2nd Amendment Purpose and Limits

I think the purpose of the 2nd amendment is to guarantee that the people have a right to defend themselves, even against a corrupt government if necessary. It's important for this to stay in the constitution so that people easily recognize any attempts to prohibiting them from owning weapons.

The 2nd amendment was written at a time when the weapons a man used to hunt or defend his territory were not much different than the weapons infantrymen carried into battle. Armies had cannons and grenades, but these were not used for police action against citizens.

Today, the weapons available to our military and police are far superior to those we use for self defense and for hunting, their training is excellent, and they have an operational and logistical capability unrivaled anywhere on the planet. What kinds of weapons should civilians have in order to defend against a (hypothetically) corrupt government and military forces with such strengths?

Clearly, it doesn't make sense for citizens to buy and store grenades, machine guns, tanks, cannons, and missiles. The safety and maintenance procedures alone can be a full time job (this is just one reason we have an active duty military force even during times of peace). Even if training on using this equipment were offered to any interested citizen, I would hesitate to be a neighbor to someone who stores bombs in their basement or back yard.

On the other hand, we should not arbitrarily limit the kind of weapons that individuals are allowed to possess. Our rights should not be subject to whims, knee-jerk reactions, or fashion. If we need to limit weapon ownership, it must be in a very deliberate, thoughtful way.

I think the distinction should be made between weapons that are useful against specific individuals and weapons that are "area weapons" or cause an amount of damage that is enough to destroy structures or injure bystanders and not just targeted individuals. So, using this guideline: clubs, knives, swords, pistols, and rifles are all weapons that are easy to target to specific individuals and in the hands of a reasonable operator are unlikely to cause harm to someone other than the intended target or to cause great collateral damage. So I'm intentionally discounting any occurrence of someone flailing a sword wildly in a crowd or shooting wildly into a crowd. However, grenades, rocket launchers, machine guns, and tanks are all area weapons and have a potential to cause great collateral damage and should be restricted to military use.

The police should be restricted to individual weapons the same as are authorized for individual citizens. If a criminal is using area weapons or explosives then the police must call the national guard for assistance. In this event, the national guard should not hesitate to kill the criminal if necessary to stop the violence. As soon as the violence as ended the national guard mission is over and the police resume their investigation.

If the deceased criminals had any possessions these may be used to repay some damages but unfortunately it's common for violent criminals not to own much. In this case the community should band together to support its victims, and be comforted by the fact that taxpayers are not paying any money to clothe, feed, and house (in prison) criminals who used advanced weapons to hurt others.

Government Should Use Open Source Software

A law in New Hampshire was passed that requires state agencies to consider open source software when purchasing.

Full details: http://www.nhliberty.org/bills/view/2012/HB418

I think it's a good idea that can reduce costs for the government, especially when it's time to switch vendors, because when using open standards it's easier for other companies to estimate how much it will cost to integrate or modify, which means reduced risks for companies who bid for a contract, which means more competition and lower price for the government.

Libertarian Party

Just saw on the news that congress currently has an 11% approval rate... Which is far out of alignment with its political makeup. It seems that citizens are unhappy with both major parties because they spend too much, they pass many laws for the benefit of few people, they pass laws that they claim protect citizens without understanding how they are hurting the country.

The popular wisdom is that Republicans are financially and socially conservative and Democrats are financially and socially liberal. However, both are financially liberal - they just have different clients. Democrats are willing to forcefully take money from the rich (including the middle class) to take care of everyone else. Republicans are willing to take from everyone to feed their friends. Both parties disregard the constitution when it's convenient for them.

The Libertarian Party is the only constitutionally conservative party.

Every time you vote for a Democrat or Republican candidate, a little part of America dies. Vote Libertarian - its te only way to save America.

Smart Electric Meters

Benefits to using a "smart" electric meter that stores and transmits electricity usage wirelessly to the electric company:

Presently, electricity customers can monitor their usage by observing the analog meters outside their property. The procedure is to observe the amount shown on the meter, wait for some time (an hour for example), then observe the meter again. Subtract the earlier reading from the later reading to obtain the amount of electricity used during that period.

An advantage of "smart" meters touted by electric companies is that customers would be able to more easily monitor their usage by logging in to the electric company website.  However, this creates a risk that someone else can steal that information or take advantage of security flaws to observe the customer's usage and glean personal information such as if the customer is home or away, or what appliances the customer is running inside the home.

We can have the best of both worlds by installing our own smart meter that reports wirelessly to its master - the person who installed it. Customers could purchase an application that runs on a laptop or smartphone that communicates with their own smart meter and monitors the usage.  The smart meter could include 32 MB of data memory, which would be enough to store the reading every minute for an entire year, along with the cryptographic keys it needs to communicate securely with the master's application.  When the memory is full it the device would simply purge the oldest entries to make room for the newest ones. Clearly, the owner can be away for an extended period of time and still monitor usage that occurred during his or her absence.  The meter would need to transmit the same amount of data wirelessly continuously in order to prevent outsiders from gaining information about usage based on the length of the wireless transmissions alone. However, the transmission can be low power because it's for local use only and the smart meter could allow the owner to set the interval between transmissions (to be 1 minute, 5 minutes, 1 hour, etc.) in order to further cut power usage, or even make it "on demand" by pressing a button or issuing a command wirelessly.

The electric company is welcome to install its own smart meters as well in order to save the cost of sending someone to monitor them. However, it does not need to risk its customers privacy by making that information available online because customers can install their own smart meters if they want that capability. Risking everyone for a benefit that only some people want does not seem to be a good idea and government should not encourage it.

In addition, continuous communication between meters and the electric company can help to pinpoint power failures but those communications need not include personal information - they should be simple and anonymous such as "node 1234 receiving power from the grid" or "node 1234 not receiving power from the grid" and encrypted so only the electric company can interpret them.

It's the cookie, stupid!

I bought a cookie at a convenience store today and a man noticed me and said that he saw me buy a cookie yesterday too and asked if I can afford it. I said, yesterday I bought the chocolate chunk flavor and today I bought the peanut butter flavor. He asked if one was healthier than the other and I said, no, they are different toppings but the cookie is the same, and both are equally unhealthy for me - I just wanted to see how they tasted.

Now that I think about it, it's a lot like America's two-party system. We have two different flavors of the same cookie - they both like to spend more than America can afford, and they both have a vision of America that is far different from what our founding fathers envisioned.  This may be an oversimplification, but during the recent budget crisis where the Republicans and Democrats agreed to form a "super-commitee" to decide on budget cuts to total $1.4 trillion over the next ten years, they couldn't agree on what to cut and this was big news. What this big news and all the talk about a balanced budget was hiding was the fact that $1.4 trillion over the next ten years is meaningless. What we need is to create a budget surplus of $1.4 trillion in the next 12 months and then maintain it for the subsequent 10 years in order to eliminate the country's $15 trillion national debt, without accounting for inflation.

The Republicans and Democrats are just fat cookies. Each one tastes good to different people but they are both bad for our health.

The Libertarian party is the ideological descendant of the founding fathers. Only the Libertarian party recognizes that both Republican-run and Democrat-run governments have had the same deleterious effects on our nation - money being forcibly taken from all citizens in some way to pay for special interests, rampant fraud and corruption endorsed by the government (both Republican president Bush and Democrat president Obama endorsed bailouts of companies) and handouts to either rich or poor citizens (just another flavor).

Net Neutrality to Protect the Commons

Americans for Tax Reform has taken the ISP side of this issue in the name of less government regulation. This issue has nothing to do with tax reform and if handled properly has no regulatory burden any more than we have to regulate who gets to use America's roads.

The Internet is a commons and it's the government's proper role to make sure that it remains available for the benefit of everyone.  I, for one, subscribe to Internet service at home and via my phone so that my ISP will deliver the world to me - and I'm already paying for the access so I reject any idea where the ISP will further restrict what I can access by charging the other side for it as well.  This is highway robbery - everyone has already paid for their access and now the man in the middle wants a bigger cut.  

The Internet has grown because the free market works but ALSO because all sites are on an equal playing field:  business owners control how well their site is accessible by investing in better servers and more bandwidth, and customers control how well they access the internet by choosing their devices and bandwidth. Now some ISP's see a new profit venue by charging businesses more money to ensure their data flows well to customers accessing it through that ISP - even though both businesses and customers have already paid for their bandwidth separately. This is going to lead to the OPPOSITE of a free market because as ISP's consolidate, more and more customers are forced to access the internet through less and less ISP's. So this means that just A FEW entities will have a large amount of control over what people see by simply adjusting how much it costs.  Only large well-funded businesses will be able to afford having great performance and customers will gravitate towards those sites, some which will inevitably become mere portals like AOL.  Because this model will work well for ISP's, they'll exploit it as much as possible, which means for smaller businesses, the barrier of entry into the internet marketplace will be raised again and again until eventually starting an online business will become very prohibitive.  It turns the Internet from a free market to a very controlled market - but controlled by a few really large monopolies.

Sprint, Verizon, and the like didn't invent the Internet and the prospect that they will reduce their individual investments in their  network infrastructure doesn't scare me at all. They'll cut jobs? Fine, you can't terrorize me.  If they don't think it's profitable they can quit the business and someone else will happily take over their customers.  It was tax money that led to the creation and many subsequent innovations of the internet, and the livelihoods of a lot more people can suffer as a result of letting ISP's dictate what we see online.

Election Rules

Running for public office costs money. The more important the office, the more is spent on the campaign.

Should there be a limit on how long the "campaign season" is? No. A person who is running for office is using reputation built over his or her entire lifetime, and the right to free speech prevents the government from restricting precisely this kind of (usually positive) political speech. Putting an arbitrary limit on the "campaign season" won't do much to curb the spending, it will just concentrate most of it during that period when all the advertising and traveling is done.

Should private funding of campaigns be prohibited? No. Having the government pay for campaigns is a terrible idea. First, there would have to be a system to determine who is eligible to receive money. Since we have two long-standing major parties, any public funding system would probably end up being very biased towards those two parties the way that the rest of the election system is biased towards them now. Second, there would have to be a limit on how much money is spent on each candidate or in total over all the candidates, and each year lawmakers will waste time debating about raising the limit. Third, I reject the idea of using my tax money to pay for the opposition's advertising.

Should there be a limit to private donations? No. It would be very hard to enforce, anyway, because a person with a lot of money to donate can get around any arbitrary limit by distributing the donation among a large number of supportive people.

Should disclosure of donations be mandatory? Yes. People have a right to know who are major donors of campaigns (for any definition of major) because it may affect what the candidate will do once in office (sadly) and also casts light on some of the candidate's statements. Right now there is a law that campaigns must disclose the names of all persons who donate over $250, but they get around it with "bundlers" who collect thousands of dollars from people and then don't have to disclose where they got it. I don't know how the justice department allows that to go on when it's a clear violation of the spirit of the $250 law.  I think $250 is a fine arbitrary maximum anonymous donation.

Is there any adjustment we can make to get better accountability over the election funding process? Yes. Even though the money should not come from the government and we shouldn't limit the period of time that candidates are allowed to make statements, if we want to be certain that we know who is contributing to a campaign we need to make the accounting transparent. The way to accomplish that is to require candidates to use an independent accountancy firm that has a license from the government to manage campaign funds. Anyone should be able to get a license to do that job by reading a book with all the campaign finance laws and signing an agreement to report faithfully what is going on with the campaigns it manages.  Every candidate would hire their own "treasury firm" to manage income and expenses for the campaign - actually the licensed accountancies should be allowed to manage the finances of only one candidate running for any one office. So for example the same firm could manage the campaign of a person running for mayor and another running for congress but not the campaign of a third person who is running for the same mayoral or congressional office. The firm would accept all donations and issue checks and debit cards for all expenses. It would publish (publicly) a list of all people and corporations who donated more than $250 to the campaign (or whatever the maximum anonymous donation is) and the government would access the same published data that everyone else can access. People would still be able to get together, form an organization, and donate through that organization to the campaign - but that would still allow investigators to find out the identities of the people behind that facade.

Also, campaign income and expenses would have to be defined as being specifically about the candidate. That is separate from income and expenses of the candidate's party to promote its platform without naming a specific person who is running for office.  Any trip that the candidate makes in which the candidate performs even one speech about election is considered a campaign expense. If it's paid for by some other person instead of coming out of the campaign fund, then the accountancy firm must simply list something like "trip to (wherever) and meals paid for by (who) estimated at $xxx" so the public knows about the donation. This allows people to contribute equipment, food, parties, or whatever with assets they have instead of having to convert that to a monetary donation while still being accountable to the public for their support.

Is it proper to make a candidate's election finances public? I think so. Candidates who are elected for public office will be managing public funds and there is no privacy there - so why should there be privacy for people who want to attain such positions? The people have a right to know who they are voting for, and a person's finances have a lot to tell.

What else can we do? If we're concerned about minority party access to the public during a campaign there should be non-profit associations who set up debates and donate radio, television, or newspaper ads to campaigns by minority parties (anyone not a Democrat or a Republican).

I also think that how political parties choose their candidates is not government business. All sorts of "primaries" and other nonsense should not be funded by nor regulated by the government.