all the other amendments, there is no flexibility or wiggle room in its interpretation.  It is an ironclad statement with many protections:

1. The state has the right to create a well-regulated Militia
2. The people have the right to keep and bear arms
3. Those rights shall not be infringed

I don't see how you could interpret it any other way.