Hello! These are some of my political views! I live in the United States, so many of these are from a US perspective, but I am more interested in policy than I am in partisan politics (not that I’m ignoring that, it’s just not as interesting)!

Please feel free to send in additional information on these topics! Feel free also to request additional topics, and I might or might not add them!

Environment and Science#

In general, I tend to be in favor of a lot of biological technologies that are scary to others.

Nuclear energy: Pro. It’s far safer than fossil fuels: nuclear has killed a very small number of people in accidents, but fossil fuels not only cause accidents but also kill millions of people a year from air pollution alone, not to mention permanent environmental damage. The alternative to nuclear energy isn’t renewables, but fossil fuels. When Germany got rid of nuclear, they added coal, and the “environmentalists” who wanted nuclear gone have made the planet worse by it.

As to whether new nuclear plants should be built instead of renewables, that’s a matter of a number of factors. But when it comes to dismantling nuclear, or other situations that in practice pit nuclear power against fossil fuels, nuclear power should always be preferred.

More resources:

GMO: Pro. It’s not that different from traditional plant breeding. It has the potential to lift people from poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition. I do think that monopolistic practices connected to GMOs can be bad, but those are the fault of those practices, not GMO in general.

Vaccines: Pro. The purported downsides are mostly literal lies.

Technology#

Open source: Pro. The government should fund open source development liberally, as should private corporations. Companies should upstream internal improvements to open source software.

Social media: Opposed. Online activity should be expressed through decentralized means like the Fediverse, e-mail, and traditional websites. Let’s give less control to the megacorporations and their algorithms.

Blockchain: Opposed. Cryptocurrencies are a bubble, and blockchains, while interesting in theory, use way too much energy in practice, for no societal gain.

“Artificial Intelligence”: Opposed as it is used. They steal from content creators in a bad way (from regular people to large corporations), they lie continuously because they have no concept of truth, and their biggest use case is lying convincingly and creating a bland but elevated style, both of which are bad things, actually. They are useful for language learning, and are an interesting topic for research.

Transportation and Housing#

Building more housing: Pro. The US has a shortage of housing overall, and in particular a shortage of housing where jobs actually are. We also have a demographic crisis that will require more people, and once we have those people, either through immigration or by having children, we will need places to put them. Building new market housing does in fact overall drive housing prices down, or slow down their skyrocketing. Exceptions are local and transient, and those who say otherwise are mistaken.

Public transit: Pro. Especially trains (inter-city, subway, and trolley) are essential infrastructure for a functioning society. We should have many times the amount of transit infrastructure we have in the US. Trains are currently barely subsidized at all compared to cars and planes, so expecting trains to be profitable when those other means of transportation are not is actually very unfair.

Cars: Opposed. Cars not only pollute, they are also dangerous (car crashes are a huge cause of death) and bad for society. Only licensed sober adults can drive them, and people not in those categories also need to be able to socialize and visit each other. People should live in walkable towns with convenient walking access to services, not in suburban developments only accessible by car.

Economy#

Anti-Trust: Pro. Break up big companies! Break up monopolies, especially tech monopolies! Disapprove mergers!

Debt ceiling: Opposed. It’s unconstitutional, default would be disastrous, and there are other mechanisms to keep budgets in line.

Government spending: Pro. Money has to come from somewhere, and the government is likely to spend it on good projects like infrastructure, rail, and climate technology, whereas the private sector is likely to spend it on consolidating monopolies and problematic tech feds, like AI and blockchain. Discretionary spending should focus on technological development and infrastructure, rather than military, and it should be an investment: it should try to grow the economy by a multiplier of the amount of the spending.

Regulations: Nuanced. Regulations should be effective but simple. Adding bureaucracy for limited benefit can be very bad, even if the purported goals are good.

Deficit spending: Pro. The government should always have at least a mild deficit, specifically in the US. Total debt is a bad metric for anything, but it can just monotonically increase, as GDP also grows (see next point). Debt per GDP should probably stay steady, although it might have to increase and decrease in various situations depending on economic conditions.

Growth: Pro. Green growth is possible. Saving the planet will be accomplished by building technology, not by asceticism, mostly because not enough people will support asceticism to actually make it a realistic goal. The economy can and will continue to grow as technology improves.

Taxation: Taxes in the US could be mildly higher. Tax increases should be careful to focus on the actual rich rather than the upper-middle class and small businesses. More important than increasing taxes is simplifying them, closing loopholes, funding enforcement, and getting rid of the arcane requirement in the US to file our own taxes. Just tell me how much money you want, IRS!

Entitlements: Entitlements should be universal rather than means-tested. For example: Everyone should get food stamps, funded by a tax that the poorest won’t pay anything for.

Representative Democracy#

Constitutional monarchy: I enjoyed this article, which suggests that the US should become a constitutional monarchy and invite Beyoncé to literally be Queen.

Electoral system: Proportional representation. The US should transition to a German-style proportionate representation multi-party parliamentary system.