Growing up, I remember my mother warning me that things are more complicated than they seem. Just because I think I know the best thing to do doesn’t mean it would actually work in practice. it was an interesting thing for a teenager who thought he knew everything.
I have found myself thinking back to that from time to time. Teenage me was a little naive. A lot angry. And prone to impulsiveness. A fair number of my views have changed dramatically since then. But not all of them. Some of those thoughts have crystalized into full fledged ideals.
When I look around at the world, I can see problems in nearly ever direction. Some aren’t easy fixes. You can’t wave a wand and make climate change go away. Sexism. Racism. Income inequality. Inadequate education. Health care disparity.
Tough problems. And I think back to my mother’s warning. It’s all more complicated than I think. Simple solutions aren’t likely to be the best solutions. But the more I think about it, the more I think I could fix a lot of it by being king for a day. So many problems can be made so much easier by attacking the reasons that prevent us from acting.
Take a problem in the US. let’s start with income inequality. Tough one to fix right? Not really. Remove all money from politics. That’s hard to do in reality, but as King for a Day I could do it. Change the constitution to limit the income of the politician to only that from the public purse, with all former funds locked in blind trusts. A handful of other restrictions to close loopholes and nail down the entryways for money. Toss in term limits for a single public position. Put something in place similar to the Wyoming rule to have each representative represent the same number of people. Computer modeled districts to prevent gerrymandering. Addition term limit to restrict total time in public office regardless of position. All of the sudden politicians care about the masses again to get a vote. Taxes on corporations and wealthy people pass without hesitation. Laws are passed to prevent a company from locking it’s workers into minimum wage increases while pumping up it’s own stock prices or owner income. Wealth tax, yes. Estate tax, yes. Mandatory minimum taxes for top earners and companies locked to an inflationary index regardless of deductions. All locked in for the next 100 years by Kingly fiat.
That fixes a lot of issues. But not all. What if we made it easier for everyone to vote? I’m king. Let’s do it. Election reform! Candidates can only run ads for 180 days prior to the election. All citizens of the country are automatically eligible to vote. Oh, and DC? That’s a state. Or it’s blended into Maryland. I refuse to accept that 700k people’s vote doesn’t matter. Puerto Rico can be one too if it wants. Former criminals have voting rights restored once their sentences are served. Instead of election day, we have election ‘2 weeks’ with one polling location per 10k people in the district. Mail in voting for an entire month prior. Voting machines that are either open source, or reviewed by a 3rd party to ensure no maleficence.
Now we’re hopping. Just like that we’ve change the structure of the US government to be more responsive to it’s electorate. That 20% of minorities have suddenly have a lot more weight too them. And heaven help you if you piss off the female electorate.
Now that we’re taxing rich people again (seriously, it was 70% in the 1980!), we have some money coming in. What to do, what to do. Right, better education. Increase funding by 250%, and lock that in to grow with inflation. Oh, and that bucket is nation wide, distributed by the number of students in a district instead of the wealth of the local neighborhood. Want a better local school? Raise funding for ALL public schools. Private schools can continue, but with no income from the public purse. If private school test scores are more than 5% better than public school an automatic increase in school funding is approved.
How am I doing? That’s just the first 60 minutes it took me to write this. Think of what I can do for the rest of the day. Or hell, give me a week to plan before my King Day begins.