Yet another articulation of my politics

In response to a comment in .

I’m mostly for social freedom and economic regulation to guarantee society’s best interests. Your talk of doing people’s brothers and legislative interns kinda led me to suspect you weren’t dogmatically republican. =)

I’m in favor of localization of gun policy, in favor of universal mandatory military service (2 years), but cutting military funding, and particularly moving most if not all research funding responsibility out of the military. I’m politically pro-choice, though personally anti-abortion, and generally pro-birth-control. I feel national security is best served by increased attention to diplomacy and reduced attention to military activity.

In my ideal world, marriage would not be recognized as such by the state, but there would be legal co-parenting, and co-residentiary relationships (as well as legal co-ownership-of-property relationships), that various parties could choose from according to their preferences. These relationships, being divorced from marriage, would not be restricted by various sexual mores, allowing blood relations, more than 2 constituents, and same sex constituents. Since that’s not going to happen in my lifetime, I’ll take the small part of it that is attainable (gay marriage).

I’m big into religious freedom and the separation of church and state. I am an opinionated agnostic, but I would not call myself anti-religion. Religion has brought both good and bad to the world, and should be handled with care to maximize the common good and ameliorate the bad.

I’m pro environmental preservation, pro high quality universal health care and education (‘high quality’ having an interesting definition that I won’t go into here), pro public transportation, and pro provision of minimal food & shelter for everyone.

I value the free market, and think that the government ought to work harder to make one. Particularly in terms of internalizing externalities and maintaining the ‘full information’ and ‘no monopoly’ criteria. I think patents and tax abatements are corporate giveaways and should be abolished.

I think “middle of the road” is, taken together, a vast oversimplification, an insult, usually an innaccurate description, and an artifact of an all but useless concept, specifically the linear model of politics. We all have our ideas about how the world works. It is only the two party system that produces this linear model. And two party systems do a crap job of representing the diversity of interests in society.