Refactoring the United States

As a libertarian, I do a lot of whining and complaining. Seems like the government is always taking up for special interests and consuming more and more of my freedom in the process. No matter which party is in power, I can count on having less freedom by the time they're through with me. Sometimes each party wants to screw me over different ways, but many times both parties are paid off by corporations and such and the only difference is what kind of political bullshit I have to listen to while my freedoms are being restricted.

Every week, it seems like it just gets worse and worse. SOPA/PIPA, NDAA, and so on. We keep getting laws passed with names like "The Protection of Bunnies and Children Act" which end up letting government do all sorts of nasty things that nobody who has really thought things through would agree with.

I'm getting tired of complaining. Today I thought I'd put some possible solutions out there. Suggest some ways to refactor the government:

• Constitutional Amendment: The government shall not abridge the digital communication of data between people.
• Constitutional Amendment: digital data collected by a person as part of a wearable or embeddable computational device shall be considered an integral and internal part of that person.
• Constitutional Amendment: For any year that the Federal Government increases operating expenses more than 3%, or that the total federal tax burden is more than 20% of GDP, currently elected officials will not be eligible for re-election. (Also known as the "Warren Buffett" rule)
• Constitutional Amendment: No federal law shall be valid for more than 40 years or less than 1 year.
• Constitutional Amendment: The only form of tax collection authorized to the Federal Government is a flat tax on consumption, with blanket exemptions for certain types of consumption created and managed by law.
• Constitutional Amendment: Each Congressional Representative shall represent no more than 100,000 people. (This would increase the size of the House to around 3,000 members, easily manageable by technology yet much more difficult for a 2-party system to control)
• Constitutional Amendment: Senators shall be appointed by the legislatures in each state (This takes the Senate back to being an aristocracy, which was the intention of the body, and not just another place for populist grandstanding)

Admittedly there are probably a lot of problems with my suggestions. I would point out, however, that amendments are supposed to be simple and broad. They are later "colored" by court action. So although we have freedom of speech, we can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Likewise, although we might have freedom of digital data transfer, this probably wouldn't be construed to allow incarcerated drug lords to control their crime empires from prison. There will be many reasonable limitations to these amendments which will come out like always, through judicial interpretation.

I'd also caution against taking facile pot-shots at some of these ideas. It's easy to sound like you're making a valid criticism when in reality that's not the case. For instance, one of the reasons we have a popularly-elected Senate is because the states did such a bad job of it. At one point a businessman in Illinois basically paid-off every legislator so he could be a senator. This makes for a wonderfully dramatic rhetorical point, but looking back I think it was a major overreaction to change the entire system simply because of local abuses. The way it was supposed to work was that the House was filled with people who lived next door. The Senate was filled with rich banker and lawyer types. That's because the system is set up to be a balance between aristocracy and representative democracy. (Most graduates of High School civics classes are probably unaware of this fact.) What we've ended up with is both houses being full of banker and lawyer types -- the reason is that the House is too small, limiting the number of seats available, and the Senate is too dependent on national political parties for their election. Let's have some Senators chosen by states with 50/50 Democrats and Republicans. We know from past experience that we end up with a Senate that's much less partisan and full of more calm, thoughtful, diplomatic members.

I could go on, but the point isn't to defend each item. It would make for too long of a blog post. I just wanted to point out that I've heard many of the objections to these ideas. This wasn't something I saw on TV somewhere or read about in the back of a libertarian comic book.

The important thing is putting something on the table. Complaining is easy. Suggesting fixes is not. The only way we can improve is to discuss our problems enough so that we can then begin outlining ways we might fix them. Democracies work on conversations. Whining and complaining is a good way to begin a conversation, but at some point you have to move on to the next step.