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Policy

What are the rules of living with each other and how should we enforce it?

My beliefs

  • The electoral college is out-dated and too easily manipulated. It should be replaced by something like delegative democracy or another simple system founded on popular vote.
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  • Abortion and birth control should be made available for readily accessible and free to people who need it and can't afford it.
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  • Marijuana should be legal to grow, sell, buy, carry, and use.
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  • Free college education should be available to everyone who wants it.
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  • As a citizen, you should make full use of your right to vote as a tool to influence the country's direction towards improvement. This right includes choosing not to vote, since that too influences the country's direction.
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  • When using your right to vote to influence the country, you should weigh not only the direct outcome, but also the 2nd and 3rd order outcomes that ripple outward from the act (both intentional and unintentional).
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  • Owning a gun should require certification and licensing from a firearms officer verifying that they've taken a safety course, are free of criminal record, and pass a psychological mental health check every few years. The licenses should expire every couple years and require re-testing.
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  • Health care should be available and affordable to everyone who needs it.
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  • Hunting endangered animals in order to raise money to conserve them is okay if it can be proven to actually work.
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  • Guaranteed basic income should be a thing available to everyone that is living below the poverty level.
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  • Assisted suicide (or medically-aided death) should be legal and available to people in a certain set of dire situations that they feel prevent them from having any chance of a pleasant future.
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  • The death penalty should be used only in very extreme and certain cases to protect the public, because of the risk of false-positives.
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  • Prisons should be about protecting the public, not about punishment, and should be tested for efficacy alongside other interventions like restorative justice.
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  • There should be special measures made to insure that criminal behavior by people in high-power positions get punished with equal or higher frequency than criminal behavior by people in lower-power positions, because those in higher-power positions are better equipped (and incentivized) to avoid accountability.
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  • Any sufficiently powerful entity to enforce the limits of free speech shouldn't be trusted to do so without bias for protecting their own power.
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  • Speech is a form of power, and just like power, free speech has constraints and is never absolute. However, because speech is often regulated by those in power, it's important to make sure they are not in charge or even capable of determining the constraints of free speech.
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  • See all beliefs

Buster Benson (@buster) is a writer and builder of things. If you're new here, check the about page or see my entire life on a page.

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