According to an old story a prominent Philadelphia host and correspondent of the political elites, Elizabeth Willing Powel, had Benjamin Franklin over to her house at the end of the constitutional convention of 1787 and asked him, “Well, doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
This post is the first in a series exploring current threats to our democratic form of government and offering suggestions on how our society and each of us as individuals can preserve or recover freedoms that belong to all our citizens and restore and increase their well-being, aka “happiness,” that Thomas Jefferson declared in the Declaration of Independence was the “unalienable right” of all people.
Mostly you can expect posts on politics or economics, although there will also be forays into the sciences and my specialties, information technology and Christian belief. To encourage sharing links to the posts with friends, family, co-workers, etc, the posts will all be accessible to the general public, kept short, and refer to other resources for those who want to dig deeper. Based on my schedule and other commitments, I expect new posts to come out between every two to four weeks. The plan is to continue the series through the upcoming general election and beyond.
The intent of this series is to be as non-partisan as possible, although there will be obvious and perhaps not-so-obvious limits. So let’s get my own orientation out in the open first. I believe a representative democracy, aka, a (small “r”) republican form of government, with separation of powers and guarantees of rights for citizens is the safest form of government over the long term. I believe that a mixed economy provides the greatest benefit to the broadest range of participants in that economy. A mixed economy includes a free market for most goods and services with government regulations designed to limit concentration of economic power in any one sector or class and to protect the people at large from market failures.
I believe that an economy ought to regulated so that
- it is relatively easy for someone who is contributing something of value to society to achieve a stable, long, and healthy life for themselves and their loved ones
- those who cannot support themselves are not left to slip into poverty and desperation
- those who have the ability and circumstances to achieve greater wealth should find that as their wealth increases it also becomes increasingly difficult to accumulate more.
By the way, hat-tip to both Neil Gorsuch and NPR for the Ben Franklin quote included in the title of this series.
Here is a list of some of the topics I hope to cover, in no particular order:
- what does “freedom” mean?
- Project 2025: what it is and how it plans to reconfigure the federal government to become a permanent arm of a wealthy oligarchy
- large numbers of wealthy people have been engaged in class warfare against the rest of American society
- “Neo-liberalism:” what it is, how it became the favored framework for guiding government economic policy, and how it transferred trillions of dollars from most Americans to the wealthy.
- how the manipulative actions of the leaders of the Federalist Society have led to the corruption of our federal and state judiciaries in favor of the wealthy
- how corporate power has contributed to the dangerous delay in addressing climate change
- how deregulation of monopolies has hurt most American workers
- how failure to raise the minimum wage has hurt most American workers
- how failure to fund public education has made what was easy for baby boomers almost impossible for Gen Z
- how repeated tax cuts have hurt our government and economy
- how under-investment in infrastructure has reduced our ability to compete in the global economy
- how the increasing use of “dark money” has enabled small minorities of the wealthy and powerful to bend public opinion in favor of their preferred policies
- “Surveillance Capitalism” and the “enshittification” of the internet
- how deregulation of the banking industry led to the economic catastrophe of 2007-2009
- why Libertarian approaches to government policy usually hurt most Americans
- how the spread of employee non-compete agreements stole money from workers
- how the government’s failure to update overtime rules stole money from workers
- how drug companies have been able to drive up the costs of pharmaceuticals so drastically
- why housing costs have risen so dramatically over the last several decades
- why much pearl-clutching over federal entitlement spending is done to promote the interests of the wealthy