Leo,

The three examples you give (slavery, women's vote, civil rights) actually all fall into my exemption to incremental change for eliminating governmental violation of people's rights. For me, human rights fall into a different category than governmental policy. Legitimate governments govern at the behest of the people and as such have no mandate to prevent people from freely exercising their rights. If a government is violating people's rights, it is doing so illegitimately (because it has no right to do so) and therefore should stop immediately. Incremental change in this case makes no sense because a lesser violation of people's rights is still a violation of their rights and therefore illegitimate behavior for a government.

A good analogy here would be a person who is embezzling money from his employer. The theft is illegal and morally wrong. When he is discovered, he should be forced to stop embezzling immediately. He must stop because any ongoing embezzlement (even at a lesser rate) would continue to be a violation of his employer's property rights. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't unintended consequences to forcing him to stop immediately. The employee may have taken out a mortgage using falsified documents that he has been paying with the money he is embezzling. When he is no longer allowed to embezzle he won't be able to pay the mortgage and the lender (who acted in good faith and had no idea the money was stolen) loses its investment because the loan is defaulted. In this case though, we accept the negative consequences to the lender because we do not consider theft to be legitimate and therefore stop it whenever it is discovered. It is the same with government, if it is violating our rights it should stop, damn the consequences.

I think, though, that at this point it might be a good idea for me to define what I mean by a right. When I say "right" here, what I'm specifically referring to is the concept of natural rights. Natural rights are universal and inalienable, and are inherent in our nature as independent moral agents. The specific things that qualify as rights is open to debate, but there are a few minimum requirements that must be met for something to legitimately qualify as a right.

1. Free exercise of a right must not violate the rights of someone else. It would be illegitimate, for example, to say that I have a right to force you to follow my religion.
2. A right must not force action on someone else. For instance, I cannot have a right to daily free Pearl Jam concerts.
3. As a corollary to #2, a right cannot be actively provided by the government. There are many legitimate and valid government services, but it is not my right to have them because they require the use of limited resources and therefore proscribe others to give up some of their resources to provide me with the service. If those resources weren't available then the government couldn't provide me with the service. But since I have said that it is illegitimate for a government to limit the rights of its people then a government that didn't have the resources to provide that given service would become illegitimate. Without the government to provide the service we would still be absent the service. Since natural rights exist even in the absence of government, it is therefore illogical for any government service to be a natural right, regardless of how good an idea it may be.

Now that I've made it clear what I mean by a right, let's go to your comment on the health care debate. I would argue that people have a natural right to seek health care, because it is illegitimate for the government to deny me the right to attempt to cure any sickness or injury that I may receive. It is not, on the other hand, a natural right to receive health care, because that requires a doctor to take action. That means that health care falls under the umbrella of policy not right. That means that I do in fact feel that it should be fixed incrementally (and I do agree that there are things to be fixed). A massive overhaul sounds like a good idea because there are lots of things broken that we want to fix, but such an overhaul would be just as likely to cause new problems as it solves the old ones. By pursuing incremental patches to specific problems we can measure how those specific changes effect the overall metrics of the system and correct where necessary.

One more thing that I'd like to mention is that we have a powerful tool for enacting incremental change at our disposal here in the United States, in the form of our federal system of government. Since state governments are independent of the federal government they are individually free to try different solutions to problems. That actually gives us the ability to apply some degree of scientific method to determining what changes will work and what won't by measuring the success of states that enact a change vs. those that make no change (or enact a different change to address the same problem). When we apply changes (especially grand sweeping changes) at the federal level without state-level experimentation we lose our control and have a much harder time measuring the success of specific changes.

Hello World,

Bill, that was a great intro.  I particularly liked your comparison of a software program to a social system.  Spoken like a true software engineer! 

Your point that small changes make for measured and better steps is understandable and in many cases desirable.  Unfortunately it is not how the programs usually change in the natural and social worlds.

First, lets look at natural world--evolution did not actually happen in a nice incremental way.  We now know that it happened in spurts and starts.  Stable for a few million years and then BANG!!! a huge change

Now to Social:  Look at the US struggle to get rid of slavery.  From July 4th 1776 to April 12, 1861 US politicians tried to get slavery outlawed through small incremental changes.  Did it work?  Unfortunately no.  We had to have four years of civil war but after April 9, 1865 we had no more slavery in this country.  Same for Women's right to vote, same for Civil Rights movement. 

The natural history, evolutionary and social do not lend themselves to engineering quite as well as a computer program (I wish it did).  And when the system/program is too flawed to fix, one needs to scrap it and start a new code.  Unfortunately, the parts in the social code are not 0s and 1s and they bleed, complain, demand, and lobby!

I will agree with you Bill, that when there is a good system/program, small incremental improvements are best, like we are doing in our Whack-a-Politician game.  One example of a good engineered social system is our Constitution.  It was created from the start as a real system, with checks and balances, and despite its imperfections it stood the test of time and any changes to it Need to be incremental.  But may I also mention that in 1776 the Constitution was a complete and radical rewrite of the laws of the Common Wealth.  No incremental steps there!

Now to the present: I believe that in places where our social fabric is not so systematic, a much more drastic approach needs to happen--we need a COMPLETE rewrite.  Lets take our Health care "system" for another example of a program that should be changed.  I would assume you would argue that it should be done incrementally, but if our health care system was a computer program it would never, never work to begin with.  It was haphazardly put together WITHOUT social engineering as a response to a wage freeze after WWII.  Since then, it developed as an insurance monster connected to a JOB of all things.  Does our country values our citizen's health only when he is working? And why does it stay at the job instead of following the person?  What sense does that make?  Of course it does not, but then again our health care system is not a real system.  So making small incremental changes to a completely flawed system is not always very effective. 

What is needed is a re-engineering approach.  People with great engineering prowess to create and engineer a health care system need to look at the last 60 years of our system, and those abroad and create a new system that learns from our mistakes and takes into account the new reality of the 21st century.  The Obama care that Conservatives say is so drastic is still a patchwork of fixes on a leaky roof, but at least it changes the paradigm somewhat to a reality that health care is seen in this country as a social right.  And if it is, it needs to be treated that way.

What say you?

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.

Leo Starts

Hello World.

Leo Signing in.  This blog is intended to give voice to young moderate Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians who are increasingly frustrated with the constant stalemate, empty rhetoric, and finger pointing that is now the staple of our democratic system.  My business partner Bill Nagel are two young Americans who are frustrated with the curent status quo in Washington and who believe that out generation needs, can, and will reform the broken political system in Washington.  

Recently we have started a new venture called BLaBLaBLa, LLC (Bill Leo apps) with the mission of making fun and funny games for smart phones.  Our latest game, Whack A Politician, gives politically frustrated voters a chance to do what they’ve always wanted—to WHACK some sense into the politicians who seem to cause all the problems and spare those who they feel are making the world a better place. 

But first, let me introduce myself.  I am 35, a Democrat, a US Citizen, a Political refugee from the Soviet Union.  I came to this country in 1989 and I am proud to be an American.  But I am not so proud of what America often does here and abroad.  I love the freedom and the democracy that US affords people who live here--it is truly like no other country on earth.  But I am increasingly worried about the way our political system is so polarized, with only two sides who are seemingly unable to even speak to each other.  

If you listen to the main media, there are only two camps out there: the Conservatives and the Liberals.  I do not know about you, but these boxes do not describe me.  I am socially liberal (pro choice, pro gay marriage) and fiscally conservative (pro tax reform, pro balanced budget).  But most importantly, I believe that we need real, respectful, issue-driven COMMUNICATION between the politicians on both sides of the aisle.  I also believe that money needs to be taken out of politics as much as possible and that it is the voice of the people that should decide elections.

This is my stand.  I'll let Bill introduce himself.

In this blog, the two of us will give voice to our own ideas, debate and discuss political issues of the day and hopefully hear from all of you out there who, like us deeply care about the future of this country, frustrated with the current status quo in Washington, and ready to change the world!

Leo signing off.