It’s Sunday morning, hours before anyone else wakes up. Time for deep thought. Today my thoughts go toward encoding exactly what I mean when I argue for a better government. Now that MAGA has hijacked what used to be the conservative right, and an equally radical faction is in the process of hijacking the liberal left, it’s important to be clear about things.

The first question is “why have a government at all?” Anarchists, criminals, and corporate extremists like the idea of abolishing government, but that always leads to a Mad-Max style tribal warfare model. With no controls, humans default to “might makes right”. We’ve been there and tried that, and the sociopaths always rise to the top – they’re willing to kill as many people as required to gain and stay in power. We need a government to have a non-violent way to get large numbers of people to co-exist and cooperate. Agree on the rules and create a system to enforce the rules with as light a hand as possible. That’s called civilization.

Here’s what I think a good government looks like and does. The one caveat prefacing all these statements is a rational budget – spending as little as possible to accomplish things on the list, and balancing the budget in all but the most extreme circumstances (world wars, pandemics, comets hitting the earth, etc).

• Protect the environment, protect the nation’s natural resources.
• Regulate people (enforce laws), equally and justly.
• Regulate corporations, making sure they don’t run roughshod over citizens and municipalities, but give them room to succeed as capitalists.
• Regulate the national economy and currency.
• Run fair and open elections at every level – local, state, federal.
• Educate US citizens – all citizens get a free K-12 education. Subject to budget constraints, all citizens can get 2-4 years of higher education, in either academics or trade studies.
• Defend the US from enemies. (Notice I do NOT say have the largest defense/war budget in the world. And I do NOT say be the world’s military enforcer).
• Run a rational, humane border control and immigration system. Manage immigration to optimize our labor force and economy.
• Build and maintain critical infrastructure for energy, communication, transportation, and sanitation.
• Ensure that every US citizen has access to health care.
• Ensure that the nation’s food, water and medicine supplies are safe and plentiful.
• Assist in the financial welfare of those who cannot provide for themselves – the homeless, the poor, the chronically ill, the elderly.

That’s a lot. Some level of taxation is of course necessary to provide these services, but our current system is bloated beyond belief and skewed wildly to favor the rich. Some kind of per-capita budget should be used as a way to control/balance taxation and services.

And now that I’ve written this, I realize it’s not the “what” a good government does that’s hard to define, it’s the “how” the work gets done. We had an answer for how until Trump and MAGA came along and blew it up via corruption, lies, racism and greed. Now we need a new or at least modified system of governance – the old one is broken. That’ll take a Constitutional Convention or a civil war. Or both.