If we have healthcare insurance, we can agree to whatever treatment our doctor recommends. We don’t care if the cost is unreasonable. The forces of supply and demand do not apply to medical services and products.

We need laws and we must follow them. If a despot should gain control of our government, they get to rewrite the laws. It is never pretty. At that point, democracy ends. No citizen militia can overthrow a dictator in control of the nation’s ...

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ~ Aristotle

While we work, we think of the sacrifices and struggles of our forebears, how they helped us and how we wish to help our children in similar ways.

The “nanny state” is a symptom of a broken government system. Like in a dictatorship, other people decide what is best for us, whether we agree with them or not.

A big issue related to the secondment of fresh people into bureaus, the staffing of deliberation teams, and getting non-politicians into legislative roles, is how these programs will be staffed.

If we acknowledge that we, the citizens of our nation, are responsible for governing ourselves and that, as a citizen-body, we are the government, it is in our best interests to contribute, individually, to its wellbeing.

Privatizing the government bureaus is NOT the solution for busting up bureaucracy. The solution is in staffing systems where fresh ideas come from fresh people within the bureaus themselves.

Properly structured government bureaus are critical to a vibrant society. A bureau’s stodgy bureaucratic culture can be turned into a healthy efficiency-focused one.

Our government churns through tons of money each year.  It seems we only receive a tiny sliver of the benefits.  An analysis of where the rest goes and what needs to change.

Sometimes, it seems, that the laws that are passed are not what we were expecting. The process needs more input from everyday citizens.

All citizens should have a means to actively contribute to the development of law and policy. There are tested and proven ways.

It would be ideal if we all contributed equally to the wellbeing of our nation, including sharing equally in the cost of our agreed-upon government programs. It’s not possible.

Money represents the market price we receive for our time and ideas. Some of us make lots of money for the time we sell; others make less.

The theory is that our economy will grow sufficiently such that, as our kids become wage-earning adults, it’s okay to saddle them with the debt from our current indulgences.

A nation’s criteria for immigration must be an individual’s merit; not their level of duress in their parent country.

Even though the forces for separation can be strong, splitting a nation into pieces solves nothing. 

“No society, no matter how tolerant, can expect to thrive if its citizens don’t prize what their citizenship means.” ~ Salman Rushdie

In times of great stress, such as the Second World War, our sense of nation seems almost natural; nationhood is implicit and few question it. 

Their goal is to tip the scale toward a particular election candidate, political party or legislative outcome.

It is sometimes said that only coups and revolutions end democracies. In reality, there are also subtler, more incremental evolutions to the end.

“Any large organization will devolve from a direct democracy to one where decision-making is appropriated by a narrow group of leaders”. ~ Robert Michels, 1911.

We can make life changing financial transactions online. We can check our medical records online. We can file highly confidential tax forms online. But vote???  Pffff!

Candidates know that extreme behavior differentiates them in the candidate pool and increases their probability of benefiting from a vote split among the other candidates. 

We need to vote a couple of times a decade, but once we are done, we can turn our attention back to our daily affairs and forget about the candidates until next election.