You have a mistaken conception of the free market. The voluntary action we do in upholding our families and communities is foundational to the economy - voluntary action is the space in which economic liberty occurs.
It doesn’t reduce efficiency because the volunteers are the judge of worth and their’s is the only opinion that matters. The cost of providing services can be quite low when the labor is volunteered, so the cost to benefit tilts heavily in the direction of net benefit, i.e. efficiency in producing positive outcomes at a particular cost.
There are a few concerns about the electoral college, but I don’t consider it broken in any meaningful sense. After all, the Constitution has survived over 200 years with it in place, which makes it the longest-serving constitution in force today. We cannot say for sure that it would have survived so long under any proposed alternative.
The first issue I would aim to address is the variance in voting power from district to district. In Wyoming, voters have a significantly lower constituent to elector ratio, ie greater voting power, than those in e.g. California.
This issue is a recent development due to the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the number of reps in the House. As the population has grown, the distance between the average population vs the minimum population of a district has increased.
The remedy is to simply uncap the size of the house and increase the number of representatives. This would quantize the population over a greater number of electors thus reducing the remainder, resulting in relatively more equivalent voter power.
As an added benefit, it would increase the amount of access each voter has to their Representative in the House, and make it practically more difficult to corrupt a majority of the House members.
From what I understand, the Permanent Apportionment Act can be adjusted or removed as result of a law being passed which would make it a really promising option. Access to representatives and durability against corruption also feel like they could be really compelling issues to voters.
The strongest response I have received to this suggestion is something like a fear about having more paid politicians. I don't see an increase in the number of legislators as the same as an increase in executive branch bureaucrats. I think part of the issue that does come to mind is how we fit twice as many reps in the capitol. I like the idea of having to adjust the size and arrangement of our legislative chamber. I also like the idea of addressing housing challenges; maybe its time to bring back the legislator bunkhouses. It becomes the reason to review and revise the existing standards for offices, housing, and even the culture of the house or representatives.
Anyone looking for a solution to physician quality or availability can find it through direct primary care / concierge care. Personally I pay $60/month to have unlimited access to my physician in Austin.
The physician, in turn, rather than having 40% overhead, has no overhead from billing or insurance. They have simple monthly cashflow that they can allocate to cover rent and wages for their practice. This means that the physician can choose how many patients they have relative to their expenses, and decide how much time they have available on average for each patient.
The result is great for the patient, great for the provider, and the sort of thing that will help increase availability of doctors, and their satisfaction with their work.
The cops don't do much about bike theft. The perpetrators are the homeless, and they're basically untouchable. They have no assets, they can't pay any fines, and it's too expensive to keep them in jail.
Edit to add: It would be nice if they at least recovered the bikes and returned them to their owners but it seems like if they can't collect fines or put someone in prison they aren't interested. It woudn't be hard. Go to the local homeless hangouts. Any bikes nicer than what you could buy at Walmart are stolen, and most of the other ones are too. Run the serial numbers against theft reports and load them out.
Cops here in Chicago will not do anything about bike thefts. Multiple cases of vigilantes getting arrested after they took the law into their own hands when cops wouldnt retrieve their airtagged bike.
About 44% of the population goes through college.[1] If this population was the top 44% by IQ, then the minimum IQ would be 102.[2]
Instead the average IQ is 102, meaning many college students are below average in intelligence. We’re populating our universities with students of less academic potential than you would expect given the number enrolled.
The question is not whether any particular person can benefit from university education - the answer is that there is a possibility of benefit for any person. That does not mean that every person should attend university.
The question we should be considering is, given that university education comes at substantial expense, and that the number of students our university system can accommodate is necessarily limited: what students are justified in going to university, by their ultimate social and personal benefit?
I would argue that sending unintelligent people through university is counter-productive: it undermines the quality of conversation and culture of the university by allowing mid-wits to shift the conversation. It undermines the standards that professors apply to their students by making it intractable to fail much of their class. It lowers the bar, even for the capable students. Thus it diminishes the education, most tragically, for the capable students who might otherwise take us to greater heights of understanding.
Drone strikes on foreign targets are most analogous to the historical practice of issuing “letters of marque and reprisal,” which allowed private actors (privateers) to act on behalf of the state to take out pirates.
Issuing such letters is an enumerated power of Congress, not the Presidency. So if the President does so unilaterally, they are acting outside their Constitutional authority.
The risks of abuse to military power are real and significant, which is why the power was placed in the body closest to the people - so that such actions would be consistent with the public will.
This is super cool, I love how it suggests safer ways to achieve the same goal for many common risky migrations. Definitely going to sit down and study these.
It doesn’t reduce efficiency because the volunteers are the judge of worth and their’s is the only opinion that matters. The cost of providing services can be quite low when the labor is volunteered, so the cost to benefit tilts heavily in the direction of net benefit, i.e. efficiency in producing positive outcomes at a particular cost.