Liberal Dreams

The Democrats are doing well politically partly because they offer to have government manage parts of people’s financial lives at a time when people feel like they cannot manage their lives on their own. This will end when the media start reporting positive stories about the economy and people feel like they’re more on top of their lives.

I would love to see Democrats take on something truly big and fund it as if it were a war. We have a war about every ten years, so this isn’t such a big deal. Here are ideas in rough order of decreasing merit:

• Massive anti-poverty program focused on nutrition (decreasing the death rate), housing, and educating girls (decreasing the birth rate)
• An alternative energy program aimed at helping the entire world, including the developing world, move to getting more than half its energy from renewable non- polluting energy sources.
• A network of high-speed trains
• Grants to any local government or private organization who can teach kids to be #1 in math, science, history, and language compared to all other countries
  
• An Apollo-style space program focused on sending people to Mars and beyond and/or putting a decent-sized permanent research facility and business incubator in low earth orbit.
• A program to end the drug war and all that comes with it by researching medications for addiction and more innocuous recreational drugs for those who insist on using them.
• Research into technology to incubate fetuses in vitro as an alternative to abortion – If successful, this would put an end to a contentious issue.

I know the government can’t do any of these things well, but they’re just potential alternatives to: We must spend $100 billion per year on fighting loosely-defined enemies who hate us because we’re so good/free/beautiful/etc. The answer would be, We’ll they’re really gonna hate us now because we’re striving to be even better. (It should go without saying, BTW, if you think people hate you because you're so good, you probably have some kind of psychological problem.)

I know this is just liberal dreaming, but it doesn’t seem that much worse than Democratic goals:

• Manage your healthcare spending
• Help people stay in $400,000 houses they can’t afford
• Help you out with a few bucks if fuel costs rise
• Manage part of your retirement savings
• Even out the economic cycle a bit through government borrowing and spending

Those are lame. If politicians are going to sell something, I want them to sell giving every human being access to food, water, education, right to own lands they’ve squatted on for decades, and contraception. I want a nano-tech project focused on materials strong enough to build an elevator literally to outer space. I thought liberals wanted to save the world. Why are we selling a plan for the government to borrow money to save us a few hundred bucks on insurance? Politicians should leave that to Geico and, if they refuse to offer simply to leave us alone, they should focus on some really momentous dreams.