The Obamas vs. the Private Sector

The Obamas are officially at war with "corporate America." Michelle Obama famously told young Americans not to, because apparently we don't need anybody in the private sector. It's ok, because their stimulus will fail miserably, proving once and for all the need for the private sector. I expect we'll be on track pretty soon. I suspect congress will be a lot less redistributionist in 2010.

a new deal

The way we treat minorities now works out badly for all parties; minorities are miserable, so we feel guilty, so we give them money, which discourages them from working, making them miserable, making us guilty... We need to break the cycle. We have to eventually give them no money, but giving them less is a good start. The poor hold us hostage by threatening to riot, rob, and ransack if we cut them off. But that is just a bluff, one that we have to call. There is a reason we have police. They are easily equal to the task. Secondly, cuts in public aid would take years and years to happen, plenty of time for any one who isn't mentally retarded or insane to start taking care of themselves.

Double Military Spending, halve Domestic Spending

We should double our military spending so we can simultaneously defeat all of our enemies: Islamists, Mexico, and various, more minor threats like piracy on the ocean. Our domestic spending is way too redistributionist, and the vast majority of it is unneeded. Worst offenders at the federal level: National Endowment for the Arts, Amtrak, foreign aid, farm subsidies, car subsidies, and all other subsidies. We could use money we don't spend on propping up domestic industries on ensuring that foreign countries stop cheating. We need less of our government at home, and more of it abroad. The best known uses for government are military, currency, and schools. I suspect everything else can be done privately. So we can spread American military and schools all over the world and leave the rest of our institutions in history. And I mean everything. We should eliminate cities, counties, and states, because they are wasteful.

Libertarians needn't worry, the world is getting privatized every day

Libertarians fret because so few government functions have been privatized, but if they want to feel better, they should note that all new technology efforts are done privately. Take the trans-Pacific fiber Google and other companies strung recently. Or the whole open-source movement. Or all the different standards: Wi-Fi, WiMax, RSS. The government can't take over these efforts because it moves too slowly. Instead of whining about what should be privatized, and asking for the government's help in doing it, libertarians should just try to put their ideas into practice. Of course, then they couldn't bash the U.S. any more, so they would never do it. One example is private schools. Libertarians want vouchers. But what's keeping them from making a network of private schools and figuring out how to finance it. Private schools are a competitor to public schools, so improve them if you want them to win. I'm not mocking libertarians; I think doing these things would work. The high-tech, private world is moving fast, and people that spend too much time whining about society and the government will be left behind.

the new world order

America runs the world, and it will for the foreseeable future. Here's how we should do it:

• Unilaterally end all our trade barriers. This way we can co-opt countries who are not contributing enough to the global economy by pulling them into the free market.
• Kill whoever kills, or credibly threatens to kill, Americans. This includes Mexican drug soldiers, Pakistani terrorists, and other enemies. We should attack them all-out. No more half-assed poking at Pakistan. We should also just occupy Pakistan, and Iran, too, because we will spend more money fighting them indirectly in Afghanistan and Iraq than we would taking the fight to them. Speaking of half measures, once we destroy the status quo in a country, we should...
• Run foreign countries directly. Giving Iraqis money to run their own country doesn't work; they just steal it. USAID doesn't help much either. Although it does do worthwhile infrastructure projects like wells and pipes, it spends too much trying to preserve a rural lifestyle that really should be eradicated. To stimulate Iraq and Afghanistan's economies, we should make them tax havens. This would bring in the foreign investment they desperately need. 60% of Iraqis are employed by the government, and they are just doing make-work. Bringing in foreign companies would get infrastructure built over there in a hurry, and pay Iraqis more, and wouldn't cost us near what giving them government jobs does. An Iraqi or Afghani military makes no sense; we already have the only real military in the world. We just need to plop a couple of bases down over there and keep defending those countries ourselves. Afghanis and Iraqis can be policemen, though. There needn't be a rule barring Afghanis and Iraqis from the government. They can join the government if they get elected or hired without racial preference.
  

Anarchy is just an Idea

There is no such thing as anarchy. It never happens. One power structure doesn't collapse without another simultaneously rising. According to more radical libertarians, Somalia should be a perfect country, because its government collapsed and they had a fresh start. This is basically what they advocate for the U.S. It doesn't work, though. In fact, such a radical transformation is just inefficient, like reinventing the wheel. Getting stopped at checkpoints along the road every couple of miles, constantly worrying about who will take power next...it's a mess. If no one else, American libertarians at least should stick to the U.S. This recession is a great opportunity to cut taxes and government programs.

browser ui

Imagine if the browser's address bar was even smarter than the awesome bar—a genius bar, I guess. As you type, it recognizes your intent. Type “browser's address bar,” and, like the awesome bar, it shows matches in your history. It also shows search results, like the omnibox in Google's Chrome. As you type, the search results dwindle. Type this entire post, and this post, and others related to it, would pop up. However, if you were just quoting this post, and you continued to write your own post, all search results would disappear. The genius bar would automatically add footnotes, and turn the quote into a link to the search for the quote. As your essay gets longer, the bar becomes a large text input area, complete with text formatting options that would pop up above the essay. Once your essay reached the bottom of you screen and required a new page, the awesome bar would now be a full-fledged word processor. By default, writings would be public. You could just drag the whole thing to a sidebar of contacts, though.Click on the person you want to send it to, and a contextual menu pops up--send it to the person, chat with person, call person?

Much like FriendFeed aggregates and improves receiving information, the unified writing interface would help sending information. One UI expressly for writing beats all the disparate ones that are tacked on to web sites and apps. A good example of this idea in practice is Posterous. This service lets you write an email, then make it a blog post by sending it to post@posterous.com. This makes your email client more useful, which is good because people usually keep their email client open all the time. It saves people from opening another app to blog, which makes good sense. I rarely blog, so even logging into blogger is a little inconvenient, as it is not routine for me;it is not as integrated into my workflow. Right now, my incoming messages are split between google reader and gmail, while my outgoing messages are split between comments on blogs and personal messages on gmail. Ideally, this would all be one service, which I guess FriendFeed is.