How My Politics Have Changed in the Last 10 Years
I was never an arch-conservative.
I was always a moderate prone to conservative viewpoints, but over the last 15 years, I've come to some very different conclusions based on the same information and reasoning that I used to initially identify as being conservative, and I aim to take a look at a few of the issues where I've changed my earlier conclusions.
Generally, I don't want to kick poor people, and I also don't want to stifle the ability of industry to innovate and disrupt the status quo.
Where I was and still am conservative is foreign policy.
The biggest lesson that there is to learn from the 20th Century is that when your economy is as big as the United States' economy is, major political and economic disturbances - no matter where they happen - are our problems. In reality we may not be earnestly trying to make the world safe for democracy, we certainly have attempted to make the world safe for free trade.
Even in peace time, our military is crucially important for keeping things the way that we like them.
Why that is mainly our problem and not so much the problem of our allies is simply that our allies have lived under the penumbra of the American hegemony to the point where if and when we are supplanted by another power, it very likely isn't going to be one of our allies. So if the democratic-leaning West is going to maintain its place on the world stage and progress social mobility and human rights, then our best chance to maintain that hold is for the U.S. to keep subsidizing the military industrial complex, for better or worse. How much, though is up for debate. I certainly classify certain social welfare programs in the national security.infrastructure category that I certainly classify certain social welfare programs in the national security infrastructure category that I feel the majority would consider a stretch, but if there's one gateway for social programming in this ultra-capitalist, ultra-patriotic society, it's by leveraging the military - our most successful social spending program - against the people who hug it so tightly for cover.
The Death Penalty, the War on Drugs, and Private Prisons
I will start off with this: I have no problems with euthanasia or capital punishment.
None. Nada. Niente.
However, the death penalty is a lose-lose as a blanket policy.
It is cheaper to house and feed someone in prison for the rest of their life than it is for the state to put them on death row and deal with the impending appeals and court time.
In addition to this wrinkle, capital punishment is wrought several problems, not the least of which is wrongful conviction.
We in the United States are a bloodthirsty lot when it comes to punishing our fellow citizens.
The stories that you see on the news, the promises of elected judges, sheriffs, prosecutors, and legislators all talk about criminals as less than human.
Are they bad people? Some of them, sure. Even if they're the worst people, they're still people and how we treat these people is a reflection of our society's true values.
These people are some of the most vulnerable people in society, so they're easy targets for the aforementioned elected officials and law enforcement officers. When you're "hard on crime," most of us think that this will never affect us because we're not criminals and therefore we can't possibly be criminals. When people aren't people, it makes it easier of us to rationalize cruelty and treat them inhumanely.
The pursuit of justice can sometimes be a dirty place. Those officials are under pressure to solve the crime and punish the guilty. This pressure can lead to miscarriages of justice and a disproportionately heavy execution for certain crimes to pad stats and make certain people look like they've done something with their time in office.
This culture has contributed to the U.S. having the largest prison population in the world to the point a multi-billion dollar industry has cropped up with private companies building and operating prisons for profit. This is reprehensible from my perspective. The government wants to have the power to punish, but doesn't want to carry the burden of its court decisions.
From my perspective, I'm going to go full Stark here and say that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. The man being the government, and the sword being the burden of its decision. If your prisons are overburdened, then we should probably take a long hard look at why.
When you lump in the death penalty with this kind of compulsion to convict, if you execute an innocent man only to have better information come to light at a later date, then the scales of justice will always be unbalanced.
It's an immoral policy and the stigma helps create self-fulfilling prophecies that disproportionately affect the most vulnerable among us.
Healthcare is Not a Right, but It is an Economic Imperative for the State
In the last 15ish years, the younger generations (Gen X, Millennials, and now Gen Z) have championed socialized healthcare.
The mantra has been that healthcare is a right. I don't agree.
I come to a very similar conclusion, but I wouldn't call healthcare access a right.
I do, however, believe that the healthcare market cannot be a functionally free market for the individual because the demand for the service is too inelastic for an individual to have enough leverage to negotiate effectively on their own behalf.
If there's a treatment or procedure that will extend your life, the laws that govern so many other markets begin to break down and the value of that treatment starts to reflect the value of the life that particular individual rather than the cost and scarcity of the materials, labor, and transport involved to bring that treatment to market.
In order for the sick to have bargaining ability, they will need to bargain collectively to counteract that kind of leverage.
In addition, health insurance is a company taking on a pool of risk to pay out from the healthy to the sick. In a for-profit insurance model, this encourages the insurance company to screen their risk pool as much as possible to prevent those who are at high risk from getting paid out and hurting their profitability. Consequently the people most at risk who are most in need of healthcare are hit with not just one, but two limiting factors that will keep them economically bogged down.
Because of this kind of inelasticity, it is in the best interest of the government to regulate the market and ensure that its population has access to affordable healthcare.
In addition to fairness of access, it's also important with regard to economic output and defensive capability.
A healthy citizenry is a safer, more productive society, and I think that's something that everyone wants.