How do "massive corporations" and "the wealthy" even factor into this? Are massive corporations blockading school entrances, or are the wealthy kidnapping teachers en-masse? This is where the concept of Rights has gotten unhinged from reality. Rights prevent the state and others from doing things to you. Rights cannot compel someone to do something thing for you.

If someone has a right to "an education or healthcare or a basic standard of living," then others -- many others -- have an obligation to provide it to him. You can only ensure this obligation is met by being prepared to violate those others' right to self-determination (embodied in, e.g., freedom of association, property, and choice of occupation). Once self-determination is out the window, all other rights are meaningless, subject to the whim of politicians.

The UN long ago forgot that products and services cannot be "rights" in a society that's free of officially sanctioned theft and compulsory labor. The concept of "rights" has become so silly with these people that a nation can seriously propose such lunacy as this: UN document would give ``Mother Earth`` same rights as humans. They've become little more than a very expense three-ring circus who has no authority whatsoever on the subject.

You can try to universally provision a good or service free of charge, but you will bring it into a state of scarcity in the process.

I would suggest government offering of privately-managed wholesale wiring towers and tunnels... no monopoly, and no government owned/controlled wires (at least not if you want any chance at privacy, open content, and long term economic efficiency). These would run to the community; communities and those that serve them would be at their discretion to close the gap to the neighborhoods and dwellings (perhaps on the condition that they facilitate no barriers to any provider who wishes to lease wiring space in those local segments).

The offering could have three rates per unit of capacity rented: a base rate when you provide service equally across your entire serving area, a discount for bringing service to unserved and under-served areas, and a surcharge for the percentage of the population you do not offer service to within the larger of a) the region bounded by the outermost points of your service area, or b) the entirety of all counties in which you offer any service.

By collectivizing the biggest barrier to entry -- the initial infrastructure buildout -- and not collectivizing the ownership of the lines, you could probably get the best mix of benefits that the two sectors could offer. The goal is to catalyze new competition in as many markets as possible; do that, and the bandwidth and price problems will get solved better than by any strategy involving monopolies or a select few 'licensed' providers (with ever-increasing bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles in front of new would-be entrants).

I think you seriously hit on the raw material for a new amendment there. We could keep politicians of all stripes from infringing constitutional rights for political ends with a simple rule, that stripping any of an individual's rights by due process requires that you do so for all forfeitable rights. There, mister congresscritter... you're no longer able to selectively attack rights you wish weren't rights in the first place.

There are probably edge cases where this would be undesirable, but I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Hmmm... seems every one of my guesses at the statistics was 180 degrees off. Literally, every one of them. ;) A 2005 misleading press release (called "States with Higher Gun Ownership and Weak Gun Laws Lead Nation in Gun Death") by the Violence Prevention Center did conclude that "More guns means more gun death and injury. Fewer guns means less gun death and injury. It's a simple equation." Unfortunately, their pronouncements on the five-state statistics only prove that you can make a small subset of a dataset say the opposite of what the whole dataset says.

I grabbed stats for gun ownership rates by state from the Washington Post, and you can get violent crime rates from a variety of sources (e.g. violent crime rates by state for `04 and `05, or gun crimes by state for 2009).

If you merge all that together, it shows a mildly negative correlation between per-capita gun ownership and gun homicide (-0.2612653943), and similarly between gun ownership and robberies with firearms (-0.2144191759) [varies depending on the years you compare & whether you include Puerto Rico, etc.]

What, are they nuts? Who would want to live in a place where barroom brawls give way to deluges of bullets? Or where would-be minor road rage incidents end up in cars full of corpses? The violent crime rate there must be through the roof!

I'll admit I haven't looked this up for myself, but Vermont's homicide rate surely has to dwarf that of more civilized states with sensible restrictions on deadly weapons. People may mock DC for its violence, but it wasn't that long ago that they enacted gun control legislation. With most of the rest of the country's gun laws going in the opposite direction since then, you know DC's violent crime rate is going to be well below the rising national average before long. Maybe then people will come to their senses?

I don't understand why people can't leave the shooting of criminals to the police, who are much better trained and more effective at it. Why the rush to vigilantism? We have law enforcement for a reason. The untrained masses probably shoot 100 innocent people for every criminal they stop or deter. I've heard something like that for every one citizen who stops a crime with a gun, several thousand have their guns turned against them. It's sad that people get so wrapped up in being trigger-happy that they can't stop, acquire some facts, and think things through. If they would educate themselves and make decisions based on fact instead of emotion - instead of trying to be a bunch of Rambos -- this would be a much safer country.

Well, thankfully, the FCC created all those rules that gave us mobile data access in the first place. It wasn't so long ago that all I had was a big beige brick phone that didn't even text, so I'm grateful that they finally required phone manufacturers to make smartphones, and cellular providers to sell them and support them with data networks. If it weren't for that, how I would I be able to watch cats that hiccup and fart at the same time while I'm on the train, or alert everyone who knows me to the fact that I'm grabbing dinner at Jack in the Box again, in realtime?

Whether the FCC gets it right or not isn't important. What matters is that the decisions are made by people who have our Best Interests at heart, not people who are just going to make money off us. I mean seriously, why be protected from bad decisions when we could be protected from profit-generating ones?

We agree on much. The problem is that too many conservatives and libertarians argue as if any tax cut will pay for itself or even increase revenues, and too many liberals argue as if any tax increase will increase revenues, some going as far as to predict linear revenue gains.

Neither extreme is true, but it's nearly axiomatic that some form of the Laffer Curve is true. Few would argue that a tax rate increase from 99% to 100% will increase revenues, and a decrease from 1% to 0% will surely lessen them. In between those extremes, there's a valid debate about what the parabola looks like. Presumably, it varies different under different economic conditions. People (and corporations) are probably more prone to try to minimize tax exposure when times are hard, growth is slow, margins are slim or the future looks rocky.

So to have a rational, evidence-based tax policy, we need to start with

• What is the purpose and goal of tax policy in the first place,
• What does the Laffer Curve currently look like,
• Where does today's tax policy put us on that curve (to the best of our knowledge), and
• What net impact is this likely to have -- on the economy and on revenues?

Then you have to look at what the proper function of government is, and whether we're currently overstepping or falling short of that. Another point that often gets overlooked is that giving revenues to an overspending government may be like making loans to a gambling addict. If they simply leverage every dollar they actually receive to borrow eight more, then more revenue might not be desirable. Even after all that people will still have irreconcilable ideological differences about taxation (you could favor anything from sharply redistributive policies to a flat amount tax of the budget divided by the tax base), but laying out something like the above would still go a long way towards separating the pragmatic debate from the ideological one.

I was critical of Bush's lack of fiscal restraint while he was in office, but I still thought (and think) that McCain is the kind of political animal who can be counted on for nothing except to promote himself and seek his own career advancement. I like his efforts promoting pork awareness, but I still would never trust him in the long run. Bush at least tried to create an opt-in privatization option for a small fraction of Social Security, and somebody's going to have to touch that third rail again before long. The market has taken some lumps since then, but even in light of that I think that once the entitlement shit really starts hitting the fan, we're going to wish that Bush had succeeded.