Back in the Saddle and Looking for a Change

A week off from work and news is a good thing. A week spent with family and friends is an even better thing. We had the good fortune to do both last week. You would think that four children in a car for four days of driving would be rough, but the boys did great and the van survived the trip, although it took hours to detox it when we got back.

I did some thinking while I was there and I might try a few different things in the future here, just normalizing some of the behaviors that I’ve already been doing sporadically.

I have also been thinking about how best to win people over to certain ideas and concepts. A lot of politics is name calling and mud slinging, which can be extremely entertaining, but rarely gets people to rethink their positions. Rethinking is a good thing.

Of course to rethink you really need to think about something in the first place. It occurred to me that a lot of people just don’t think much about politics. They vote for people that seem likable or for people that have the best rhetoric, in spite of what they are actually proposing.

Politicians have capitalized on this by making policy nearly undecipherable. Bills exceeding a thousand pages are rarely read by the members who vote on them let alone by the people who only pay attention to politics for an average of six minutes a WEEK. The tax code is a painful example, considering lawyers build lucrative businesses on the mere fact that they actually know and understand the ins and outs of the tax code. Lobbying firms make millions of dollars every year to push their clients’ interests into bills. That’s not saying anything against lawyers or lobbyists; quite frankly they are just playing the established game for their own causes and profits. As long as they are ethical in their practices, I really don’t have a problem with their behavior.

Of course I have a huge problem with the system.

Openness and transparency are great buzzwords, but they need to be actual policy, not just lip service or campaign slogans. Bills need to be straight forward, clear, and they need to be public with ample time for elected officials and average Joes to take some time to read them. They should be written about a single issue. No “omnibus”. No earmarks. No footnotes to be filled in later. Clear, simple and straight forward. Every Senator or Representative should have full confidence that they know what they are voting for and every citizen should be able to look at a bill and the vote of their representative and decide whether they agreed with the vote or not.

I need to do some more thinking on this, but this needs to be part of the conservative movement of limited government. A government that is strewn with loopholes, voluminous bills, and incomprehensible laws, is a government that is working against the people. There needs to be a healthy skepticism throughout the process. Argue your ideas, write bills to propose you ideas, but write it clear and let your ideas stand on their own merits, not tagging along something else.