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Wave a Magic Wand
On the latest Ricochet podcast with Rob Long, Peter Robinson, and James Lileks, they ask the following: If they could wave a magic wand, what one wish would they grant to change our country? I’ve thought about that a lot myself.
I would wish for a one-term limit on all offices. It would include lengthening that term for the President and the House of Representative to six years, just like the Senate. I see the possibility of so many benefits: less time and money spent running for office, fewer entrenched office holders seeking their own welfare instead of the welfare of their constituents, less money flowing to corrupt politicians, fewer politicians whose only experience in life is a series of political offices, more candidates that seek to make a positive contribution instead of seeking for contributions.
That would be my one wish. What would your wish be?
Published in General
I’m not sure what I’m more in favor of , no voting rights for drains on society or term limits. Can we have both wishes.
Even with term limits, the drains on society would vote in new candidates who give them the same goodies. Go with the disenfranchisement.
Everyone gets their own wish. Of course, some might be in conflict so we should establish a wish council that reviews them.
They asked a Miss America question?
If one of you people answers “world peace” I’ll cancel the podcast.
I would wish to execute all the stupid people. And be able to decide who they are. (Oops, that’s two wishes.)
I would stop the slaughter of the unborn. Call me old fashioned, but I think bringing infanticide to a screeching halt should be top priority when it comes to restoring our nation.
Tom Paine, probably the most radical of the founders. advocated that no one that received a benefit from the public purse should be allowed to vote. I’ve always thought that was a good policy. It used to be the customary practice in the US military officer’s corps to not register to vote and thereby be untainted by partisan affiliations, Eisenhower observed this custom, for example.
I think term limits would [and have on the state level] just motivated more jockeying for a lucrative post elective office gig by the term-limited pols. I would advocate something like Glenn Reynolds’ revolving door tax on pols and bureaucrats that cash in on their public service.
If I could pass one law it would be to abolish tax withholding by employers. If everyone had to sit down and physically write a check every month or quarter to the IRS for our government services I think it would change people’s perceptions a lot. Milton Friedman, even in his 90’s, said his biggest regret was that he participated in starting the withholding program during WWII.
My wish would be to return to the original four cabinet-level departments/positions: State, Treasury, War/Defense, and Justice.
The rest should be summarily disbanded and the responsibilities devolved to states, localities, or to the private sector.
Size and scope of government is everything.
As long as the bureaucracy associated with the abolished cabinet positions go too.
Re #9, DocJay
“I would publicly execute every politician involved in criminal activity similar to what China does.”
This comment reminded me of when I worked and lived in Guangzhou China from 1983-1986. From time to time, groups of us gweilos would be rounded up to go view a public execution, lest we forget where we were and who was in charge. It got your attention.
Oh yes indeed. That’s the whole point. :-)
Totally agree! The money and corruption in our politics is because influence peddling is worthwhile. I would do whatever I could to dramatically weaken the federal government.
I would also make unconstitutional the redistribution of tax dollars by the federal government, which this limitation to the four essentials would do. States could do whatever they want, meaning California could keep its generous welfare state, thereby attracting ever more people with a dependency mentality. The market will will take care of welfare dependency in short order.
If I had two wishes, I’d like something to make “public service” truly service to the people, and not a way to accumulate power and wealth. Start by moving the capitol to the geographic center of the contiguous US (somewhere in Kansas just south of the Nebraska border) where Congress would be housed in un-air-conditioned barracks for three months in the summer, after which members would recess and return to their “normal” lives for the school year. The president’s family could have nicer quarters for hosting visitors — including air-conditioning. I’ll take suggestions for what to do with SCOTUS.
Wish 1: End administrative law. Require that all regulations be written directly into Congressional legislation and voted on by Congress. This will reduce the number of regulations by orders of magnitude, and return accountability to our elected representatives.
Wish 2: Eliminate collective bargaining rights of all government employees at all levels, and make all government offices Right to Work workplaces. This will starve the Nomenklatura of the money they need to bribe elected officials through campaign contributions.
I would prohibit the government from doing anything regarding personal identity; race, sex ethnicity. No collecting statistics, no affirmative action, no outreach programs. Every citizen would be truly equal in the eyes of the law.
An excellent idea for state and local governments. The federal government is generally a Right to Work workplace (or open shop) already. That is, while federal employees have some limited collective bargaining rights, they cannot be forced to join or pay dues to the union that bargains for or otherwise represents them.
I could live with everything else if we had honest media. True watchdogs that we could trust.
Someone has probably said it already, but my wish would be for one 20-year term for Supreme Court Justices. No more appointing a guy because he is young enough to hang on for 50 years. No more senile Justices, holding onto their seats long after they can understand the issues before them.
For elected offices, though, term limits tend to have awful consequences. First, they don’t prevent career politicians. Politicos just move from office to office. Second, at least in legislative bodies, they result in bodies that have no idea what they are doing. No institutional memory. No long-term planning.
In California, term limits appear to have been a total catastrophe. I say “appear,” because the idiots who get elected in California probably would have been a catastrophe anyway. But it should not surprise any conservative that tinkering with the mechanics of government mostly results in terrible unintended consequences, and fails to solve the problem it was meant to solve.
My wish:
In Berkeley, 1964, UC President Clark Kerr leads a cohort of university police consisting of WW II and Korean War veterans to a protest rally that is being addressed by Mario Savio. Kerr confronts Savio and slaps his face, knocking him to the ground. “You are expelled!” Kerr announces. As Savio is hustled away Kerr tells the crowd that the rally is over and that those who linger will be subject to academic discipline. The university police begin taking names.
Two days later Savio, having been re-classified 1A for the draft, gets off a bus to begin basic training.
Take your amendments, term limits and bureaucratic reforms, fold them five ways and stick them where the sun don’t shine.
Give me men who act.
I second the wish. Roe v. Wade is the Dred Scott decision of 20th century. It should be a source of national shame. That it isn’t says much about the state of our culture.
Fifty-five million defenseless American lives snuffed out, and counting.
Me too! His name can be “Sven.”
Larry3435
Someone has probably said it already, but my wish would be for one 20-year term for Supreme Court Justices. No more appointing a guy because he is young enough to hang on for 50 years. No more senile Justices, holding onto their seats long after they can understand the issues before them.
Yes on this one.
Now that I think about it more, I think I would go with my one wish being that the United States of America would have another Great Awakening. You won’t get rid of something awful like Roe v. Wade unless you have a substantial cultural shift.
Once we became a post-Christian nation, we became a post-Constitutional nation because we turned out back on the natural law principles of the Declaration.
SOS #4, yes 4 stars; Tabula Rasa #17, yes 5 stars; Publius #36, Yes 5 stars; Petty Boozswha#38, yes 3 stars.
Charlotte #40 yes, 5 stars; Western Chauvinist #38, yes 5 stars; Morituri Te #45, yes 4 stars.
Blue State C Yes, 5 stars ; DocJay #11, Yes.
DocJay #9, hmmm? yes, no, yes, no. ok (only after a trial).
EThompson #1, yes, no, yes, no, maybe … I need more time to think about this.
OK, I’m ready for final arguments. When is the Wish Council meeting going to start?
Can I modify this suggestion?
We we just publicly execute every politician? Maybe they get one year in office. One and done.
(No, that’s only a semi-serious suggestion. I’d have to think about the kind of perverse incentives it’d create.)
Do you guys realize how this makes you and conservatism in general look when you post stuff like this?
This is why I’m going back to just listening to the podcasts. The podcast content is fantastic stuff and more than worth the price of admission. This sort of content really is going to drive people away from joining Ricochet and participating in the forums.
Publius nailed it. We need a Great Awakening.
Term limits are a bad idea, because politicians are constrained when there is a prospect of reelection.
Remember FDR’s bank holiday? Banks were closed and not allowed to reopen until they demonstrated solvency.
My one wish would be to do the same to all the colleges of education in this country: all, both public and private, would be closed and all faculty would be fired. The colleges would be allowed to reopen and faculty rehired only upon adoption of a curriculum that teaches the precepts of a classical liberal education. This definition will do:
It seems to me that many of the excellent suggestions above come to naught without an electorate who can reason at a basic level at least. I don’t expect that everyone should master an Oxford-level command of rhetoric, but we do have a critical need for everyone to have the ability to construct or follow a logical argument composed of at least two consecutive thoughts. Anyone who has been ensnared in a political argument on Facebook knows we are a long way from this modest goal.
John Dewey’s progressive triumph is nearly complete. A hundred years ago he orchestrated the destruction of the American public school curriculum, and ed theory has been on a jihad against objective knowledge ever since. As a result the National Leader can fill his speeches with nothing but grandly proclaimed arguments by assertion, and be rewarded with two terms in the Oval Office.
You say you want to ditch base line budgeting? Or repeal the 17th Amendment? Good luck with that when a majority of us can’t name the three branches of government.
I respectfully disagree. Politicians facing reelection are mostly constrained to:
Getting reelected engenders much more bad behavior than being term-limited. There is a lot of talk about Obama being unconstrained, but was he a better president in his first term? Would you want him to have the possibility of a third and fourth term so as to avoid his unconstrained behavior now? I wouldn’t.
In other words, you’d simplify the current system … ?