Bitcoin Forum

If you could make any three changes in America what would they be? I assume most will want to change laws or government, but anything is fair game. You're king for a day, what are your three changes and why would they improve America?

First I would like cannabis legalized.  It will help create jobs and the money made can help the middle class and infrastructure of the country.  Next would be stricter penalties to any government agency or employee caught abusing their powers given to them by the people.

Last would be changing the laws so the people had more power and their was nothing the government could do to infringe on the rights of it citizens.

1.) Income tax abolished (bye IRS!)
2.) End the Fed (bye Fed!)
3.) All drugs legalized (bye DEA & cartels!)

That would be one hell of an amazing start to give the people of this country their rights back.

Legalize weed
Forbid agencies like NSA spy on people or just close NSA
Burn down the NWO

1) Kill IRS and instute flat tax - enough of this tax loophole and tax credit BS
2) Abolish Medicare/Medicaid/SS/Disability taxes- just raise the damn flat tax in #1 to make it single payor (since this country refuses to let people have the right to F themselves)
3) Get rid of electoral college - I don't give a flyin F what the hell people in Ohio think about the next candidate.  I don't vote right now because my vote almost never counts thanks to the welfare queens that live around me

1) guns banned and siezed from every holder
2) deprivatization of natural water sources
3) immigration policy change (kick out illegal citizens to their motherland).

1. Introduce a Silver/Gold standard and make paper currency illegal

2. Abolish the Federal Reserve

3. Introduce currency competition

1. Accept Bitcoin.
2. Allow all immigrants to receive USA citizenship.
3. Reduce money spend for army and use this money to help homeless people.

1. make usa accessible for everyone
2. legalize drugs
3. legalise 007 agents.

If you are a king for only one day, the changes you made will be useless and will be revert back the next day. Unless you start killing those corrupt politicians, businessman and military officials and change the constitution/laws favorable to the people.

I agree with you,but i don't think you can kill all the corrupt american people in one day...unless you put them all in one place and bomb them.....

Single payer health care. Improved primary education. Decriminalization of drugs. And the ability of foreign people to enter USA without having to apply for a visa.

I agree with you on 2 and 3 (and 2's benefit is self-evident to everyone), but how would you accomplish 2? Why a single payer healthcare system?

1) legalise weed
2)shutdown NSA
3)better healthcare

1. Shutdown the NSA, CIA and DEA.
2. Legalise all drugs
3. Ban junk food  :D

Yep!

Nice post!

Single payer system is the most efficient for the US. As a matter of practicality, single payer is definitely the most efficient.

I sorta agree with this. But it's a move in the exact opposite direction of where we should be heading ideologically. Putting the state in charge of so much at such a fundamentally individualistic level is ... a terrible idea.

So you support school choice and taking money out of the Union thugs hands and directing it to the students? Nice!Get Big Brother out of our Healthcare.Get Big Brother out of our Bodies.Get Big Brother out of our Wallets.

There is nothing inherently wrong with teacher's unions. Then what's the point of a union?

i disagree when we're talking about public schools. i'm not saying that public-sector trade unions shouldn't exist, but they should be castrated.

1) Single Payer HC

2) Term limits

3) Abolish Lobbyist and groups

i think teachers unions (as well as all other public-sector trade unions) should effectively be turned into political action committees and serve the collective interests of their members that way.

Maybe, but widespread cannabis use would lower productivity.   People work and think slower when they are "stoned".

Term limits are not necessary because members of Congress must be regularly re-elected. If they are not doing a good job in office, we can simply vote for someone else.

Career politicians have no place in Washington. They are also subject to corruption, and the influence of lobbying.

My three are:

(1) Eliminate Social Security and replace it with individual retirement accounts.

(2) Eliminate the Department of Education.

(3) Simplify the income tax to a flat 15% rate with an individual exemption for each member of the family up to the poverty level. All tax credits, deductions, and incentives would be eliminated, including mortgage interest, investment loss, charitable giving, student loan interest, oil and gas exploration, etc.

Career politicians should be valued for their experience. If we regularly fill a Congressional office with a newcomer, we will lose the valuable experience on-the-job that person can offer in government.

and
Amend Constitution to explicitly ban corporations and other liability-shielding business structures from being considered to have Constittuional rights

Allow government regulators a stipend and a job in human resources and ban them from taking any private sector job that is not far removed from any business sectors that they regulated in their government position for a period of 4 years.

Amend the Constitution to set a lower limit on the reserve ratio of private banks to 40%.

This implicitly gets rid of corporate income tax. It's stupid that entities other than individual humans were ever considered to have Constitutional rights.

It doesn't implictly get rid of anything. Corporations are legal fictions, and are subject to whatever legalities that legislators want to come up for them.

It's silly to think taxation of an organization and Constitutional rights are somehow inseparable.

1. No more corporate citizenship
2. No more corporate citizenship
3. No more corporate citizenship

that should solve most problems.

Citizenship?

Well, it's a matter of logistics. If the corporation is not autonomous insofar as it does not shield individuals from liability, then individual owners become liable for the taxes. This, by definition, renders corporate income tax a contradiction of terms. In other words, the income of the corporation would constitute income for the individuals who own the corporation. Ergo, they pay individual income tax on the gains, not a corporate income tax. Even if you call it "corporate income tax," it's still, conceptually, an individual income tax unless you're holding the corporation uniquely liable for its taxes as distinguished and separate from the liabilities of the individual owners.

I believe i meant "corporate personhood." Woops.Meaning corporations should not be afforded the right to donate to political campaigns.
Our legislators are currently bought and sold by corporate interests, on both sides.

And I am guessing that you are native of america? You realize that almost everyone in USA were immigrants at some point.

The only change I want is to have laws like before WW1. It was TRUE land of freedom them.

What's to prevent governments from banning certain organisations it deems nasty--like your typical union or non profit? Or your newspaper?
And Rigon,so no more PIRGS? Ralph Nader would be unamused.

Well, corporate personhood means a lot more than that.
For example if your small business goes under, you can file bankruptcy and the business will be dissolved and its assets pooled for debt collectors, but your individual assets will be okay. You will not lose your home or your car or whatever. You just lose your business.
When you attack "corporations," you're attacking small business owners, not the conglomerates that you think you're attacking.

Oh, my, now you've gone and sone it!

You probably made a few heads explode with your use of knowledge, common sense and logic.

The right of actual humans to peaceably assemble.
Of course, a corporation is NOT a human -- it is explicitly detached from any particular human. It should be subject to exactly nothing more than the privileges a legislature grants in the charter -- it certainly shouldn't be the case where a piece of paper in a govt filing cabinet is successfully claiming to have a religion.

Pardon me but are you on drugs?

Yes, that last sentence is easily possible.
Corporations exist solely due to charters granted by government. If you want to tax them as distinct entities, it is hardly a difficult matter to legislate -- it very certainly does not require that any Constitutional rights be granted to them.

Okay but why should a newspaper have the right to freedom of the press? It's not an individual.

lol, want some?

Oh, I just realized your initial post said to ban them from having constitutional rights, not to ban liability shields entirely.

Firstly, a newspaper business doesn't need to incorporate.


Secondly, even if people do choose to incorporate a news business, a news corp doesn't need a right to freedom of the press. A corporate charter has never crawled out of its file cabinet to write a news article. Every article has a human journalist, so only journalists need freedom of the press.

It doesn't take a judicial scholar to sense that the publication of news articles would easily be protected as rights of the articles' authors, even if their employer does not have Constitutional rights. Corporate charters already are written to absorb liability, it would hardly be some crazy new thing for them to absorb the liability of the journalists as well, if ever needed.
The bottom line is that corporations explicitly are legally detached from humans. If you want to exercise the Constitutional rights then run your business under a human. It is ridiculous that people want to be shielded from human obligations and liability by having their businesses treated as non-human but then still want that non-human have a full set of human rights to be recognized.

Ideally, I don't think any human should be allowed to make decisions that affect others but then hide from the law behind a non-person. But, there probably are more far-reaching consequences to completely banning legal liability shields. Certainly there are large economic effects -- investments would be chilled considerably.

The effects of your first suggestion would be disastrous and as others have pointed out would eliminate freedom of the press for newspapers. It would also eliminate due process, contract rights, etc. It's simply a pie-in-the-sky idea that would never work.

Your second idea is perhaps worse. Government already has a terrible time attracting and retaining professionals because of lower pay and opportunity. Right now the main incentive to go into public service is the experience. Your proposal devalues the experience completely. Who in the right mind would work for the government under your proposal?

Your last proposal will lower already minuscule interest rates for savers and will make loans more expensive. And ignores the real problem: the Fed's balance sheet.

1) Send all members of congress on a two week long camping trip in groups of even democrats and republicans.  Handcuff one dem to one repub.  No cellphones.

2) Require all corporations to fully fund outstanding pension liabilities.  Require stock sales if needed to make pensions whole.  Provide the same requirement of public sector pensions.  Then eliminate pensions going forward in favor of tax advantaged private savings account to supplement SS.

3) Put enough money (fuck it - idc if we borrow it from china or print it) into education to insure that we end up ranked number one in every category.  As part of this one, I would make it a requirement for graduation from middle school that all children have a proficiency in either speaking a foreign language or coding.  Also nutritional education proficiency.  Additionally fund a trust to insure that teaching jobs are very well paid and very competitive.

It doesn't eliminate any of those things. Who would? The right kind of people -- which is the entire point. duh.Trouble attracting workers? Raise the pay until you attract workers.
OH MY GOD -- that was hard. It would do none of those things.

And only tinfoil loons who know shit about banking think "the real problem" is the Fed's holdings.

It's not. And it makes sense to allow corporations to have the same rights as individuals. Your idea would make it so no one would want to run a business.

It makes absolutely no sense for them to have Constitutional rights. You do realize the vast majority of businesses are not    corporations....................................

First, please explain how contract rights, due process, etc. would not be eliminated by a constitutional amendment "to explicitly ban corporations and other liability-shielding business structures from being considered to have Constittuional [sic] rights."

Second, what you are arguing for is similar to a non-compete. Look at some of the economic research on the cost of non-compete clauses--I think you will find that they result in massive wage premiums of 100 to 400%.

Third, increasing capital requirements for private banks will have (and is already having) a major negative unintended consequence: further bank consolidation and concentration of capital. And, the larger capital requirements, makes it harder for new entrants, further entrenching existing interests.

.... such abilities would not be eliminated because corporations would retain those powers through EXACTLY THE AUTHORIZATION WHICH ALREADY EXIST.

For example:
http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatD...10&DocType=ARS


As stated before:

You are conflating a corporation's state law charter with the question of whether it has federal constitutional rights. That Arizona law, or any state law for that matter, would not give a corporation federal due process rights or protect it from abrogation of its contracts by the federal government.

So what?

So you would vastly increase the cost of bureaucracy and you likely would still get lesser qualified candidates even with the higher salary because workers desire lateral mobility.
What do you do for a living?

I like how you attempt to wedge in some idiotic claim that candidates would be "lesser qualified", when even you yourself have posted that the only change required is to raise wages.
The ONLY necessary difference would be an increase in wages for regulators. And the costs today of regulators being offered incentives from companies they regulate isn't exactly a boon to the taxpayer as it is, especailly when it comes to the revolving door with Wall Street banks.

Taxing existing larger banks is not going to solve the problem of capital requirements for smaller banks, nor is it going to solve the interest rate problem for savers and borrowers. In fact, it would have the reverse effect--higher taxes will mean less profits for banks, so they will lower the interest rates they pay and increase the interest rates they charge.

I'm not conflating anything.
I destroyed your silly suggestion that corporations would suddenly lose the ability to enter into contracts.


Except that Federal law recognizes protections for corporations.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/1


Your histrionics aside, corporations aren't losing a single thing that they need to function properly.

As compared to the trillions in wealth lost during the financial crisis of 2008?

I think people would rather pay a few pennies more in bank fees, than to continue with banks allowing their reserves to get so low that they continually risk being unable to fulfill withdrawal requests if defaults spike --- especially when such risk means we can end up with banks failing and 8 million people losing their jobs and for millions to lose their homes, and for every worker in the country having to adjust to a severely depressed economy with lower wages and reduced standards of living.

You do realize that you just agreed with the Hobby Lobby decision, right? You just pointed out the efficacy of the exact law that Hobby Lobby was decided under.

I have it on good authority from an accomplished constitutional scholar that Hobby Lobby was decided on the basis of one single piece of legislation from 1993 and absolutely nothing else, because that's how Supreme Court decisions work.

Sana is agreeing with non-natural personhood for corporations insofar as he agrees that corporations should be able to act as liability-shields for natural persons, but he doesn't agree with constitutional rights being given to corporations. You are wrong, completely wrong, to suggest that he agrees with the Hobby Lobby decision. We can fact-check you if you'd like, by simply asking Sana if he agrees with the Hobby Lobby decision

You still have not read the decision have you?

Direct quote from the opinion:

"RFRA applies to “a person’s” exercise of religion, 42 U. S. C. §§2000bb–1(a), (b), and RFRA itself does not define the term “person.” We therefore look to the Dictionary Act, which we must consult “n determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise.” 1 U. S. C. §1.

Under the Dictionary Act, “the wor[d] ‘person’ . . . include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.” Ibid."

Yes, I have. But you're in the wrong thread.Also that quote agrees with what I just said. Thanks for proving me right again.

Perhaps you need a refresher course on how statutes work.I'm counting more than 1 piece of legislation already.

He(umair) is indeed wrong.

In his zeal to hype the RFRA as the totality of the Hobby Lobby case, he seems to neglect that the RFRA itself applies to only those with First Amendment rights......


I wonder if the RFRA would apply to corporations. Hmmmmmmmmm

I had actually beat him to that too, and he still either didn't understand the point or ignored it. He then responds to this post saying that 'person' is defined by The Dictionary Act, effectively (and seemingly completely unaware that he was) conceding.

He mentions in the beginning of that thread he had been a lawyer. It makes sense why he gave up on that. He seems to think the job description of a lawyer is to shit your pants and then do as much as you can to strengthen your opponent's argument.

Most controversial:

1. Lower taxes and remove all deductions aka loopholes. No one deserves a tax credit just for wanting a house, a kid, or an ivy league education.

2. Single payer healthcare although for the sake of the economy and choice allow varous options through insurance companies. The big thing would be unhooking healthcare from being still largely based on employers and high deductible plans.

3. Remove finance reform and replace it with full contribution disclosures. It doesn't matter who gives how much to a campaign as long as it's not anonymous.

lol


I'm not sure how anyone could claim that only one piece of law played into the Hobby Lobby decision.


Even at first glance, the Hobby Lobby case involved more than the RFRA, because it requires the First Amendment as well. And looking deeper at the case, it is evident that other laws played a part, like:

  1.  exemptions in the ACA itself,
  2. the Dictionary Act,
  3.  the 14th Amendment,
  4.  Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (and a variety of related case law),
  5.  and even the justices' vague consideration of state laws defining closely-held corporations.