I.3: American Society’s Most Fundamental Needs

Humanity’s biggest problem is human nature. But humans cannot change human nature.

So, to meet American society’s most fundamental needs, we need a government that restrains our nature. And compared to history, our government does a marvelous job of that. But by any absolute standard, our government fails to stop corruption. That tells us that our founding fathers only scratched the surface of what a good government could be. And most other governments are even more corrupt.

In an upcoming book, I argue that the U.S. Constitution defines an excellent government. But then I proceed to show that we could do a better job of satisfying society’s needs. In particular, I show how we could improve by restructuring our federal, electoral, regulatory, and local community systems.

I believe American society’s most fundamental needs are:

1. To prevent special interest groups from gaining political control through campaign contributions.
2. To prevent corporations from gaining control of the agencies designed to regulate them.
3. To provide more direct control by regular people, to make government and business more honest.
4. To more properly restrain all power, including the power of regular people in order to prevent mob rule and the abuse of minorities.
5. To balance general decision-making between experts and regular people.
6. To balance the power to interpret the Constitution between experts at law and the people.
7. To vastly reduce the reach into citizens’ lives, the size, and the expenditures of government.
8. To vastly reduce the size and power of the largest corporations, and increase the power of small businesses.
9. To reject both socialism and crony capitalism.
10. To establish capitalism that nourishes the society, by rewarding honest and entrepreneurial behavior and punishing political and economic manipulation.
11. To ensure that laborers’ standard of living improves whenever the economy improves.
12. To ensure the election of the wisest members of society to government offices.
13. To prevent political candidates from promising handouts to buy votes.
14. To prevent government officials from getting rich on insider information.
15. To increase liberty for everyone, while protecting everyone from control by the rich.
16. To increase equality for everyone, while protecting everyone from manipulation by politicians.
17. To replace states’ and communities’ subservience to higher levels of government with a more balanced relationship.
18. To make all these goals possible by taking control of our educational system away from bureaucrats and giving it to people with teaching experience.
19. To allow conservatives, liberals, and all other groups to express as well as live according to their own values, without interference from opposing camps.
20. To remove the incentives that produce corruption in our economy and our government by separating money and politics.

Do you agree with my list?

Furthermore, I argue that we need to address the needs in this list before we can solve society’s deeper problems, like war, disease, racism, injustice, and poverty.

Do you agree that the list above indicates American society’s most fundamental needs? If not, how would you re-write the list?

This site is for discussing how to improve our political system. It is NOT for discussing party politics or political figures. So if you have a non-partisan question or comment, feel free to leave it below.