What I Think

Many people seem broadly nervous to write about their own personal political platform stances (which may be nuanced and not in alignment with any one party or candidate), instead preferring to stump for a party and candidate and re-share uncritical pro/con articles. I’d like to be part of the solution by sharing my thoughts on policies which don’t seem to fit neatly into a box or label — although learning one exists and what to call myself would be lovely!

I’m not only not expecting you to agree with everything I say or be persuaded on every point — I think it’s pretty improbable that you would. But I hope that unlike the more typical scene of kindergarten name-calling and demagoguery we can have a grownup and respectful dialogue about these differences that may leave us each changed in some way, while understanding that even kind and thoughtful people are going to disagree a lot of the time. That also means asking more of you than liking this post or blithely commenting “I agree!” since it seems really unlikely you agree with everything I say. I want you to disagree and I want you to cite sources and persuade me of something new and to be open to being persuaded yourself.

Overall politically I don’t really fit in and am finding nobody who represents me well. It’s obvious in retrospect this would be an outcome of a two party system; one cannot divide every individual American’s opinions into two clean camps. One solution would be to more meaningfully allow for support of candidates beyond the two party system! But in this 2016 election I resonated with half of what Bernie had to say, none of what Trump had to say, and didn’t feel like Hilary said almost anything at all. When I took a political alignment quiz it said I should vote for Kasich. I’m unenthusiastic about Democrats but neither do I find any of the contradictory Republican platforms appealing, including such wildly disparate views as Trump, the Tea Party, neocons and libertarians. We have not in our lifetimes seen a US election with both presumptive nominees so poorly regarded by either the general public or their own parties. So I’m not alone in my being appalled at the current setup and how poorly I feel spoken for.

I’m pro fracking and pro nuclear, anti-union and anti-protectionism. I’m pro choice, pro immigration (and anti wall), and pro free trade but think it needs to be transparent. I’m anti subsidy (including for corn and religion) and anti war, including the wars on drugs and terrorism. I support low fixed income taxes but with a wealth tax and basic income. I’m pro single payer health care and anti private-only health insurance. I’m pro GMO. I think the evidence is clear climate change is happening.

Protectionism is bad: open borders create economic opportunities and encourage companies to specialize. Trade promotes prosperity and peace. High quality, low cost goods only come to market with vigorous competition. Subsidies, tariffs. and protectionist measures by other countries should be met first by diplomacy and reason and then by matching on our side but with a consistent and believable message that the desire is to remove those measures and action to do so immediately when the other party does. We should engage in multi-stakeholder free trade partnerships like TPP but citizens must be one of the stakeholders. It is not acceptable to limit access to legally binding contracts to those signing it or likely affected by it. I understand that may slow or complicate such already-complex agreements by being more transparent, but that will be the price of voter buy-in and will assure the permanency of such agreements.

Unions harm worker and employer choice by effectively demanding a monopoly on worker representation and rent-seeking. One friend who is a public school teacher found herself having to pay a substantial fraction of her income in union dues to support a union leader earning many times her salary and not representing her interests effectively. I’ve found unions disempowering in the strangest ways, like growing up in a union city where it was illegal during the school play to have someone plug in the lights. However, worker legal representation in class action as well as lobbying is critical and has brought many improvements in quality of life for the semi skilled worker. We do have unions to thank for the eight hour workday, weekends, and sick leave, among other things! So I’m for defending workers’ rights but conflicted about whether everything about unions is a great idea.

Self-regulation and transparency are better answers than government regulation. Government limitations of competition incentivize cronyism and harm consumers. Paperwork slows innovation. Make doing the right thing easy and fast. Measure everything automatically and publish the results. Note what is happening in NYC with open data to make the government more accountable.

Permit an individual to do what they want by themselves or with consenting fellow adults. Pushing negative activities underground may slightly curtail them but dramatically increases the risks to society by creating black markets by definition outside the rule of law and overall is not worth it. A boring society with every vice in the open will be safer and better taxed than a putatively Puritan one with a seething and violent well-funded criminal underbelly.

War is a terrible idea almost all of the time. After WW2, the US got the wrong idea that people wanted or needed it to fight wars and spooled up the world’s most powerful army. The US has one of the most impressive recruiting and training regimens in the world and as a result produces masses of brave, talented, and clever soldiers. But we try to use them to fix problems — and despite their sophistication and competence, we find that warfighters do not bring longstanding peace. Even when we attack objectively awful regimes we find that inducing change from that which is bad is not always positive. Sometimes there is, tragically, an answer to “surely nothing can be worse than this.” Often a strongman is the bringing force keeping sectarianism at bay; witness Iraq’s post-Saddam implosion into multiple failed states. Bravery abroad is not translating into safety at home. We should trim our military significantly while funding care for veterans who have given their all for our country and vigorously investing in retraining soldiers exiting the military for onboarding to civilian life, including encouraging entrepreneurship and effective paths to good jobs. Fancy new kit like the JSF does little to materially improve our defense, while shuttering highly effective and cost efficient programs like the A-10 is a waste of taxpayer money.

It is good for the US to be a destination for the world’s best minds. Immigrants are net creators of jobs and are the key ingredient in America’s greatness. 40% of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or children of immigrants. We should fast track entrepreneurs and high skill workers for not only residency but citizenship while maintaining appropriate national security checks. Every PhD from a US university should come with a Green Card stapled to it.

The already-wealthy like Buffett support increases in income tax because it does not affect their wealth; indeed an increase in income tax for the wealthy sounds charitable but it perversely increases wealth disparity by making it harder for new people to become wealthy without affecting the wealth of those already rich. A wealth tax is more effective than income tax at ensuring appellate revenue and equitable collections. US residents should pay a small percentage of their net worth, say a percent per year (half target inflation) and pay a fixed income tax, say 25%. Coupled with basic income this will be a net improvement in tax paying for all but the wealthiest. (Side note: I deeply admire Buffett; I strongly recommend you read his autobiography The Snowball for his shockingly common sense approach to value investment. Lacking that, please at least read his annual letter to shareholders which is actually a lot more beautifully and clearly written than you’d expect for an otherwise dry and abstract work.)

Automation technology and globalization have already commoditized much semi-skilled labor, eroding the middle class. Coming radical improvements in artificial intelligence will likely quickly obsolete a wide swath of both middle and upper class jobs, replacing truckers and radiologists alike with algorithms. While retraining may allow a fraction of the affected population to find new (and possibly even better) jobs, enough people will likely be affected in a short enough time period that there will not be enough jobs to go around. Technology has no evidence of being a net creator of jobs and even individual annual productivity growth over the last few decades has been a halting 1–2%, half of which is strictly attributable to better female workforce penetration and longer hours. (Steam engines, light bulbs, refrigerators, and automobiles all did a lot more for workers than the Internet, which is embarrassing to admit as a technologist whose job it is to spread the Internet.) It’s possible this will lead to a two tier society with low paying service jobs for which a human is desired largely for visual comfort and a handful of extremely leveraged and well-paid jobs creating new automation solutions. In this world, huge swaths of previously well qualified individuals will now be unemployable. Young, unemployed men with no hope of a future are generally a sure recipe for discord, so to prevent an implosion of society we will need to figure out either how to ensure a comfortable and dignified life for the jobless masses or find clever ways to employ them gainfully via some new mechanism not yet obvious to me.

Minimum wage should be high. Yes, this will encourage automation to be adopted even faster but if a job is right on the edge of being automated (eg a job that makes sense to automate at $11/hr pay but not $9/hr) it’s not likely to stave off machines very long. Going toe to toe with machines is not long going to be a winning battle.

The Wall is a bad idea regardless of who would finance it (though remember when we were reassured that Iraq would pay for the Iraq war?) — firstly, our southern border is actually a net outflow of Hispanics. Sealing it would increase the Hispanic population in the US, which is likely counterproductive to the stated goal of getting rid of illegal immigrants. Furthermore it does not address the issue of improving conditions for US workers since illegal migrant workers are largely taking unskilled jobs for which no competition exists — kicking José out of the country for picking strawberries at $5/hour will do nothing to bring back a $30/hr steelworking job for Bill.

To ensure a good life for unemployable citizens while letting them maintain their freedom and dignity will probably require financial assistance. To minimize government overhead, a Basic Income program could be sound — every living, born human being who is a resident receives a deposit to their bank account of choice twice a month regardless of need and with no paperwork beyond rendering your account and proof of life and citizenship. It should not be legal to securitize these incomes to avoid people seeking credit by selling their safety net and creating a financial incentive for their early demise.

The most economically and culturally productive societies have been religiously inclusive and eagerly sought out knowledge from all. Chest-thumping Christianity has no basis in support from either the Bible or from our Founding Fathers. The New Testament says “and if you pray, let it be in private, let no one hear you.” (paraphrasing Matthew 6:6) Let’s be kind to one another and keep religion a private affair lest our politicians attempt false appeals to piety only inevitably to be later found earthly.

I find it surprising that any church or mosque can write off all its taxes and is wholly unaccountable for how this taxpayer subsidy is spent, unlike non-profits, who have to file annual reports on their finances and continuously justify their charitable contributions to society in order to continue to receive benefit. Most religious organizations put to work only a very small portion of their revenues to charities or have much budget allocated for charitable activities (3% in one survey of church budgets); the majority is spent on benefits to parishioners: beautiful buildings, collective meals, salaries for employees to provide entertainment and inspiration. Religions in the US are unaccountable taxpayer subsidized social clubs. While they absolutely should have their charitable works supported by taxpayer subsidy (schools, shelters, soup kitchens) there is no reason to tax exempt churches further nor to allow them to fail to be accountable. Let’s close this loophole.

Our subsidies of corn are literally killing us. While we used to be an agricultural nation, only 2% of Americans are farmers today. Heart-wrenching stories of family farmers laid destitute by tough growing seasons outside of their control are real — and those farmers deserve help — but they are also misleadingly unrepresentative of how most farming is done today or who our subsidies benefit. Artificially low prices on particular crops like maize distort production away from other crops that may be more badly needed and encourage overproduction of corn derived products like HFCS and corn based ethanol, an energy product that is a net energy negative to produce — a “green fuel” that is actually more harmful for the environment than gasoline (see: NIH). E85 should be banned and all corn subsidies removed. Crop insurance for small farmers (<$1m/yr revenues) should be single-payer and entirely paid for by the government. Removing the corn subsidy would improve the health of Americans by improving their nutrition (see: SciAm 2012).

Health care insurance must also be single-payer, with a possible exception. While I am a big believer in free markets, I believe that what they’re excellent at is optimizing complex systems of aligned incentives. In the case of health care, the primary entity that will benefit from a citizen’s long and productive life is the state. Therefore as a simple matter of maximizing collected tax revenues the state has the greatest economic interest in ensuring not only reduction of disease and early mortality but also a maximization of productivity, which requires improving health beyond “not sick”. With median employment duration low, employers do not benefit from a worker’s long life — given a larger number of employees than employers for most job types, it is most economically advantageous to simply get rid of a worker who becomes ill and therefore unproductive. Furthermore, private health insurance companies are most profitable if they collect more coverage payments than pay out in delivering coverage. While they are therefore putatively this invested in being highly efficient in delivering coverage or coverage payments, there is even better margin to be had in simply denying benefits. There is no economic incentive for the insured to be healthy, only to be not incurring cost and to be paying their premiums on time. I have not yet seen a model whereby a set of private entities can compete to make a person as healthy as possible — to do so would require capturing a portion of the person’s probabilistic lifetime forward earnings in a liquid and exchangeable contract. In that case it would be in their interest to maximize the invested’s probable health, lifetime, and productivity and therefore education. Limits might need to be in place to avoid literally recreating slavery but the thought of incentivizing a marketplace for human development and excellence is exciting. Lacking this, the government remains the best entity for realizing the gains of a productive populace and therefore the government has the best incentive to look after the population’s health. Therefore I am a believer in single payer health care.

To call out the contradiction, I will admit this is in conflict with my above proposal for Basic Income under which a permanent member of the non-working class is strictly a drag on state finance and therefore the state would have no interest to keep alive long. Indeed the state perversely found that successful campaigns to reduce smoking failed to save health care budgets since the smokers previously had died quickly after exiting productivity (eg from fast growing lung cancers) — quick and early deaths are cheap. A population that retires at 65 and lives to 85 in gradual demise is quite pricey and the state has little incentive to improve quality of life for a terminal ward.

This leads to a collectively uncomfortable decision about how we want to die — and even how we want our parents to die. It is uncomfortable because we do not like to contemplate death in our society — it is an impolite thing to remind someone of their mortality or that of their loved ones despite evidence that such contemplation is actually important for happiness and good mental health we insist on calling it macabre. We fear “death panels” that decide who lives and who dies and yet the counterpoint is throwing vast resources at every person, resulting not only crudely in huge sums being spent but just as importantly in radically lower quality of life for the affected — and, shockingly, lower life spans. (See: How Doctors Die.) With American hospitals a pervasive source of untreatable disease and infection with no end to MRSA in sight, an assessment of treatment followed by preferentially palliative/hospice care could not only save money but also unintuitively increase the time one is able to spend enjoying life (see: NEJM), which feels like the best thing to maximize. “Get out of the hospital if you want to be healthy. Get out if you want to live.”

If we want our citizens to have long, happy, healthy lives followed by a quick and humane death, this is a critical input to considering health policy and a dramatic shift from where we are today. It is a terrible irony of our system that it is considered unethical to allow a suffering and incurable animal to live and considered unethical to allow a suffering and incurable human to die. I strongly support euthanasia and would consider making it mandatory to have a living will on file with the state to make one’s wishes unambiguously known.

Reliance on private insurance further harms quality of care by making it difficult for doctors to access a patient’s health history. Health privacy laws like HIPPA severely constrain the flow of health data primarily out of fear that it will be found by insurance companies who will then accordingly raise their rates or deny coverage. So it ends up paramount to never disclose any patient data to any other provider ever. This is part of the reason why in nearly every admission to a new facility you have to fill out a long health background. When I did last get my Hep C booster? Honestly I don’t exactly remember. It is in someone’s database somewhere but I can bet that if I waltz into an ER in Michigan they won’t have any idea either. In a world with single payer insurance there are substantially fewer risks to disclosure of health history to physicians — although I’ll acknowledge broader concerns with general release of medical data such as STDs w/r/t social acceptance and conditions with potential mortality/productivity impacts for an employer. For many situations, timely access to complete health information could substantially improve outcomes and save lives. HIPPA is killing people because we can’t trust private insurance companies.

Reliance on private health insurance also harms American entrepreneurship. Large companies’ group plans cover all regardless of preexisting condition and average over a wide enough base that an individual’s health status will not materially affect premiums paid. But a startup has no such structural benefit; a founder with a congenital disease or family history of cancer may decide to work for a big company instead of literally risking their life to be underinsured as a sole proprietor. I’ve seen this play out in Silicon Valley and watch people not start companies as a result. Furthermore, employer premiums are huge and grow dramatically year over year. When I was CEO of my first company I dreaded my annual meeting with my benefits representatives. Every year it was the same theatre where they would come in, wince, and deliver the bad news that we would have to pay 40% more per worker and reduce the quality of benefits. We had to look into whether we would look after all our employees’ health or keep everyone employed. We ended up laying people off and not replacing departing employees. Health care policy is reducing our country’s competitiveness.

None of my railing against people being dependent on private insurance for their basic needs should be taken as opposition to private healthcare or industry innovation. Rather it’s railing against the lack of single-payer “safety net” insurance. Any company should be free to offer healthcare services to whomever would like to pay for them. If you want care beyond what the government will give you it should be legal to voluntarily pay for it, including purchasing supplemental insurance. Note that companies like OneMedical already provide “supplemental services” by allowing individuals who may already be covered by employer plans to purchase higher quality of service. I think that is great. It also frees up more resources per-patient to single-payer plans to have individuals so supplementing.

Moving on from death, I think we need to reconsider life as well. 20th century existence was a play in three acts: going to school, working at a job, then retiring. In a certain sense: learn then work then play. This has proved to be a terrible construct in the 21st century for several reasons: teens receiving education aren’t contributing to the workforce (teen labor participation rate is a fraction what it was in the 60’s) leading to a legitimate feeling that schoolwork is not relevant to the real world, markets change constantly requiring workers to constantly learn and retrain, and retirement may be a terrible idea — shortening lives and lowering quality of life as surely as a terminal illness. And all this to say nothing of the basic absurdity of an economy in which students are supposed to receive expensive educations until their late 20’s, work for some thirty years, and have earned enough to not only pay off college loans but raise a family and save enough for a thirty year retirement.

Anthropogenic carbon emissions contributing to climate change is a real thing, as backed by substantial peer reviewed scientific evidence. Radical ongoing reductions in the cost of solar and wind have been tremendously encouraging. And hard as it may be for some to admit, natural gas and fracking have played an enormous role in cleaning up America’s air by provably directly substituting for coal and foreign oil, lowering the price of fuel and defunding America’s enemies. Yes we should be urgently moving to carbon free energy generation but let’s acknowledge that that natural gas has provided a huge stepping stone from coal to clean.

Nuclear may yet play a role in our future. While disasters at antiquated and dangerous plants like Fukushima, Three Mile, and Chernobyl have scarred the public (and the Earth!) they have blinded people from the material advances made in nuclear design over the past forty years that make nuclear failsafe, efficient, clean, and incapable of generating weaponizable material. North America alone is sitting on fissile material sufficient to power us for 200+ years, which should surely be enough time to figure out how to find further clean sources of energy like mining the Moon for Helium-3 to use in fusion. I’ll admit I don’t know enough about thorium reactors to weigh in meaningfully though I have heard strongly mixed opinions from technical people I respect on both sides of the pro/con discussion.

GMOs work. This is turning out to be the “climate change denial” of the Left, where there is an increasing body of evidence that genetically melodies organisms do not produce inferior health outcomes but rather have played a substantial role in keeping the world fed by continuing to dramatically increase crop yields. While I agree that IP-defensive “terminator genes” that can spread to nearby fields involuntarily are an appalling issue this alone should not be sufficient to decry all forms of genetic modification. Furthermore, I oppose the labeling of GMO foods. While seemingly innocuous, this labeling is willfully misleading to the vast majority of consumers who may believe the contained material to be more healthful, similar to how campaigns advertising that Bacardi and Diet Coke had no carbs caused people to falsely believe that the combo had no calories, or that low-fat muffins were healthful.

We should respond rationally as a country to threats against our people and our statehood. One doesn’t die from a bee sting from the bee venom; one dies from the body’s overreaction. Responses should be appropriate and proportionate to the credibility and impact of threat, otherwise we’d hire hundreds of thousands of new lifeguards and Coast Guard members to scour every beach for sharks to defend Americans against insidious shark attack. When we pander to coverage of the unusually catastrophic we ask the terrible question of our politicians “what are you doing to make sure this never happens again?” This kind of reactionary mentality guarantees an overreaction to the particular (potentially minor) threat and more dangerously steers attention and resources away from where they can have best impact. Daesh cannot destroy America; they are a failed state by definition. Car accidents kill Americans. Heart attacks. Cancer. (CDC) Let’s keep our eye on the ball and fix the problems that matter. Americans deserve reason over sentimentality and facts over stories.

Corporations are not people. Having created several corporations and overseen one human birth I think I can speak for my wife to say that it’s harder to make a person than a corporation. The Constitution was not written to define the rights of corporations. A corporation cannot (and should not) vote, cannot be imprisoned, and does not feel. A democracy should be composed of its humans constituents.

The US could be further improved by considering becoming an actual democracy. It has become excessively clear of late that we are not at present; our electorate a poor map to the elected with superdelegates and gerrymandering undermining the will of the people and opaque corporate SuperPACs dominating the narrative.

The media of all stripes has suffered badly in this transition to low-margin online reporting, devolving into base entertainment, no longer even making an effort to actually appear journalistic but instead copy-pasting press releases, embracing “integrated advertising” from Taboola (“Around the web”) and payments from the mafia in exchange for the right to inject malware into visitors’ browsers. Neither CNN nor Fox show news; they perform a play of doing the news with the requisite elements viewers are looking for that shows talking heads looking concerned, cuts to on-scene reporters, and large font bullet points to communicate talking points. Ticket scrolls coat the borders giving a vague impression of all material presented being timely and important all the time.

Ironically TV is suffering the same decline newspapers once did — newspapers were originally a timely source of information but were supplanted by TV which was more timely and visceral. Now Twitter and Reddit are dethroning TV, showing photos of an event seconds after a fact — an event can have been corroborated, researched, and discussed on the public Internet for an hour before a producer decides there’s enough to run it live on TV. It’s already old news. When looking for depth and analysis conversely I’ve had to turn to paid media, who can actually afford to pay journalists to write real, thoughtful articles. I happily pay for The Information and The Economist (which I believe is consistently highest on graph density in a periodical). These two alone provide me more thoughtful insights and data than I can process. I used to have a Nature subscription but I rarely had time to read it and was sad to admit that.

Overall I think what’s missing in media is respectful disagreement that changes minds — if we only look to validate our opinions we’ll become more partisan and ignorant. Even in the writing of this article I had to look up and revise several facts — for instance, I claim that TV is suffering decline but the truth is the number of hours per day Americans spend in front of the TV has actually increased, which surprised me and hurt my narrative. ^_^

So I’m hoping it’s okay for us to share our thoughts and revise them as we learn more and lovingly discuss what the world is and might be. And this is my attempt to start that.