Bill's Manifesto

Thanks, Leo...

Politics in the U.S. has never been clean, and I'm very glad that our politicians don't try to beat each other to death on the senate floor or shoot each other dead in duals anymore. However, just because our elected officials aren't literally beating the crap out of each other doesn't mean we shouldn't be striving for a more adult level of discourse.

Politically, I tend to be a classic liberal in the tradition of the founding fathers. I believe in individual freedoms and responsibilities. I hate tyranny, and I feel that the only way to protect against it is to have a strong but extremely limited government. With too little government, you dissolve into anarchy, which allows tyrants to flourish and grab power through force. If you let a government gain too much power though, it will eventually become a tyranny in its own right.

I'm also a conservative, in the sense that I believe rapid and radical change is rarely a good idea (the major exception being a change to remove a law denying people their natural rights). As a software engineer, I have a lot of experience with making changes to large complex systems, and the best way to do that is to make small incremental changes. Large sweeping changes (or worse, complete re-writes) almost always result in unintended consequences and hard to resolve bugs. Of course, life isn't a computer program but our government and legal system are also extremely complex systems and even well-intentioned politicians rarely make big changes without a myriad of unintended consequences. I don't think things should stay the same just because that's how we've always done them, but I do think that if we made more small-scale tweaks to the system and then measured the results we would end up with progress that drove things more steadily towards a better world.

I love people, but I don't trust them. Individually, people can be great and do great things, and when great people work together the possibilities are endless. Unfortunately, the reality of the world is governed by the asshole principal, which states that any group of people of non-trivial size will contain at least one asshole. The founding fathers understood that, and devised a system that would limit any individual person or group's ability to grab and hold too much power.

The Republican party used to be the party that understood these principles of limited government and a strong rule of law. Recently though, they've lost sight of that. Unfortunately, the Democrats are still worse at following limited government principles though, and the Libertarians are too impractically idealistic to ever get elected (or govern effectively if they did), so for the time being I'm stuck looking for the least damaging candidate in a slate of generally mediocre options.

As you can see, Leo and I are coming at things from very different viewpoints, but we've also got some common ground. So, without either of us abandoning our principles, we're going to have a civil debate on the issues without any of the double-speak, character assassination, or pandering that the real politicians seem to love so much. And with any luck we'll whack some sense into them along the way.