Crossposted from Facebook: Take A Stand
Crossposted from Facebook: Take A Stand

2008 Presidential Candidates: Obama. He's the only candidate in my lifetime whose election has the potential to facilitate a change in the culture of the Democratic Party towards left libertarianism - the principle that the coercive powers of both government and corporations need to be limited by a strong emphasis on the Constitution. He is also the only candidate who qualifies as a member of the religious left - someone who acknowledges and embodies that principles of faith have positive transformational potential in the fight against injustice - without privileging one religion or enshrining false interpretations of religion in our social law.

Party: Reluctantly Democratic. If the party transforms how I want it to under the leadership of Barack Obama, then I will be less reluctantly Democratic. I am a transnationalist left libertarian and there is no transnationalist left libertarian party.

Abortion: Our goal should be abortion reduction, not abortion criminalization. I believe life begins at conception, and that our primary goal as a society is to protect life. Yet making abortion illegal is not the way to protect life. This puts mothers in an even more difficult situation. We need to prevent unwanted pregnancies before they start with better education and health care, and reduce abortion rates after pregnancy begins through poverty reduction programs, family education, and most importantly, an increase in the role that extended family and the community at large has in the raising of children. Nuclear families can't go it alone.

Affirmative Action: Affirmative action should be transformed into an equation that includes not only race but also class, income, geography, and family educational history. People of color are at a disadvantage because of historical injustices, but there is no binary distinction between "privileged whites" and "disadvantaged people of color". Race should remain *part* of the equation though until educational inequality begins to be addressed at the elementary and secondary level. You'll never have much impact if you start equalizing things in college or in employment.

Capital Punishment: Theoretically, the state can be the exception to the otherwise universal law "thou shalt not kill." In practice, I don't trust the state with the responsibility of deciding life or death.

Censorship: I'm a firm believer in the first amendment. There should be no state censorship. I do support self-censorship and would, in principle, be OK with regulations that privileged those forms of artistic expression which have strong moral content. In practice, I don't trust the people who tend to focus on morals these days to decide what moral content is. In a society where progressives and other complex thinkers were interested in morailty I would trust this sort of regulation.

Cuba: Communist rule in Cuba is bad for certain human rights issues, but no worse than corrupt capitalist rule in certain other Latin American and Caribbean countries. The Castro administration should have been replaced by something else a long time ago, but not the kind of government for the rich people and by the rich people that the Miami Cubans want. I hope that the Communist Party retains power until the older generation of Miami Cubans dies. They only want to return so that *they* can be the dictators.

Current Adminstration (Bush/Cheney): They should go to prison for life in punishment for their crimes against the principles of human rights enshrined in the Constitution and international law.

Current Congress: Many of them should also go to prison (along with the Bush/Cheney administration) in punishment for their crimes against the principles of human rights enshrined in the Constitution and international law. This includes every Republican besides Ron Paul and the majority of Democrats.

Education: Education needs a massive overhaul in the United States. This should be done from the ground up, facilitated by regulations that privilege spending on schools which transform communities. This achievement should NOT be based on standardized test scores, however, but on the improvement of the prospects for students and their community measured on the very long term. We should not be expecting a short term fix. Schools should be open as community centers when school is not in session, particularly in underprivileged rural and urban areas.

Electoral College: The electoral college is a good idea, but states should not be winner-take-all. Electors should be calculated proportionally based on the winners of congressional districts and the percentage of victory, like in the party primary systems. No superelectors however.

Energy: Regulation should encourage the development of clean energy technologies. Clean energy does not mean burning something else besides petroleum. Biofuels are a joke and are wreaking havoc on our already strained food distribution infrastructure. Nuclear is NOT green. Neither is hydroelectric. Solar, wind, and geothermal only please.

Flag Burning: The flag is not the primary symbol of the United States, the Constitution is. Flag burning should be legal but frowned upon, since it is a non-constructive way to advocate for change. It doesn't work in dialogue with people who do see the flag as important. It makes them think the flag burners hate America instead of the policies which have brought America too far from its founding principles.

Foreign Policy: There is no such thing as foreign policy in my mind, since my perspective is that of a transnationalist who seeks solutions beyond the arbitrary lines on the map. People everywhere should create cross-border civil and governmental organizations based on trade and cultural intercourse which transcend goverments and make traditional bordered power structures increasily irrelevant. These organizations should be based on the principles of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Human Rights.

Free Trade: See "Foreign Policy"

Gay Rights: Human rights are universal. This includes the ability to form same-sex partnerships for the purposes of sharing wealth and creating a loving family. The state should not recognize gay marriage, but the state should not recognize straight marriage either. Marriage is instead a set of contracts for a constellation of purposes. Each of these contracts can be recognized by the state separately. Religious marriage is up to religious organizations. Sexual relations between consenting adults are not within the purview of the law.

Global Warming: On one hand, the evidence that human activity is the cause for 100% of the warming that we are seeing is not there. On the other hand, the idea that we are responsible for none of it is just plain silly. The solution is clear despite the outcome of the science. We should act as if we were responsible, because we certainly could be. We need to stop burning things for fuel for economic reasons and for its other environmental impacts alone.

Globalization: Globalization is inevitable, just as nationalization was inevitable in the 19th and 20th centuries. We need to work for the globalization of univeral rights in parallel with the inevitables globalization of opportunities for the wealthy and powerful to suppress those rights.

Gun Control: As Governor Schweitzer (D-MT) said, "You control your gun and I'll control mine". The right of gun ownership is not about hunting. It is about protection against tyranny. However, there's nothing in the Constitution that says we can't limit the right of gun companies to market and distribute their products into war zones, which is what the streets of some of our cities are, under the control of the drug trade and of youth with no legitimate opportunity for social advancement. Regulate the gun industry, not legitimate gun owners.

Health Care: Healthcare spending should focus more on prevention than on disease treatment. The health care dollar goes much farther that way. For preventative medicine there should be a single-payer system, not necessarily run by the government, but not necessarily not run by the government. For disease treatment private insurance should probably still continue, until disease rates are lowered enough that the cost of covering them is no longer so prohibitive.

Illegal Immigration: There is no such thing as illegal immigration. Anyone permanently residing in the United States is automatically a citizen and laws which try to prevent or limit those citizens' full participation in government and civil life are based on flawed interpretations of the Constitution that arose through the assertion of ethnic, racial, and national inequality.

Marijuana Legalization: Prohibition should end. Anti-drug education should continue (including education to not use drugs, like alcohol, which are currently legal).

Media Bias: There is no real liberal media bias or conservative media bias. At one point there was a bias toward having the narrative controlled by journalists, and journalists tend to be more left-of-center than the population at large. Today there is more of a bias toward making money for the big news corporations, so they just let people on "both" sides talk and talk, offering little analysis. They want every election to be a nailbiter so they can have a good story.

Minimum Wage: It shouldn't necessarily be a number. Government should, however, be able to see worker exploitation when they see it, and have the legal mechanisms for criminal or civil prosecution for convicted business owners.

Outsourcing: Outsourcing is pretty much balanced by insourcing. Keep the economy strong, encourage innovation, and stick to Constitutional government, and the United States will never cease to be a great place to live. Also see "Foreign Policy"

Right to Die: See "Abortion"

School Prayer: When I was a kid, I used to thing this issue meant "should children be allowed to pray in schools". I also used to think that "bussing" meant "should children ride school busses." I still kind of think that way. Of course children should be allowed to pray. There should also be religious education in schools - knowing about religion is part of cultural awareness. This education should not, however, privilege one kind of religious doctrine and religious history, as that is a clear violation of religious liberty. It should encompass everything found in the wider community. In most communities, that is multiple religions. Even in 100% Christian communities, it involves a lot of teaching about faith that churches just don't go into.

Separation of Church and State: The state should not privilege a particular religion or a particular interpretation of any religion. Laws should be based on the common moral principles of all religions and of the non-religious. There are certain things we can all agree on. Everything else is subject to individual interpretation.

Social Security: Social security systems are necessary due to our currently very unequally structured economy. Ideally it should be done in a different way, involving more incentives and less direct taxation. If you want to know in what way, ask a left-libertarian economist. I haven't studied it enough, as these sort of macroeconomic equations are beyond me.

Stem Cell Research: Ideally we should be able to coax non-sex-cells, say, skin cells, to become stem cells, thus taking away the potential-for-human-life argument. I think this will happen within the decade. Even right now though, the potential good outweights the harm.

Supreme Court: President Obama and a Democratic super-majority congress should immediately add 19 more seats to the Supreme Court and fill them all with left-libertarian legal thinkers.

Taxes: Ask a left-libertarian economist. Again, these sort of macroeconomic equations are beyond me.

The Constitution: "America didn't invent human rights. Human rights invented America."

The Constitution is sacred and universal, and that should include outside of the United States. We should work toward creating transnational non-bordered governments based on the ideals of liberty that founded this country. They are not specific to the United States, but within its borders now, we should always be looking to do things more Constitutionally."

Unions: Shouldn't be needed with the right kind of regulatory balance between civil liberties and economic health. Right now though, they are very necessary.

United Nations: The United Nations should be replaced. It is ineffective because it is an organization of existing national government powers rather than of the people of Earth. We need to work to marginalize national governments, not empower them through letting them make global decisions. The Security Council is a particularly grave error.

War in Iraq: Like all wars, should be ended. Terrorism, within Iraq as elsewhere, needs to be prosecuted as a crime, not as an act of war. This is true globally. Gangs of thugs are gangs of thugs, whether they are in control of a block, a village milita, or a nation state. The U.S. troops need to be treated better, upon their return, than any group of troops in our history. Non U.S. citizens in the immediate family of all non-nationals who serve in the Armed Forces should be granted citizenship immediately.

Welfare: Social security systems are necessary due to our currently very unequally structured economy. Ideally it should be done in a different way, involving more incentives and less direct taxation. If you want to know in what way, ask a left-libertarian economist. I haven't studied it enough, as these sort of macroeconomic equations are beyond me.

Welfare: Social security systems are necessary due to our currently very unequally structured economy. Ideally it should be done in a different way, involving more incentives and less direct taxation. If you want to know in what way, ask a left-libertarian economist. I haven't studied it enough, as these sort of macroeconomic equations are beyond me.

Wiretapping: I'm not against increased government surveillance for the purpose of increasing security just as long as the investigation is completely transparent. These means immediate declassification and publicization in the news media as well as the distribution of government surveillance technologies at zero cost to private citizens so that they can spy on the government too. Unless the government is willing to do it this way, wiretapping should be banned for law enforcement based on 4th Amendment principles.

Comments: I'm so glad this wasn't a yes/no or multiple choice quiz. As you can see, none of my answers would fit the typical choices.

Other: Encourage people to live either in the city or in the country. Suburban living is economically and environmentally unsustainable. Suburban values are generally anti-community, anti-individual liberty, and otherwise poisonous to positive human values.