Libertarian Answers To Labor Woes

I agree with all three libertarian approaches to helping workers: relaxing immigration laws, ending exclusionary zoning laws, and relaxing unnecessary occupational licensing requirements. These aren't sufficient, but they are all steps in the right direction.

Today is Labor Day. As usual, there is much discussion of what can be done to help workers. But few focus on the one type of reform that is likely to help more poor and disadvantaged workers than virtually anything else: increasing labor mobility. In the United States and around the world, far too many workers are trapped in places where it is difficult or impossible for them to ever escape poverty. They could vastly improve their lot if allowed to "vote with their feet" by moving to locations where there are better job opportunities. That would also be an enormous boon to the rest of society.

This quote, and the quotation below are from Ilya Somin, "Help Workers By Breaking Down Barriers To Labor Mobility", The Volokh Conspiracy (September 2, 2024).

Globally, the recommendation is to make immigration easier by relaxing immigration restrictions, which benefits not just the immigrants but the countries receiving them. The author explains that:

Economists estimate that eliminating legal barriers to migration throughout the world would roughly double world GDP—in other words, making the world twice as productive as it is now. A person who has the misfortune of being born in Cuba or Venezuela, Zimbabwe or Afghanistan, is likely condemned to lifelong poverty, no matter how talented or hardworking he or she may be. If they are allowed to move to a freer society with better economic institutions, they can almost immediately double or triple their income and productivity. And that doesn't consider the possibility of improving job skills, which is also likely to be more feasible in their new home than in their country of origin.

The vast new wealth created by breaking down migration barriers would obviously benefit migrants themselves. But it also creates enormous advantages for receiving-country natives, as well. They benefit from cheaper and better products, increased innovation, and the establishment of new businesses (which immigrants create at higher rates than natives). Immigrants also contribute disproportionately to scientific and medical innovation, such as the MRNA Covid-19 vaccines, that have already saved many thousands of lives around the world.

Domestically:

barriers to labor mobility also harm workers within the United States. Exclusionary zoning prevents many millions of Americans—particularly the poor and working class—from moving to areas where they could find better job opportunities and thereby increase their wages and standard of living. Recent evidence suggests that the problem is even worse than scholars previously thought. Occupational licensing further exacerbates the problem, by making it difficult for workers in many industries to move from one state to another.

Breaking down barriers to labor mobility is an oft-ignored common interest of poor minorities (most of whom are Democrats), and the increasingly Republican white working class. Both groups could benefit from increased opportunity to move to places where there are more and better jobs and educational opportunities available.

Selected Wishes

They aren't prayers, because there is no one to pray to and prayers don't work.

They are just select, somewhat realistic, wishes or dreams, and I have little ability to do much to make them happen or not.  

U.S. Politics

* Harris wins the Presidential election.

* Democrats win the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.

* Democrats hold CO-8 and win CO-3 and maybe even CO-5.

* The filibuster is abolished in the U.S. Senate.

* The U.S. Supreme Court is expanded to 13-15 seats, allowing Harris to appoint 5-7 new liberal justices.

* D.C. gains statehood status.

* Trump is sentenced to and serves several years in prison on his current charges of conviction, is not released pending appeal, and is ultimately convicted of at least some charges in the three other criminal cases that were brought against him with the classified documents case dismissal reversed on appeal.

* Justice Thomas is punished for corruption.

* Abortion bans fall one by one, state by state.

* The MAGA movement collapses.

U.S. Culture And Daily Life

* Christianity continues to decline in the U.S. in favor of secular worldviews.

* The percentage of people who own guns falls.

* Crime rates continue to fall.

* Police become less likely to use excessive force and less likely to act inappropriate when accountability measures and training are improved.

* Life expectancies and general health improves with new medical advances and better public health measures.

* Southern and country culture, and cultures of honor ebb and wane.

U.S. Economics

* Electric vehicles increase their market share.

* Coal consumption continues to plummet.

* Petroleum consumption plummets.

* Fossil fuel dependent economies like Wyoming, Alaska, and Texas see huge, long term stagnation similar to what was seen in the Rust Belt.

* The U.S. becomes more urbanized.

* Anti-fraud enforcement becomes more successful.

* Lawns and grass landscaping become more rare in the arid West.

* Land use regulations are relaxed.

* Unnecessary occupational regulation is relaxed.

* Immigration remains substantial and undocumented immigrants are largely legalized.

* Copyright laws and other intellectual property laws are weakened.

International Affairs

* Ukraine wins its war with Russia.

* Putin dies or is removed from office.

* The Houthis are defeated in Yemen.

* Hezbollah is defeated in Lebanon.

* Iran's efforts to make war with Israel prove futile.

* North Korea and Russia cease to be able to support their large military forces and greatly reduce them.

* Countries with fossil fuel economies like Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia see long term stagnation as fossil fuels become less important in their economies, and this undermines their authoritarian leaning regimes.

Urban Density Is Green

 This is the biggest apartment building in the world.

The colossal Regent International apartment building in Hangzhou, China, is is the largest residential building globally and hosts over 20,000 residents! Initially designed as a hotel, this 36-story architectural marvel was transformed into a self-sufficient community, boasting high-end residential apartments, a vast food court, swimming pools, salons, supermarkets, and more. 

Designed by Alicia Loo, the chief architect behind the world's second seven-star hotel, the Singapore Sands Hotel, this S-shaped giant stands 206 meters tall. He has dominated Hangzhou's central business district since its inauguration in 2013. 

Home to a diverse community, from young professionals to influencers and small businesses, the Regent International building spans over 260,000 square meters, reshaping the skyline and redefining urban living in China.

Rent ranges from about $200 a month for an interior windowless apartment to $550 a month for apartments with a balcony. 

I posted this meme on Facebook and a friend of mine left the comment: "To me it is a symbol of the overpopulation that is killing the planet."

I responded (with minor editing for a blog format):

It shouldn't be. 

First of all, global population is nearing a peak and leveling off - the places that are still seeing surging population, especially sub-Saharan African and Afghanistan, have profoundly lower population density. 

China, in particular, has plummeting fertility rates and is far below the replacement level. It is at 1.4 billion people now, but actually lost population in the last year or two and will continue to. China has a fertility rate about half of the replacement rate, so its population will probably fall by close to 400 million people in thirty years and that's at current rates which are still plummeting. 

High density urban environments have the lowest total fertility rate. 

Second, the environmental impact of people in extremely high density environments is much lower per person than if they are spread out - they use less heating/cooling energy (especially in multifamily housing like this since there is less surface area to lose/gain heat per capita due to shared walls, and shared ceiling-floors), produce far less global warming air pollution, use much less transportation energy, build fewer cars per capita, use less water, destroy less land/sensitive animal habits than lower density development, etc. 

I'm sure it has lots of elevators, which are one of the single most energy efficient means of transportation other than bicycles, almost all power used to go up is recovered going down. And, people in densely populated areas can also use more efficient intercity transportation - this part of China has high speed electric rail that is faster and has less environmental impact than intercity transportation by cars or airplanes for short to medium distance intercity trips (admittedly China's electrical grid has way too much dirty coal, but that isn't an urban density related issue). 

Manhattan, for example, has better energy efficiency and overall less waste production and pollution per capita than any other place in the U.S. 

There is also an iron rule in economics that the bigger and more dense a city is the greater its per capita GDP in a very systemic, cross-cultural, cross-time period way. It is a power law relationship, so more dense urban areas are exponentially more productive per capita with no upper limit observed to date. So dense cities also greatly reduce environmental impact per $1 of GDP by both being more productive and less polluting per capita. 

More density means a smaller human footprint on the Earth. Put 20,000 people in suburban tract homes and you'd eat up 3+ square miles of land instead of one city block of maybe 1% of a square mile (6.4 acres), so that's a 99% reduction in habit destruction that can be left for open space, parks, and farming. 

Sure, the 6.4 acres for this high rise produces way more waste, energy consumption, and water consumption than my urban residential neighborhood would with 180 or so people in the same area of land, rather than 20,000 people, and far more than a suburban neighborhood with maybe 20 people in that land area, or an exurban neighborhood with 4 people in a mini-mansion on a single 6.4 acre lot. But per capita, it is much, much better for the planet.

New Colorado Laws

Many Colorado laws take effect on July 1 each year. This year is no exception:

Twenty-one new laws that the legislature passed this year will kick in at the start of July. Among them are laws covering the state plumbers board, creating a new Colorado Disability Opportunity Office and adding gender identity to the state’s protected classes in bias-motivated crimes.

Several laws passed in previous years will also go into full effect Monday, including a measure approved in 2021 that allows Colorado consumers to opt out of having their personal data sold or used to generate targeted advertising. 

Another bill passed in 2021, which banned single-use plastic bags at checkout lines at the start of this year, has another provision taking effect Monday that will allow local governments to enact even stricter plastic bag limits.

Here are six other new laws set to go into effect: 

Occupancy limits . . . 

House Bill 1007 prohibits local governments from limiting how many unrelated adults can live together in an apartment or housing unit. For college towns like Boulder or Fort Collins, that means cities generally can’t cap how many roommates can live together, except for health and safety reasons. Roughly two dozen Colorado cities and towns had occupancy limits, though only a few — including Fort Collins — actively enforced them. . . . 

Sexual assault cases . . . 

House Bill 1072. . . . It blocks defendants and defense attorneys from using what a sexual assault victim was wearing as evidence of consent in court. The new law also tightly limits how the victim’s previous sexual history, including with the defendant, can be used in court. . . .

Limit on poison

Sodium nitrite is a preservative used often used in curing meats. But in higher concentrations, it can be fatal when ingested by people, and it’s increasingly been used in suicides here and elsewhere in the United States. That’s made easier by the availability of the higher-potency substance for purchase online or in sporting good stores. Starting Monday under House Bill 1081, those higher potencies will no longer be available in Colorado except for approved commercial purposes. . . . 

Fewer guns in sensitive spaces

One of several gun-reform bills passed this year, Senate Bill 131, prohibits the open or concealed carrying of firearms in public or private schools, on university and college campuses, and in child care centers. The new prohibition also covers certain government buildings and the state Capitol. . . .  The bill . . . does allow local governments to opt out of its provisions. The Douglas County Board of Commissioners did so in May. 

Elections protections . . . 

House Bill 1147, requires political ads and messaging to prominently disclose when they include a “deepfake,” meaning an artificially generated picture, video or voice that replicates a real person. . . . 

House Bill 1150, extends existing criminal penalties and fines to people who participate in attempts to organize false slates of presidential electors. Essentially, that means anyone who attempts what a group of lawyers and officials tried in 2020 in support of then-President Donald Trump will face specific criminal liability in Colorado. . . . Colorado’s new law takes existing crimes like perjury or forgery and expands them to include a person seeking to participate in a false elector scheme.

Most Construction Work Should Relocate To Factories

Manufacturing large modules for a building off-site and then assembling them in a couple of days on site has all sorts of benefits over on site stick built construction. And, this is one area where China is far ahead of the United States in technology and economic organization.

U.S. construction firms, to a great extent, operates like pre-industrial craft shops in the manufacturing industry, that never updated themselves to the modern, maximally automized and optimized factory production model.

Manufacturing large modules for a building off-site in construction projects is significantly cheaper than getting the same work done on site.

The number of workers required is significantly lower without the hurry up and wait of traditional construction projects. You can spread the work over the entire years rather than being limited by weather to the building season, which provides more stable employment with a steady paycheck and regular hours. Workers at a factory can live close to a factory whose location never changes that can be transit accessible, and workers who drive to work can use designated factory employee parker that doesn't disrupt the neighborhood where they are working. Factory workers can use real bathrooms with running water and sinks, instead of porta-potties and sometimes hand sanitizer, and can enjoy pleasant break rooms with refrigerators and microwaves and nice coffee machines and TVs, or go to familiar neighborhood restaurants to have lunch. 

In contrast, in the status quo, most construction work is seasonal, workers work unpredictable long hours when conditions are good and have unpredictable unpaid interruptions due to weather and other onsite project delays associated with sequencing tasks in the complex PERT chart that face all sorts of random interuptions, and workers have to drive to different construction sites on a daily or weekly basis all over the region where their construction firm operates. 

On site workers swamp the neighborhood's publicly available parking on and off for weeks, have to use grotty temporary toilets, often can't wash up with running water, constantly contend with dust, mud, dew, frost, wind, chills, heat, pre-existing electrical and gas lines, darkness, glare, and construction debris at sites whose configurations constantly change even during the course of a single construction project.

For example, many of my Colorado relatives on my father's side, are dry land farmers on the Eastern Plains which occupies them during planting and harvesting season, and then migrate to Front Range cities and mountain towns for construction work much of the rest of the year to make ends meet. not that I'll ever really get why they sink so much multifaceted skill and expensive land, water rights, and equipment into something so uncertain due to fires, droughts, hail, etc. and so unprofitable in all but the best of years.

When you construct a building on site, you need to negotiate new combinations of subcontractors on a project by project basis and have only limited control over how those subcontractors do their jobs, which adds a great deal of administrative and management expense, while impairing quality control, uniform safety rules, and efficiency. In a factory, in contrast, you don't have to renegotiate the organizational structure of the factory for each new project.

Since everyone in a factory is an employee you can impose stricter quality control and safety rules and use workers more efficiently. It is easier to get workers in a factory who smoke to do so in designated areas that spare fellow workers secondary smoke and prevents fire risks,  than it is to enforce that at an on site construction project.

In onsite construction, construction workers are notorious for showing up late or not at all. This isn't simply a matter of construction workers being worse people than other employees. 

An office or factory worker can follow a routine and let habits take over, and when they arrive, what they need to start working will generally naturally and almost automatically be in place be virtue of the structure of the workplace which doesn't change much. And, office and factory workers aren't exposed to the same risks of occupational injuries and illnesses (and the away from work time necessary to treat them), that on site construction workers are on a daily basis.

In contrast, construction workers have to have the bandwidth every day to keep up with a constant barrage of changing schedules at different places with unfamiliar transportation times to get there due to traffic and construction and have to keep track of all the tools, equipment, safety gear and supplies that they need for each particular job. Often, at least somebody has been hurt or get sick from events at some previous job (often different jobs for different workers). And, those construction workers aren't conditioned to the expectation that everything will be on time, because often it isn't and they don't feel the obligation to hold themselves to higher standards. The delays that foster disrespect for exact work times flow, in part, from the fact that project managers need to make sure that everything the workers need before they can do their job from permits, to prior steps in the construction process, to construction waste dumpsters, to portable toilets, to heavy equipment, to parking spaces for worker vehicles, to partial road closures is in place before those workers show up in a process that has to be repeated from scratch with every new job and has numerous potential chokepoints that can stop everything, even before considering weather conditions and supply chain issues that add additional layers of unpredictability to the process.

When you hire general contractors and subcontractors to do on site construction, the workers generally have to pay force and finance their own equipment and tools, sometimes financing it with their own subpar credit or cutting corners on what they buy because they can't afford the best equipment and tools for the job. And, the financing costs of those equipment and those tools, and a profit margin on those purchases, gets passed along to the general contractor and the owner of the land buying the building. But, in a factory, the factory owners can buy the optimal equipment and tools with a much lower financing cost, and any profit margin is collected only once at the factory level rather than at the general contractor level and at each layer of subcontractors right on down to individual employees of subcontractors who supply their own tools and equipment and safety gear.

The predictability of the in-factory part of the construction process also makes it easier to manage the cost and timing involved in procuring the necessary construction materials. Less uncertainty about when you will need construction materials, which is subject to constant rushes and delays in on site construction, means you don't need as much warehouse and construction yard space. But you also have fewer surprises about what you will need when, which allows you to shop for deals better and allows you to avoid paying premium prices when supplies are in the highest demand at particular points in the construction season that the weather allows.

Workplace injuries are an order of magnitude lower and tend to be less serious. The work environment can be better controlled, can be monitored and improved upon over time as the same space is used for one project after another. The work is done in a temperature controlled setting that is dry and has good lighting, where everything is in a familiar place that you don't have to relearn with each new project. The factory is free of the dust, mud, frost, dew, bugs, wind, excessive heat, cold, construction debris, and pre-existing natural gas and electrical lines that are ubiquitous in on site construction. Random strangers and neighbors are much less likely to wander into a factory than a construction site. Only absolutely necessary final assembly work takes place at great heights, or in windy or wet or dark or high glare conditions.

The amount of building material waste is an order of magnitude lower and you can be smarter and more efficient about what you do about the waste that you do generate. For example, it is much easier to pre-sort construction waste into five different kinds of materials each with different recycling options that don't have to be landfilled at a factory than it is to do that on site. And, the temptation to throw out, useable bits of leftover lumber or screws or paint from one job rather than trying to save it and reuse it on another project is much smaller in a factory setting. You can also power your tools and equipment with electricity from a greener, cheaper, and more efficient power grid at a factory, while you frequently have to resort to on site diesel generators in traditional on site construction projects.

The precision and quality control in the final building is greatly increased, which also makes the finished building better at withstanding storms and minor earthquakes which aggravate weaknesses caused by minor imperfections. Concrete components that can be made in the factory can be made in optimal temperature and moisture conditions that aren't dependent upon the whims of the weather which can impair their quality. The materials in the building also aren't exposed to weather that can cause them to be damaged or deteriorate for long periods of time from heat and cold cycles, warping from sun exposure, and moisture during the construction process. 

You can use heavier machinery that is better for getting certain parts of the job done efficiently and well, rather than being limited to what a construction worker can carry. You can also build with heavier building components (e.g. large cast metal or wooden single beams with no subparts that provide weak points) rather than multiple smaller components fitted together on site like smaller girders or pieces of wood that are screwed or nailed together, even if larger building components are better from an engineering and architectural perspective, but aren't used because workers at a construction site can't easily carry them to the places where they need to go (e.g., in the interior of higher stories of multistory buildings).

You don't need to tie up expensive and scarce tall building cranes at the job site for long periods of time. 

The disruption to people in the neighborhood where the building is going up is vastly less because there is so much less on site construction time. You still need to prepare the foundation and water main, sewer, and utility main hookups in advance which can't be done in just the flashy three stories a day of onsite construction of the building itself that is shown in the video. So it isn't quite as instant as it seems. But you are still talking a few weeks instead of a few months or couple of years of disruption to the neighborhood. And, when a stick built mid-rise building looks complete on the outside it is really only about 50% done, while a modular build like this is is more like a week or two away from being ready for occupants to move in since the interior finishes and electrical and mechanical work is mostly already in place.

The inspection and permitting process for the factory made components can be done on a predictable and routine basis in the factory, rather than making every inspection a scheduling chore and bottleneck in the process that has to be coordinated on a job by job basis that requires the inspector to climb all over half-finished buildings often many stories tall, on a construction site at critical points in the course of the project whose timing is hard to predict.

Some of the cost benefits just boil down to economies of scale. It is more efficient to add plumbing and electrical fixtures to a hundred bathrooms on an assembly line at a factory, to have twenty subcontractors add these fixtures to an average of five bathrooms each in two or three buildings each, in a work load often interspersed with a decent share of repair work in existing buildings. But the construction industry in most major metropolitan areas, where about 80% of the U.S. population and where an even larger share of new building construction takes place, is large enough to support building component factories large enough to benefit from these economies of scale.

Also, in the current site built construction paradigm, to get any kind of meaningful construction economies of scale at all, you have to build a lot of nearly identical buildings next to each other in Levittown style residential subdivisions or giant multi-building apartment complexes, or office parks, or industrial parks. But, in a factory build module system, most of the economies of scale happen at the factory, so you can get most the same construction efficiencies of scale by building thirty similar office buildings that are spread out over infill sites spread all over a metropolitan area, as you can from building all thirty office buildings right next to each other in a massive, single use office park. As it happens, that isn't how it is actually done in China, which builds massive apartment complex and office parks and rapidly builds whole new towns and cities from scratch on green fields several times a year. But it could be done that way in the U.S. where the pace of development, even in the fastest growing metropolitan areas, isn't nearly as frenetic, because the U.S. economy is more mature and has already done a lot of the economic development that it needs to do over many decades. The U.S. economy hasn't had the pace of rising demand for new construction that China is experience since the 1950s and 1960s.

The construction industry has been stubbornly unable to materially improve its productivity, cost structure, and quality for decades. It has one of the highest rates of workplace injury and death in the entire economy (neck and neck with farming, fishing, and mining). And construction defeats in the site built construction paradigm are routine, can be expensive to fix, and can lead to long, complicated, and expensive construction defeat litigation.

Greatly increasing the share of construction work that is done in factories could revolutionize the industry in a way that is cheaper, faster, safer, and far less prone to construction defects and the litigation and insurance costs that go with it. It would create a better situation for construction workers, would be more environmentally sound, and would dramatically reduce the impact that construction projects have on the neighborhoods where they a located.

Doing more construction work in factories wouldn't solve the affordable housing problem by itself. In places with soaring housing costs, rising land values are more of a problem than construction costs which are often only a minority of the total cost of housing and have been quite stable over time and between markets compared to land values. But, even if the construction module factories had a higher profit margin, they would still materially reduce the cost of building new housing which would help address the affordable housing problem.

How Will The Future Look And Feel Different?

This trend will be one of the biggest visual differences between life in the late 2020s and 2030s and the period from about 1980 to the twenty-teens – in addition to the shift to now ubiquitous cell phone presence, the relative absence of roaming tweens and early teens roaming the streets when school isn't in session, fewer people carrying disposable coffee cups, and more men with beards, that have already happened.

Other pervasive change in how life feels in the late 2020s and 2030s will be a great increase in the number of people living in central cities relative to office space, more protected bike lines in cities, and the rise of recycling and compost bins. 

Fashion

Ever fewer men wearing neckties and business suits. More men and more women are wearing short sleeves in the workplace as air conditions are set to less chilly temperatures during hotter summers. Watches are returning, but are smarter now, monitoring your health and sleep.

Younger adult women are much less frequently wearing bras, other than sports bras while exercising, especially in casual settings, and have been doing that for a while. Women and girls who would have worn one piece bathing suits in the 1980s often wear two piece bathing suits that providing varying degrees of coverage now. Adult women's panties have also been trending towards being more skimpy. Yoga pants and tights for women increasingly substitute for jeans, slacks, shorts, or a skirt, without anything over them. 

Contrary to many people's conventional wisdom, however, more affluent countries and communities tend to become more gendered in dress and education and professional roles as people feel more free to put self-expression over economic priorities, not more androgynous.

Food

Diners and diner-like restaurant chains like Perkins and Village Inn are fading away. Fast casual restaurants like Chipotle have become common place. Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and vegan food has entered the urban American palette, as Mexican and Chinese food did before it.

The remaking of a shared, cosmopolitan American establishment culture diet is has been ongoing for some time now and continues. This is a question of multicultural integration, of changing lifestyles, of food economics, and of health. 

We know we have an obesity problem, and we seem to be homing in on an overemphasis on simple carbohydrates, too many "ultra-processed" foods, and a more sedentary lifestyle as some of the main culprits behind this, although it is still somewhat puzzling and intractable trend that we don't really understand well. Old conventional wisdom, like the importance of a low fat diet, hasn't stood the test of time.

Drugs

Marijuana dispensaries are now pervasive and common place and are on the brink of becoming much more mainstream since the federal government is likely to reclassify it from a Schedule I Controlled Substance under federal law to a lower schedule which will end the punitive taxes of Internal Revenue Code § 280E on dispensaries and will allow marijuana firms to use banks, declare bankruptcy, apply for federal patents and trademarks, and avail themselves of the federal courts. About half of the states have legalized THC at the state level, almost all of them have legalized CBD at the state leve, and the rest will probably follow suit quickly when marijuana is rescheduled at the federal level.

Other formerly illicit drugs are also gaining respectability in medical niches that will become a part of people's daily realities. Ketamine is now available as a fast acting, short term antidepressant and is also being widely used as an anesthetic used by first responders in trauma cases. LSD and peyote are being explored as PTSD treatments. A significant small percentage of older children, adolescents, and adults routinely take amphetamines for ADHD.

Semaglutide drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic are proving to be wonder drugs for Type II diabetes, obesity, addiction problems, cardiovascular diseases, and even enhancing executive function in people with ADHD that have surged to widespread use very rapidly despite their very high sticker price.

Surprisingly, the religious moral crusade against drugs, like the anti-gay efforts of religious conservatives (as distinct from anti-transgender efforts), seems to be a war that religious conservatives have largely conceded, at least on the political front. 

Six months away from the 2024 election, no prominent Republican politician has made the war on drugs an important part of their campaign, and this is not a drum beat which conservative media outlets are pounding any longer. There has been sharp rhetoric aimed at Latin American drug cartels with a strong xenophobic bent, an instinctual desire to crack down on the fentanyl trafficking that is behind so many drug overdose deaths, although this has finally plateaued. But few political arrows have been aimed at U.S. drug users, or harm other than opioid addition by mostly white and often working class Americans, that drugs themselves, as opposed to foreign drug cartels as sources of organized crime, have caused to the United States.

Moral resistance to marijuana legalization has been undermined by the legalization of marijuana in about half the U.S. states without any clear and shocking ill effects. Indeed, marijuana legalization has coincided with a dramatic decline in illegal opioid use by minors despite a relentless surge in adult opioid overdose deaths fueled mostly in recent years by growing illegal distribution of fentanyl, often by dealers who don't disclose that fentanyl has been cut with other drugs from heroin to meth, in non-laboratory conditions.

Red states have softened overly punitive incarceration sentencing for drug offenses as much or more than blue states have, despite their strongly conservative politics, in part, to save on the staggering costs of having the world's highest incarceration rates that has been mostly financed with state tax revenues. Red states have lagged in legalizing marijuana, but his seems unlikely to persist and all or almost all of them have already legalized  CBD cannabis products, which are more medicinal than psychoactive. Bipartisan federal legislation has mildly relaxed sentencing for drug offenses.

Demographic Trends

This said, however, the global demographic transition that has emerged hand in hand with economic development all over the world in every religion and culture that has experienced economic development shows no signs of abating. 

The average age of marriage has risen a lot hand in hand with a larger share of women attending college and weaker economic prospects for couples who don't have college degrees. The percentage of men and women who never marry has surged, as women choose not to and men can't find partners to marry as a result (and as more men who don't have college degrees can't fulfill a role as a primary economic provider for their families). Couples who do marry are increasingly close in age. Men and women are having children later in life. A large share of children in the U.S. are born to unmarried mothers, although many of those mothers are cohabiting with the fathers of their most recent child at the time. 

While divorce rates for college educated couples have plunged to levels not seen since the 1960s, divorce rates for couples without college degrees have reached unprecedented levels despite falling marriage rates (with a majority of these couples having a first child before rather than after getting married). This is driven mostly by the economic stagnation experienced by men without college degrees as the economy has developed greater intellectual requirements in a modern, automated and computerized work environment in a sophisticated complex bureaucratic society. Black families started experiencing these trends in the 1960s and have reached the most extreme realization of them, with children raised by unmarried mothers becoming the norm. But working class white families and Hispanic families are following suit thirty and forty years later. Strong social welfare systems have also made this pattern viable and the norm for lots of middle class Northern Europeans. 

These factors combined have led to a marked drop in the total fertility rate (roughly speaking the number of children per lifetime per woman) almost everywhere worldwide outside of non-elite families in sub-Saharan Africa, and outside of Gaza and Afghanistan. The decline has been seen in the Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, in East Asia, in Europe, in Latin America, among Protestants and Catholic alike.

There have been subcultures, especially among religious conservatives, pushing "tradwife" traditional housewife roles and pro-natalist agendas. But the Mormons are real the only organized movement that has had any success in implementing this agenda. And, they have seen their share of Americans decline by a third over the last fifteen years to a mere 1.2% of religious adherents in the United States. 

It is unclear if the Dobbs decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that ended the constitutional right to an abortion, and other ruling of an ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court will turn the tide. Courts and voter initiatives in several Red States, and a handful of dissenting GOP legislators in Arizona, have restored some or all of the abortion rights that Dobbs took away. Abortion drugs for some early term pregnancies, and interstate travel from states where abortion is banned to those where it is legal have caused the number of abortions carried out to decline far less than was anticipated in the wake of Dobbs. Even Donald Trump has bucked the Republican grass roots by taking the position that abortion laws should be decided on a state by state basis and not strongly advocating an anti-choice position. All of this suggests that Republican efforts to roll back the clock of reproductive rights and women's rights may not be the major step backward turning point that it seems once the dust settles over the next few years, regardless of who wins the Presidential election.

East Asian total fertility rates have fallen to the lowest levels because all worldwide, because the factors delaying marriage and child birth are present there in spades, but out of wedlock births remain extremely rare there. Out of wedlock births are rare there, in part, because neither the social safety net nor family law rules provide nearly as much support and protection to single mothers there, and because abortion is less taboo there.

For example, in Japan, much of the social safety net provided by government in Western Europe is provided by large corporate employers, to whom single parents have no access, there.

Concretely, in people's daily lives, this means smaller families, more only children, fewer siblings, far fewer families with three or four or five or more kids (especially, in couples that have not recently immigrated from countries where larger families are common) and far fewer cousins, aunts, and uncles, although longer life spans mean that more children know not just their grandparents but their great-grandparents well. In working class America, it means that lots of kids are raised by single mothers with little contact with with their fathers or father's side of the family during their childhoods. Part of the reason that housing supplies are tight in many areas is that smaller households required more distinct housing units to house the same number of people, as typical family households now have three or four, instead of four to six family members. This trend toward smaller families muddled somewhat by complex blended families resulting from fragile marriages and even more fragile cohabitations that produce children.

It will be interesting to see if polygamy laws change anywhere in the U.S. as this becomes an issue of Muslim immigrants and leftist polyamory advocates, and not just vanishingly few Mormon fundamentalists in a handful of distinct geographic places.

Shrinking families make community and government safety nets and support more important, and reduce the relevance of nepotism and clannishness in American life. This is also impacted by the fact that Americans are among the most mobile people geographically in the world. Less than 59% of Americans age 25 or older live in the state where they were born, far less comparable mobility levels in any country in Europe, and especially in Western states there is even more mobility. Less than 20% of people aged 25 or older in Nevada were born there and more of these adults in Nevada were born outside the United States than were born in Nevada.

Race

Interracial couples, married and dating alike, are no longer as striking, and mixed race children are much more common. Interracial marriage rates of native born Hispanics, Asian-Americans (including East Asians, Southeast Asians, and East Asians), Native Hawaiians, and Native Americans are all very high, and interracial marriage rates for whites (who have few non-white prospective marriage partners in some parts of the U.S.) and blacks, while lower, are at record highs. Jewish outmarriage rates to non-Jews are also very high.

The U.S. is basically seeing shrinking proportions of purely white European stable proportions of black Americans, and a rapidly growing share of mixed race, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Native American, and Asian Americans, as well as African immigrants, who are starting to blend into a "brown" plurality that is not starkly internally divided by race or deeply separated from or antagonistic to white Americans, in a manner similar to how Catholic immigrants, especially from Ireland, Italy, and Spain were assimilated into a pan-ethic white American identity. 

The cultural divide in the U.S. between native born black Americans and those of other races is higher, but not as high as it has been for most of American history since the abolition of slavery in 1865 that was replaced by de jure and de facto segregation until long after the victories of the Civil Rights movement a century later. The emergence of significant ethnic populations that are neither black nor white has helped bridge the cultural racial gaps between blacks and whites in the United States.

Homosexuality And Transgender Realities

Homosexuality and same sex couples are unremarkable, and not that controversial. A conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court established a right to same sex marriage, and there are a number of high profile politicians and celebrities who are gay or lesbian. They haven't abandoned this fight entirely, but they have deemphasized it.

The Christian conservative right has diverted its current efforts to scapegoating transgender people instead focusing on homosexuality, which is more common, more mainstream, and easier to understand.

It isn't clear how successful and sustained the religious conservative scapegoating of transgender people will persist. Those targeted don't have much of an ability to fight back on their own, and have broad but not very intense support from much of the rest of the political left, which is impotent at the state level in many Red States.

Housing, Land Use, and Remote Work

 

Land use regulation reform and New Urbanism seems to be finally hitting their stride in response to an affordable housing crisis, with state laws forcing major liberalizations of zoning regulation of residential development density in states including California and Colorado, and local municipal reforms in cities like New York. We're seeing more townhouses, more midsized apartment buildings, more conversions of office buildings to residential use, and more apartment buildings with first floor retail. 

Accessory dwelling units (i.e. "granny flats" and "tiny homes" on existing single family home lots) that are built as extended family housing or rental units are being legalized in more places and need just a little nudge to take off exponentially. Parking requirements are being dispensed with, especially near major transit lines and in walkable developments. 

There hasn't yet been much restoration of pre-zoning law land use patterns like single occupancy hotels and boarding houses, but the legal authority to do that kind of development is quietly being put into place. The same legal developments are also laying the groundwork for another round of cooperative housing with shared kitchens and common areas in basically an owned boarding house arrangement that flourished briefly in the late 1960s and 1970s before the governance and social interaction issues associated with them took the shine off of them. But the less ambitious project of having single family homes with multiple unrelated households in them, either by subdividing them physically or just having the room tenants share a house like college students is also supported by these land use reforms and is already quietly becoming more common.

We are still working out the remote work issue. But the pandemic gave videoconferencing the boost it needed to become a part of every day work life and extended family interactions. The percentage of office workers who work remotely at least part of the time has surged, although probably less than half of them are fully remote workers. A pandemic generation that attended school remotely makes this way of working a lot more familiar.

Religion

Plenty of people still attend church with some regularity, but it is no longer socially assumed that everyone does, even in the South and rural America. It is also increasingly no longer assumed that everyone is Christian. 

"Nones" and Muslims make up a growing share of Americans, while almost all forms of Christianity have a decreasing percentage of Americans who adhere to it (apart from some definitional arbitrate as Evangelical Protestant denomination adherents rebrand themselves as non-denominational Christians).

About 30% of adults view themselves as "not religious" and almost half of young adults identify that way, in a dramatic growth over the last half century.

Muslims have become much more common due to immigration and to a lesser extent due to native born African-American converts, and are increasingly a visible presence in daily life. Halal food offerings are now almost as common as Kosher ones, and institutions like schools now have to be conscious of Muslim holidays and holy days (although public calls to prayer five times a day, which are pervasive in Muslim majority countries, are absent).

Mormons have resisted the trends of late marriage, fewer marriages, less stable marriages, and fewer children, more than any other faith in the U.S. But while natural growth from these natalist attitudes has helped to keep the number of Mormons declining as much as mainline Christians, white Catholics, and white Protestants, neither natural growth nor a massive missionary effort deeply ingrained in this faith, have been enough for them to increase the share of Mormon adherents in the overall population much. For example:

Between 2007 and 2022, the percentage of Americans who self-identify as Mormon has dropped from 1.8 percent to 1.2 percent (according to an independent tabulation of election survey data) - a percentage decrease of one-third over 15 years.

Via Wikipedia.

Communication, Transportation and Energy

Other look and feel changes in daily life already happened a while ago. 

Landline phones are almost gone. Fewer and fewer people read dead tree newspapers. Broadcast and cable TV have already been replaced by streaming to a great extent. Satellite radio and apps like Spotify have gradually undermined major radio stations that used to be a pervasive sound track to almost everyone's life.

Paper checks and postal money orders sent in the mail are becoming a thing of the past, while cash apps have started to become mainstream even though they are somewhat uncommon. Invoices and appointment reminders now come via email and text rather than snail mail. Email and texts have also increasingly replaced letters. Court documents are now usually e-filed and the service has been made available to non-lawyer litigants in many cases. Tax forms are usually e-filed too, and sooner or later, the IRS will cast aside the fax machine - a technology that is increasingly used by no one else - in favor of secure online portals. 

Parcel post from the postal service has increasingly lost market share to private delivery services as online shopping has led to a resurgence in package deliveries. Homes increasingly have front porch video streaming, in part, to deter porch pirates who steal those parcels. Quality photography and videography from cell phones, pervasive security and laptop cameras, dash cams, and body cameras, cheap and small tracking devices, cell phone GPS and Wi-Fi locator technology, and digital payment systems have made a well documented surveillance society an every day reality.

As typing has replaced dead tree writing, cursive writing has waned as well and will soon go the way of the slide rule. Voice operated computer system are already common in big business phone systems, where they compete with international call centers in India and the Philippines. Dictation, now done by computers instead of secretaries, is making a gradual return. And, real time voice to voice language translation is on the brink of becoming commonplace - it is already widespread as a cheap and fast way of doing text to text language translation.

Most cars are now keyless and manual transmission has virtually vanished from the United States. A modest but growing share of vehicles are plug in electric. We are on the brink of widespread use of self-driving vehicles, although we aren't quite there yet. When the do arrive, this will have a profound effect on the long haul trucking industry, as robots replace humans on our interstate highways (probably with greater safety).

Smart phones, GPS, and computer networks with AI features, have already enabled ride sharing that has effectively restored decentralized, thinly regulated taxi service to much of the U.S., and has facilitated easy scooter and bicycle and e-bike rentals. Online real estate sharing services like Airbnb have vastly increased the supply of hotel and bed and breakfast type services on a decentralized basis, with vacationers now as likely to stay in an online brokered short term rental of a private home as they are to stay in a hotel.

Life in 2024 is full of battery charging. Laptops, smart phones, smart watches, headphones, toothbrushes, shavers, cars, and even device and home backup power systems, all have batteries that must be regularly recharged with customized power charges, and can even pose fire hazards on commercial airline flights. But this part of daily life will soon make some subtle but noticeable changes. Spurred by the demand for better electric car batteries, several new game changing battery technologies for electric cars, like solid state batteries with different raw materials will enter the marketplace in the mid- to late-2020s. The new batteries will store several times more energy than existing electric vehicle batteries, will have longer lives with less depletion in capacity as they are recharged repeatedly, will recharge more quickly, will cost less, will have less of an environmental impact, and will be safer. This will make electric vehicles in every context where internal combustion engines (ICEs) running on gasoline or diesel fuel more competitive vis-a-vis ICE vehicles - cars, trucks, buses, delivery vehicles, construction equipment, farm equipment, military vehicles, boats, and even propeller driven short haul aircraft and drones. It will make electric lawn mowers and leaf blowers and snow blowers more attractive via existing two stroke engine models. It will mean that laptops and cell phones and smart watches and headphones and toothbrushes and shavers that used to have to be charged daily will be able to manage with a couple of rounds of charging a week.

Supersonic commercial airline flights across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are on the brink of returning after the supersonic transatlantic Concorde flights from New York City to Paris and London were discontinued after a couple of decades of limited and unprofitable service.

Intracity passenger rail has experienced a minor resurgence over the past few decades although this trend may have neared its peak for a while. There are a handful of intercity high speed passenger rail corridors in the U.S. which are built or in progress, although few meet the standards of Western Europe, Japan, and China, and it will still be many decades before this really becomes an feature of American life for most people.

Modern heat pumps are replacing air conditioning and gas forced air HVAC systems in homes. Home and business solar panels are now common and meet a decent share of household electricity demand, sometimes feeding energy back into the grid. Trains full of coal to deliver to utility power plants are a lot less common, while large utility company wind mills to generate electricity are common worldwide.

Big, Low Profile Issues

Today, some big, lurking low profile issues that deserve more attention:

* The public school system does a poor job of serving those who are not in the top quarter or so academically. Far too many students have a curriculum oriented towards preparing them for four years of a selective liberal arts college education that they will not pursue, which will not benefit them, and in which the routinely fail and struggle. Too many students are pushed into enrolling in AP classes which they aren't ready for and perform poorly in. Too many students are pushed into enrolling in college programs for which they are inadequately prepared and fail in at high rates. Regional vocational schools and good community college programs are among the most important exceptions to that rule but are under-enrolled.

* We have far too many people, especially men, without college educations who have skills and work habits that would have been valuable in the 1950s and 1960s, but are no longer needed in the quantities that are present in the work force. Our entrepreneurs have failed to find worthwhile ways to utilize what they have to offer. Public policy history is also filled with dozens of case studies of job training programs designed to address this problem that have failed. Our society needs a vision of a workable decent American dream for them, for people with minor criminal records, for people who had children at the wrong time, and so on.

* Our court system does a poor job handling medium sized civil lawsuits, those larger than small claims and small collection and residential eviction cases, but less than say, $100,000 in controversy. We need a better system for mid-sized litigation. There have been efforts to do this, but Colorado's simplified civil litigation rules under Colorado Rule of Civil Procedure 16.1 does a poor job of it.  It also needs to be a system that people without legal training and with poor bureaucracy navigating and writing and research skills can navigate without catastrophic results.

* We also need more affordable legal professionals to provide affordable representation in litigation where there isn't an ability to pay a lot, which a system that requires seven years of education plus a bar exam and some on the job training to be competent in doesn't provide. Specialist, independent licensed legal professionals in practice areas including child custody and child support, immigration law, criminal defense, consumer bankruptcy, and landlord-tenant law could fill this gap with mid-skill professionals.  These licensed legal professionals would have training levels similar to tax preparers, bookkeepers, police officers, real estate agents, customer service desk workers, title company closing officers, consumer loan bank officers, mortgage underwriters, and insurance adjusters.

* We need an eviction process that is connected to a homelessness mitigation response, because that is how a lot of homelessness starts, and an eviction process that does not result in undue collateral harm to the possessions of people who are evicted.

* We need to support foster children well after they turn age eighteen, until they can reach stable self-sufficiency, and need to improve the quality of life for them in the foster care system.

* Vast numbers of homeowners live in homes in that are in dysfunctional homeowner's associations. The way the needs that these HOAs serve are met must be reformed, because volunteer elected officers of small HOAs aren't competent to run them and democratic self-governance is not an ideal model for meeting most of these needs.

* We need our public systems for taxes, for welfare benefits, for health care, for routinely consumer legal problems, for business and labor regulation, for home ownership, and so on, to be less complex so that academically average and below average people can navigate them.

* We have a large unmet need for inpatient mental health and substance abuse care. The deinstitutionalization movement made some good points, but went too far and still hasn't recovered.

* There is not enough medical education capacity. We could be training twice as many doctors each year and still have extremely well qualified graduates.

* We need better models for how to handle the inevitable decline in population and tax bases of cities and towns in the Rust Belt and in rural America.

* Every place in American should have clean running water and functional sewage systems.

* Our jails and prisons are dangerous, do almost nothing to reform inmates in most cases, and are a major factor in the formation and strengthening of criminal gangs. They need to be run much differently.

Improving Government

Government has a mix of problems. Sometimes it regulates too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it owns too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it is just operated in the wrong way. This post is a grab bag of ideas about improving it.

* Sidewalks should be publicly owned and maintained. Individual responsibility of property owners for this doesn't work because low rates of non-maintenance (including lack of prompt snow removal) makes the network of sidewalks much less valuable.

* Bicycles should usually not share roads with cars and trucks. They should use sidewalks or dedicated, protected bike paths and lanes.

* Amtrak has failed and should be shut down outside the Northeast Corridor.

* The U.S. Postal System worked well for a long time, but in the era of widespread parcel delivery services and e-mails and texts, it no longer does. Strong Veteran's preferences and higher pay than private sector equivalents don't justify it. Free mail for incumbents in Congress don't justify it. Delivering junk mail is not a good enough reason for a massive public enterprise. Fewer and fewer letters of significance are delivered that way. Money orders are no longer economically important and can be provided by private commercial banks and money services. Subsidizing rural living isn't a good reason for it.

* Occupational licensing is required when it shouldn't be. When it is required, requirements like a lack of a criminal record are often inappropriate for people who have been non-recidivist for a long enough time (about five to seven years) when the risk of future crime fades to the background level. Worse yet is construction trade licensing at the local level when it should be at the state level, fostering a high level of non-compliance. Independent legal para-professions should be allowed much more liberally, although licensing that might be appropriate. There should be a common database of licensing discipline since many disqualifying acts for one profession should also apply to others.

* Zoning and land use regulation should be dramatically paired back and places like Colorado finally realize that this is true and driving high housing prices. Deregulating is better than mandating affordable housing or rent control. Development fees to mitigate externalities of government costs caused by development, however, make sense. 

* Involuntary landmark designation is almost always a bad idea and an unfunded mandate. If it is important enough historically to preserve the government should buy it and rent it.

* Building codes are critical and non-compliance with permit requirements is far too high. But building codes are also too restrictive and the processing of building permits is much too slow. A system of private building code compliance auditors similar to the CPA system might be better.

* We should do a better job of discouraging people from building disaster prone housing in flood zones, fire zones and other "stupid zones".

* We should do a better job of encouraging off site manufacturing of buildings and large building modules.

* Property taxes are a decent way to finance local government (and shouldn't exempt non-profits and governments other than the one imposing them) but are a bad way to finance public K-12 education which is the main way that they are used now.

* Electing coroners, treasurers, clerks, surveyors, secretaries of state, engineers, and judges (even in routine judicial retention elections) is a horrible idea.

* Electing sheriffs and district attorneys and attorneys-general isn't as horrible an idea, but is still a worse idea than having elected officials appoint them, directly or indirectly.

* State and local school and college boards would be better not elected by the general public. Local school boards should be elected by student's parents. College boards could be elected by alumni or appointed by the elected official who make their funding decisions. State school boards should be appointed by the state officials who fund state K-12 education.

* Shorter ballots are better. In the England, there is one nation election in which you vote for a single legislator on a partisan ballot in a single district, irregularly, but not less than every five years absent a world war, for a government that does everything that the state and federal governments do in the U.S., with no primary elections since parties nominate their own candidates internally, and there is one set of partisan local council elections for one or two posts, and there are few referenda a lifetime, and they are democratic enough, despite having a monarchy and a house of lords. Very modest public electoral input is enough.

* I don't favor a system quite as simple as England's. But we should still have much shorter ballots.

* Rare recall elections make sense for officials who serve longer terms and perhaps for judges and other public officials who are now elected but shouldn't be.

* State constitutions and local charters should have less detail and so that changes to them should be things that require voter approval and not housekeeping measures.

* Some referenda on tax and debt issues is appropriate, but Colorado, with TABOR overdoes it. New taxes, and not new revenues from existing taxes, should get public votes. Maybe bond issues that commit a government to substantial tax obligations from general revenues but not renewals of them.

* Citizen initiatives have their place in overcoming systemic flaws in the legislative system and making elections interesting to voters. But it should be a bit harder and more structured and generally should avoid spending and taxing decisions that need to be made globally.

* Colorado mostly does the probate process right, although probate procedure could use more structure. Most states make the process too intrusive.

* When there is a single post in a candidate election, dispensing with primaries, having a majority to win requirement, and having runoff elections would be preferable to first past the post elections and to instant runoff elections.

* There would be merit to electing state legislatures and state congressional delegations by proportional representation.

* There would be merit to making state legislatures unicameral.

* The electoral college should be abolished in favor of a direct popular vote.

* The franchise should be expanded. The voting age should be reduced to sixteen. Non-citizens should be allowed to vote. Felons, even felons in prison, should be allowed to vote (in their pre-incarceration place of incarceration).

* HOAs are horrible but sometimes necessary institutions. They should be abolished or replaced where possible, and be restructured with fewer powers and less discretion where not possible. HOA covenants are routinely unreasonably restrictive.

* Municipal ordinances related to zoning and land use should have fines or other civil penalties, not criminal penalties.

* Arbitration on the U.S. model is usually a bad idea and should be banned in many circumstances.

* We should have a more pro-active way of intervening in cases where people are mentally ill or cognitively impaired, and the system for adjudicating these cases is too cumbersome.

* Single judges should not handle parenting time and parental responsibilities cases, and the best interests of the child standard should have more detailed substances to guide it. Alimony should also be less discretionary.

* There should be a right to counsel in all cases involving "persons" such as child custody cases, protective proceedings, and immigration cases.

* Forum shopping in the federal courts needs to be better restrained, and allowing a single forum shopped judge to issue national injunctions is problematic.

* After some rocky starts, regulation and technical private management of junk faxes, junk telephone calls, and even junk email has made some real progress. Social media junk is less well regulated.

* Privacy regulation often does more harm than good. Juvenile justice privacy does more harm than good in most cases, educational privacy goes too far, and Europe's GDPR goes too far. Secrecy around ownership of closely held companies is too great and the exception under the Corporate Transparency Act is far too complicated. There are places for privacy regulation but it needs to be cut way back. Secrets are often harmful in hard to quantify ways.

* Cryptocurrency serves few, if any, legitimate purposes, is an environmental disaster, and should be discouraged.

* Programs to help the poor need to have much less paperwork and red tape; means testing is rarely a good choice unless it is integrated into the tax system.

* Some tax credits for poor and middle income people, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Obamacare insurance premium subsidies, are far too complicated.

* State and local government funded free wi-fi for all would make lots of sense.

* There is a logic to allowing vouchers for religious private K-12 schools, but on balance it does too much to support religious institutions at public expense. Charter schools, i.e. public schools with autonomy from school boards, are a better approach. School choice of some kind does make sense among public ordinary and charter schools, ideally, statewide, rather than only within a school district.

* Boarding schools attached to high schools in more urban areas would be a better alternative to highly subsidized tiny rural high schools.

* We do a horrible job of managing the business of health care. The requirement that doctors be the sole owners of medical practices also forces them into being small business owners when they are ill suited to that part of their jobs and leads to bad systems and poor health care administration and bad financing arrangements. Almost every other country, in many varied models, does a better job. The current system results in overpaid health care providers (doctors, nurses, drug companies, medical equipment companies, private hospital system owners, etc.), for inferior results. Our drug prices and medical equipment prices and ambulance prices and ER prices are all vastly higher than in other countries and this isn't mostly driven by private pay medical education or medical malpractice lawsuits.

* We need to create more medical school slots. We have too few doctors and are compensating for that with too many senior paraprofessionals like nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, and midwives. We should also allow more non-M.D.'s to provide the care that psychiatrists do since the knowledge base for psychiatrists doesn't overlap heavily with that of M.D.'s and where it does overlap can be taught separately.

* The substance of pass-through taxation in taxing closely held business income once at roughly individual tax rates while allowing limited liability, is good, but the actual pass-through tax mechanism is not. Subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code is not a good approach for taxing closely held limited liability entities, it complexity, it phantom income, and more don't work well. A double taxation reducing or limiting variation on the C-corporation model would be much better.

* We do a poor job of taxing hot assets in international taxation.

* We lack adequate guidance for remote worker labor and tax regulation, and haven't updated our laws adequately to reflect the era of independent contractors.

* We over regulate many prescription drugs and under regulate supplements and herbal remedies and the like. Homeopathic remedies and other supplements need to be regulated more like drugs. Prescription drug approval when approved elsewhere should be easier. Prescription approval for experimental drugs for the terminally ill, or in a pandemic, should be easier. More non-abuse prone prescription drugs should be available over the counter or with pharmacist approval.

* Prostitution should be decriminalized or legalized to a greater extent.

* We vastly under-regulate firearms and explosives and military equipment.

* We do a poor job of commercial air travel security, imposing too much of a burden and delay for too little benefit in a security theater way, at an excessive cost and a greatly excessive externality cost. We also do a crap job of managing luggage charges and checked luggage, and we are more inefficient than we need to be in how quickly commercial aircraft are loaded and unloaded.

* Uber, etc. revealed that we over-regulate taxis, but that we do need some regulation to assure riders are safe from dangerous or dangerous to them drivers.

* Buses and intracity rail won't thrive until we make them feel safer and comfortable.

* Public energy utilities do mostly a good job, except in Texas which opted out of the national energy grid.

* Clean water and good sewage treatment should be expanded urgently to places like Indian Reservations and Flint, Michigan.

* To better disentangle church and state, the charitable income tax deduction (but not the gift and estate tax deduction) for contributions to religious organizations (but not the tax exemption for churches) should end, the parsonage exemption should end, the property tax and sale tax exemptions for churches should end, the investment income of churches should be taxed as a corporation, and the ban on politics by churches should end.

* There should be more power to compel road maintenance below some standard.

* There should be a power to compel HOAs to do their jobs for all members, similar to landlord-tenant maintenance claims.