The other day, I had a chat with Vicki. She noted that she didn't know when I was going over the top or whether I was being serious. To tell the truth, I tend to do thought experiments where I take off the limits imposed by social taboos. And people do not know what to make of me because of this.
An example of my way of thinking is allowing the public, not the politicians, to decide between two extremes of dealing with our border problems, ending political paralysis on this issue:
- Should we increase the budgets of both border control and asylum judiciary areas, so that we can both police the border humanely and process asylum claims quickly.
---- OR ---- - Issue "2-legged hunting permits", and let gun happy nuts shoot bullets at illegals trying to cross the border, firing from the American side at targets on the Mexican side.
The conversation veered into many areas, and I posed some topics that most people would consider taboo, such as:
- Given how poorly educated the American public is, require people to have completed a high school education to gain the right to vote. (There are many problems with this, but remember - this is a only a thought experiment.)
- Denying people who are too poor to raise children the ability to procreate until they can show enough earning capacity to properly take care of a child.
- Allowing prisoners the ability to vote in general elections.
- Public executions of illegal aliens who have committed felonies.
- Guardrails for both the 1st Amendment and 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution.
So I have a question: If a well informed and well educated public is needed for a functioning democracy, how much freedom has to be taken away from people to force them to be well educated? Sadly, I keep getting reminded of Juvenal's 6th satire:
--- OR ---
If I had a better answer to this question than to trust that an educated public would do the job, I'd have solved one of the major political problems that keep perplexing us thousands of years after the question was first posed....