What this country really needs...

A well-worn quip from my youth was, "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar!' Even then I took this as a wry attempt to identify the root problem of "what's wrong" with the country, or to perhaps offer a panacea for our problems. Of course this is not "the" solution, yet it offered a perspective that implied that we need to "uncomplicated" things when we are looking for "big" solutions, to start with a small, daily, routine change.

There are plenty of similar assertions that could be made today. Life is much more complicated than when I was young. There are several billion more people populating this planet since those days and while life as a whole has been more prosperous and "better" for just about everybody, the fixation over "equity" (a term that had an entirely different meaning in my research and studies than it does today in the vernacular of woke rhetoric.

So a mix of facing the challenges of a 21st century well-divided world, a willingness to cut through the rhetoric (over 'equity' among other terms), and a desire for getting back to basics leads me to propose some things that I believe that would provide a great social capital return on investment in the United States, including some "bigger" ideas, not just five-cent cigar solutions.

First, we have to manage our borders. Second, we need to replace out public education and medial care systems with more direct funding for the 'customers,' i.e., shift from taxpayer funding of institutions to taxpayer vouchers, as well as measure more important measures of the effectiveness of theses institutions, done in part by letting customers hold the institutions accountable for delivering what the customers want, not what the institutions believe to be "what's best" for the customer.

Third, we need to restore the basics of "law and order," with better trained and funded police, more engaged communities, and clearer consequences applied to those who violate the public trust.

Underlying this is a need to stop focusing attention on those things that scare us yet that even with a lot of attention and resources, we can't or don't make much of a difference with the public policies in place today. This includes big things like climate change and Covid lockdown policies, yet also smaller but more pervasive things such as divisive identity politics, the 'heckler's veto' that stops open discussion of key issues cold in its tracks with cancel culture, and a return to much of the original "enlightenment" movement, where human progress and peace can be best achieved through rational, open discourse, logic and the scientific method.

Fourth, We need to re-assert the essential nature of the nuclear family. This is especially important at a time when the "progressive" forces are moving to dismantle what is left of the nuclear family, which is perhaps the cornerstone of social stability and mobility in the foundation for the now derided "American Dream."

Fifth, and this is a good one, apply a public service tax of one cent for each recipient address on an e-mail. Think about that for a moment. And use the tax revenue to, among other things, fund mental health care for those abused by social media and mass mailings. It's actually a perfect example of "put your money where your mouth is."

Sixth, and perhaps related to the public service impact of the fifth point, it is time to discontinue the informal process used to elect a presidential candidate from each party and to re-assert the formal nature of actually voting for a president. No more two-year personal, billion-dollar campaigns for the nomination, no more state primaries, and no more televised "debates" as they have been mislabeled and widely promoted of late. Instead, return to national conventions three months prior to the election, eliminate the very need for state primaries, and create a more secure and accessible voting system for generating votes. The Electoral College is NOT the problem, although some proportional division of the electors, determined by the percent of votes for each candidate, could be a better way of expressing the will of the people. To be sure, winning a state by one vote should not generate the same percent of the electors as a candidate who wins the state vote by millions of votes.

Seventh. Going back to the second point, the content of an education today needs to focus on more practical education and skills, and not just the traditional rhetoric of learning for learning's sake, developing a love of learning, liberal arts (whatever that even means today), or other tropes from the educational industry. This does NOT mean closing all the liberal arts colleges (maybe just many of them), nor does it mean that everyone needs to start with an associate's degree in a technical field. It means realizing theta STEM is just as much a liberating art as are the ancient concepts of the humanities and social sciences. Literacy without numeracy is a fool's game; instead of some schools relying on Latin or Greek, most schools should require a second language and not just from modern languages. Rather, the real "modern" language would be one of the coding languages. What used to be Fortran, COBOL, Basic or Pascal is now Ruby on Rails, C++ and a plethora of computer-based languages that have arisen from the digital, big data age.

Seven changes might just be enough to revolutionize our thinking and to restore a prosperous, peaceful lifestyle, for all.