Platform

† neither partisan nor non-partisan †


Mission

Recognizing the intrinsic, exhilarating beauty of life, this platform seeks to serve people and organize society in a way that achieves enlightenment in the greatest possible number and magnitude.  We aim to build a just, innovative, and enduring civilization on foundations of utilitarianism and sustainability.

Vision

A civilization of wise and healthy people lives in symbiosis with the ecosystem.  Resilient to shocks, they are able to trade widely, innovate rapidly, and explore the universe at will.

Environment and Energy

The environment is within us and encompassing us.  It provides us invaluable services.  We require its integrity to survive.  With the power we have amassed, we can impact it significantly.  In eons past, burning oil and gas, combined with volcanic activity, have released massive amounts of carbon dioxide into Earth's atmosphere, causing rapid climate change that led to mass extinctions.  We can engineer our own demise.  We only need to remain on the current course.

We will pursue a rapid societal decarbonization.  We are calling for massive, emergency-level investment.  The process may incur externalities related to productivity or transitory energy rationing.  We believe such frictions to be acceptable in the face of the compounding costs of climate change.

A Smart Grid

We need to allow for and encourage the implementation of nuclear power.  Nuclear energy generation is massively safer than fossil fuels, and can be extremely safe when implemented properly.  The technology already exists, is easy to scale, and easy to incorporate into the grid.  It avoids the issues renewables face with peak-generation and ramping.  And it produces negligible air pollution.  Radioactive waste is a long-term challenge, but the volume of waste would actually be quite low, and the time for easy choices has come and gone.  France is an example of a country that sources most of its energy from nuclear generation.

We will, over a period of twenty years, close down ninety-nine percent of power plants running on fossil fuels.  This will begin with the most polluting coal plants, proceed to oil-burning plants, and continue to natural gas-burning plants.  Simultaneously, we will massively ramp up our adoption of renewable and nuclear energy generation.  State funds will finance solar arrays, rooftop solar, wind farms, and tidal turbines.  We will extend low-interest financing and tax credits for their construction. 

Sales of internal combustion cars are eventually going to become highly restricted.  At the state level, we can utilize funds for highways and rest stops to install vehicular charging stations near rest stops and attractions.  These would be either connected to the grid at large or, in more remote areas, solar- or wind-powered solid-state storage cells.

We will provide low-interest financing for insulation and efficiency improvements.  This is to include adopting heat pumps for home heating, which can replace gas heating.

We must also update our aging transmission infrastructure to accommodate changes in generation methods, population shifts, and better standards in fire safety.

Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the storehouse of novel pharmacology.  Plants, fungi, and bacteria synthesize unique chemical compounds all over the world, sometimes in extremely limited geographic areas.  Pharmaceutical prospecting in remote (micro)biomes is not uncommon.  To combat the worldwide anthropocene decline in biodiversity we will

  1. combat climate change
  2. create large and uninterrupted nature reserves
  3. as a backstop, save genetic material of threatened species in vaults

Water

Several parts of the world face drastic water scarcity as patterns of heat, precipitation, and population change.

In areas of aridification, we may impose restrictions on water usage to prioritize water for drinking.  This could include bans on lawn-watering and limitations on vehicle-washing.  We can encourage xeroscaping and rain-capturing architecture.

Climate Change

How are we going to mitigate and adapt to our changing climate?  This is the question facing our civilization at this critical juncture.  The state, as the protector of its citizenry and guarantor of macroeconomic stability, has a clear prerogative to intervene.  As climate change presents an existential threat to human civilization, the state can ethically spare no expense to avert catastrophe.

We need to begin with mitigation.  We cannot expect to keep up with the rate of change if we continue to accelerate the rate of greenhouse gas emission.

Then, we need to adapt.  Enough warming is baked in to the future to destabilize our civilization.  We need drastic overhaul of immigration and humanitarian systems, a reimagination of coastal settlement, and investment in proactive diplomacy to diminish the damage and instability that climate change will cause, even if we stop polluting tomorrow.

Third, we have an obligation to our descendants to go on a climate offensive, planting forests and improving carbon capture technology to make it cost-effective and carbon-negative.  This technology is not yet ready for wide deployment, nor does it offer an alternative to switching from fossil fuels.  But it will eventually play a role in reversing the damage.

Health

Health is among the least culturally relative goals.  The government, as part of its mandate to ensure its citizens' safety, can play a role in promoting healthy lifestyles and mitigating health risks among its citizenry.

Health Insurance and Cost-Bearing

There should be a public health insurance option available and affordable to every citizen.  We may need to increase the tax burden on individuals, but public health insurance, such as Medicare, entails fewer costs than private health insurers.  Medicare does not have to spend on marketing or executive compensation, nor does need to turn a profit.  Furthermore, it benefits from economies of scale.

Abortion

Abortion is healthcare.  We will maintain and reclaim the legality of abortion.  We are willing to legalize it at all stages of pregnancy.  The public health insurance option will cover abortions.

The Government and the Economy

The ecosystem does not depend on the economy.  The ecosystem is not at odds with the economy.  The environment is the economy.  The economy is how we distribute the resources on planet earth.  The fight for ecological integrity is the fight for the elimination of poverty and for abundance.

The government has a role to play in the economy.  It can smooth out dips and booms with discretionary fiscal policy, support households with social welfare, and step in where the interests of the public diverge from capital interests.

Economic Justice

The state will intervene to ensure that all citizens have equitable opportunity to upward social mobility.

We need a government that can reliably deliver the basics.  Nobody should have to go hungry in a country that produces so much wealth.  We will institute the steel lunchbox, a guarantee of nutritive food and clean water for every citizen.  We will implement the steel lunchbox through

Taxes, Deficits, and Debt

Artificial intelligence will assist in laying out optimal tax policy.  "Optimal" tax policy is fair, facilitates growth, and generates sufficient revenue.

Sufficient revenue balances the budget over the long term.  Here, the long term is a period of about thirty years.

We recognize the stabilizing effects of government debt on financial markets, and will issue debt when circumstances demand it.  However, expenditures on debt service draw resources away from our social safety net and the kinds of investments that power sustainable growth.

Where public pensions restrain government budgets to such an extent that they undermine social welfare, they should undergo reform.  As people live longer and outlive expectations on average, the state may have to adjust its obligations in order to maintain a sustainable system for everybody.  We will establish an official life expectancy, scientifically determined in concert between the Departments of Labor and Health & Human Services.  We would like to tie the age at which social security distributions begin to eighty-five percent of the life expectancy and the age at which pension distributions begin to eighty-two percent.  This aids the sustainability of social security and public pensions while creating an incentive for the government not to allow life expectancies to backslide.

Education

Every child deserves access to a quality public education, at least grades Kindergarten to twelve.  Most public school systems need to increase teacher pay, but also support teachers in necessary ways: modern supplies in classrooms, employee assistance programs, allowing collective bargaining, and protecting staff from radical parents.

As it stands, effective education remains a scarcity exclusively available to the privileged.  We have the resources to make every public school nearly equally excellent.  Often, archaic tax regimes and radical interest groups prevent that, at the expense of the public.  We can create an educational utopia in a generation if we set our priorities straight.  Education expenditures realize public value up to eight times their cost, through improvements in productivity and public safety.  It is time we made good on our promises and made the system work for everyone.

Private schools will be allowed to continue operating.  Parents who send their children to private schools will not be exempt from taxes that fund education.  We will oppose voucher systems that pull resources away from struggling schools.  We will not ban charter schools outright, but given their overall record, they deserve scrutiny.  Homeschooling will be allowed to continue with viable curricula.

Public schools will remain secular in their scholarship.  Supernaturalist frameworks (such as creationism or millennialism) will be excluded from unrelated curricla such as biology and geology.  We will neither encourage nor discourage prayer.

Student Loan Forgiveness

We do not want to only forgive student loans.  Free public higher education is good, but we have to ask if student loan forgiveness is a net good, worth the opportunity cost.  We have failing primary schools, and as long as that is happening, how can we justify expenditures on something that, even if means tested, will primarily benefit people with a college degree—with presumably enhanced job prospects?

We aim to create a fair and effective education system.  That could include free tuition at state and community colleges.  But we do not have unlimited resources, and we should start by getting the basics right.

Foreign Policy

The Armed Forces

We want to support our military, and continuously enhance its capabilities in line with our doctrine.  But that should mean utilizing the military only in pursuit of worthwhile and attainable objectives.  At all times, experts should question and improve the country's defense doctrine to reflect changing geopolitical realities.  We will utilize the armed forces under a few specific circumstances:

We hope to reduce spending in this area by in-housing certain experts and bureaucratic functions.  We can share capabilities among allies and security partners.  There also appear to be redundancies and instances of overspending.

Humanitarianism

Relief

The federal government will provide resources to supranational relief efforts in the wake of natural and man-made disasters, to include food, material goods such as blankets, essential medicine, qualified personnel, and emergency infrastructure such as water purification.

Military Intervention

The federal government will attempt multilateral solutions to outbreaks of conflict with high casualties.  Failing multilateral and diplomatic solution, the federal government will reserve the right to intervene in order to prevent massive casualties.  We will do everything in our power to prevent additional instances of genocide.

Nuclear Weapons

We will try to reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our stockpile, in proportion to reductions in the Russian Federation's stockpile.  We will convene the major nuclear powers of the world for a proportionate reduction in nuclear weapons.  Eventually, we will dismantle the remaining nuclear weapons simultaneously under the eye of international observer parties.  We will allow the United Nations to retain fewer than ten to use exclusively in the event of imminent asteroid impact.

There must be severe consequences for rogue states that develop or attempt to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.

We will continue to develop ordinance that could safely block ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads.  These lower the leverage of rogue states with few warheads, and may save lives in the event of all-out nuclear war.  We will reserve the right to deploy anti-ballistic missiles in South Korea on the border with North Korea.  We will seek an international ban on tactical nuclear weapons, which could make escalation to all-out nuclear warfare more likely.

Afghanistan

The invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was likely ill-conceived, and should have ended much sooner than it did.  At many points and at many levels, our military mishandled it.  However, the invasion did provide a generation opportunities for education and freedom which the Taliban now denies them.  It may be possible—and indeed more fruitful—to encourage Afghanistan to liberalize without putting troops on its soil.

Australia

Australia is a solid partner in the Pacific region.  We will continue to invest in this relationship as we create a ring of prosperous democracy in the Pacific.

Australia stands at the nexus of several environmental issues.  While it has the means to resettle peoples entirely displaced by sea-level rise (such as the Maldives), it also faces aridification and biome collapse along the Great Barrier Reef.  So while the world may rely on it over the course of the coming centuries, it may also require assistance.

Canada

We will seek to ease and facilitate transit between the United States and one of its top trading partners.

We may seek to resolve border disputes.  Though in some cases, there is a good argument that small islands and territories serve both parties best in a legal grey area.  Nonetheless, experts should examine these cases to prevent minor disputes from escalating.

China

We will strengthen allyship with liberal democracies in Asia to counterbalance the authoritarian style of Chinese government.  In this vein, we will support Taiwan's strength and independence.  It is a functional democracy of twenty-three million people with over seventy years of history separate from the People's Republic, and its people deserve self-determination.

We will advocate for the liberty and cultural continuity of the Uigher and Tibetan people.  This will begin with diplomatic overtures and could escalate to specific economic sanctions to discourage and disrupt the eradication of these cultures.

We will press and encourage China to ease its restrictions on immigration and accept more refugees from North Korea.

Iran

We will seek a general détente with Iran and normalization of relations.  Iran is only a few reforms away from illiberal democracy.

They should be heavily discouraged from developing a nuclear weapon, though they should be allowed to generate nuclear power.  The JCPOA was a positive step for nuclear non-proliferation and for US-Iranian relations.

North Korea

We will, ultimately, pursue regime change in North Korea and reunification of Korea.  The people living under the Juche regime face immense duress under a hypermilitaristic system that does not serve them.  Regime change and reunification are bound to be chaotic; the region will require international assistance in setting North Korea on a healthy course.

Palestine

The United States holds a special position as perhaps the only state that can reign in the radical right-wing Netanyahu government.  It should use that leverage to save lives in Gaza and bolster the rights and political autonomy of Palestinians.

Palestinians deserve more than peace.  They deserve assurances against genocide.  As of this writing, the situation is urgent and dire.  But human flourishing has never been possible under the Israeli apartheid regime.  A two-state solution will not protect Palestinians from their ongoing genocide, nor guarantee political freedom.  We can see that in the way Israel represses Palestinians in the West Bank.

Peace may grow from a single unified multiethnic state in which Palestinians possess civil rights equal to those of Jewish people in the Levant.  Failing fully liberal secular democracy, a consociational system, akin to that of Lebanon, may be appropriate.

Russia

Russia seeks to sow chaos in the world order, and makes the world less secure in doing so.  As its power and economy decline, Russia's leadership and arms manufacturers stand to benefit from the reticence of global superpowers.  And all this at the expense of Russia's people.  We will utilize precise economic sanctions and diplomatic influence to contain Russia and similarly aggressive regional powers.

We will not seek a forceful regime change, but we will be prepared for both the inevitable end of Putin's leadership and the possibility of changes in or collapse of the current illiberal regime.

Simultaneously, the United States will need Russia's collaboration on nuclear disarmament.  We will seek to build on the progress of SALT and demonstrate leadership in nuclear drawdown in partnership with Russia

Economic sanctions will continue and intensify as the war in Ukraine drags on, and to punish Putin's transgressions against humanitarian norms there.

South Korea

South Korea is an important democratic ally in the Pacific region.  We will seek to support its sovereign integrity and eventual reunification.  This may include the stationing of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles in South Korea, with its consent.

The United States should officially apologize for the No Gun Ri massacre and support independent investigation.

Taiwan

Taiwan shall proceed with maximum independence.  Diplomacy in this area cannot ignore that Taiwanese (increasingly) want to be independent and democratic.

Ukraine

Ukraine deserves self-determination.  It deserves to foster its young democracy independent of or in good-faith partnership with its neighbors.

In light of the present war for continuity, we would underwrite Ukraine's wartime expenditures.  We would also supply weapons and training to the Ukrainian military.

Immigration and Naturalization

Every asylum-seeker deserves to have their case heard.  We will hire and train additional case workers to work through pending asylum cases.  That entails pay raises for immigration officials.  This will include a reserve group of adjunct case workers, who are equally qualified, but called upon to assess anomalous waves of asylum-seekers.

We will maintain and systematize DACA and Temporary Protected Status.  Those who grow up in the United States deserve a path to citizenship.  Those to whom we grant residency on account of untenable conditions in their home country should not have to return as long as those countries remain dangerous or unstable.  Residents of the United States under TPS should be able to make a case for non-delimited asylum and seek citizenship after a period of ten to fifteen years of residence.

We will roll back restrictions mutually with Canada to ease trade and transit across the US-Canada border.  This may include aligning the two countries' immigration policies.

Rural Development

Arable Land

The price of meat should incorporate the cost of its deleterious effects on society and the environment.  Our administration would seek to end farm subsidies for any crops that harm the environment or diminish public health.  These could include conventional beef, pork, and poulty; feed like dent corn and ryegrass; sugar cane and sugar beets; and water-intense crops grown in areas of drought like almonds or avocados.

Conversely, we may subsidize farms that can provide produce locally, as this benefits our communities and the environment.  We may also maintain subsidies for farms that produce staples at scale, for security reasons.

We want to encourage efficient use of our fertile lands.  And we want to ensure that future generations have the opportunity to utilize that land as well.

Parks and Conservation

Parks and reserves provide us with important ecological services.  They serve as grounds for studies in biology and environmental studies.  Park can also enrich their surrounding communities with recurring tourism revenue.  We will seek to establish and expand parks and reserves as an integral part of maintaining biodiversity and developing a sustainable economy.

Urban Development

America's population is growing fastest in its urban and suburban areas.  Cities offer the most efficient and ecological way to settle people.  High-rise residences can reduce the land needs of a population.  Dense, mixed-use development can preclude the need for a personal car and increase residents' quality of life.  Additionally, by facilitating access to labor and ideas, they tend to generate growth and innovation.  We will encourage people in cities to age in place in order to maximize these societal benefits, and promote community-building.

The state, when zoning and writing tax codes, should never incentivize post-war style suburban development.  Single-family (R1) zoning multiplies the ecological impact of families.  Furthermore, it stretches public resources in municipalities that already struggle financially to update infrastructure and provide public services.  Suburban development requires far more miles of roads and utilities—financed with taxes—than denser urban living.  We will cease subsidizing exclusive and inefficient development.

We will repeal parking minimums.  This will encourage the establishment of new small businesses and revitalize town centers.  Multi-level parking should be relegated to levels underground.  Surface lots offer potential as future sites for development.

Urban density presents a challenge during times of plague.  Robust public health infrastructure and a culture of solidarity can make areas of dense settlement as safe as or safer than suburban settlement.  This requires the following:

We will ban leaf blowers.  These are a noisy and polluting solution to a non-existent problem that could be solved with brooms and rakes.  The noise they generate impacts the mental well-being of citizens.  Gas-powered models utilize single-stroke motors that can pollute more than a car in the same amount of time.  In nature, fallen leaves form the rich layer of humus in which new life takes root.

Criminal Justice

Our criminal justice system needs to focus on rehabilitation and protection.

Ending the drug war

We will decriminalize possession of all drugs.  We will legalize the sale, possession, and consumption of marijuana and marijuana-derived products.  The sale of narcotics, amphetamines, and psychedelics will remain tightly regulated.  We will decriminalize small-batch manufacture of psychedelic drugs such as lysergic diethylamide and psilocybin mushrooms.  The Food and Drug Administration will conduct research on these chemicals, and continue research on tetrahydocannabinol and cannabidiol.

The state will utilize discretionary health spending for substance abuse rehabilitation centers.  Paid state agents with training in social work will address patterns of substance abuse.  The state or its partners in civil society will provide clean needles to users of intravenous drugs, and collect and dispose of used needles, while offering tests for diseases spread by sharing of needles.  In addition, the state will decline to arrest in cases of experimental harm-reduction strategies such as safe supply.

The death penalty

The state shall not carry out capital punishment on its citizens.  The preventative power of the death penalty is suspect.  Any such effect is not worth the expense of holding inmates on death row and carrying out executions.  The gravest sentence shall be life without parole.

Holding police accountable

Police can abuse their privileges and power, and there should be recourse for the citizens they harm.  We need to ensure that victims of police have a pathway to justice, and this may involve ending qualified immunity.  Furthermore, we need to ensure that we are not overpolicing certain communities, provoking tension or instilling roles of oppression and resistance.

Reimagining Emergency Response and Policing

Governments at the local and state level overuse and misuse their police forces.  Armed elements of the state need not bring force to non-violent situations.  That risks escalating these situations and stretches police resources thin, while imposing significant costs on taxpayers.  We would prefer to respond to most mental health crises and substance abuse with social workers and paramedics.

Government Reform

We will adjust for the encroaching power of the executive branch and Office of the President.  The law shall not be helpless against a president keen to ignore it.

The founders intended to establish a republic without political parties; reality bore them anyway.  Recognizing this reality, we will seek a more responsive electoral system, which does not grant dispropotionate power to populous swing states.  This may include replacing the first-past-the-post elections system with a proportional representation system and abolishing the electoral college.  We also endorse ranked-choice voting, which can prevent wasting votes and diminish the effects of a "spoiler."

Territories and Minor Outlying Islands

Representation for the District of Columbia

The District of Columbia will receive representation in the House of Representatives and Senate.  On the way to two senators and a number of representatives reflective of its population (one for the present time), it may receive one senator, but this shall not impede progress to full representation in Congress.

The District of Columbia contains nearly seven hundred thousand people—more than Wyoming or Vermont.  By some accounts, that population can double during business hours.  All of these residents and workers deserve representation.

An Ultimatum for Permanently Inhabited Territories

The five inhabited territories must either become independent countries or begin the path to statehood.  Each territory will hold a referendum within five years.

Territorial possessions are anachronistic vestiges of an imperial America.  We can maintain the military strategic advantages they confer with arrangements similar to those in Japan, Germany, and Guantánamo Bay.  The territory system, as is, creates legal loopholes and systematizes second-class citizenship (or non-citizenship, in the case of American Samoa) for nearly four million people.

Uninhabited Outlying Islands

We will maintain these posessions as areas of conservation, scientific inquiry, and/or military outposts where prudent.

Antarctic Claims

Antarctica should remain a place of scientific inquiry and cooperation.  We may reserve the right to our claims in Antarctica, but will facilitate scientific exchange and will not enforce a hard border there.