This being the final edition of this series of posts and it being Friday, I thought it would be a good time to think about some radical reforms the ruling class could implement to address present problems. It is hard to imagine the ruling class making radical reforms, given their inability to manage small reform to this point, but events often force the issue. A century ago, giving women the vote was a crazy idea in 1919. It is a crazy idea now.

Anyway, I mentioned previously that a big problem for the American political class is the influence of the mega-rich. At the end of the industrial revolution, the answer was to bust up the great fortunes. Maybe this time, the answer is to embrace the great fortunes. Instead of having billionaires buying politicians, perhaps the answer is to create a chamber for the mega-rich. A third chamber of Congress could be something like the House of Lords. It is open only to those with a net worth in the top-1%.

The idea here is to get the mega-rich out of the shadows, so to speak. Instead of pouring money into campaigns and political action committees, guys like Mark Zuckerberg could claim a seat in the Patrician Assembly. The trade-off would be no other participation in politics. The top-1% would be banned from politics other than running for office. Since the ultimate spot would be membership in the Patrician Assembly, the mega-rich would compete for one of the spots.

The thing that makes divided government work is each branch has a unique power. The House has the power of the purse. The Senate confirms judges and executive appointments. The Patrician Assembly would need a unique power in order to be worth the office. The most logical power to give the super-rich would be the power to borrow. This would, in effect, be a veto over deficit spending. Raising the debt limit and authorizing new debt would be the job of the Patrician Assembly.

Another nagging problem in modern America is mobility. Americans move around for all sorts of reasons, mostly for work, but also for family. Of course, foreigners move here for economic reason. This makes maintaining local communities difficult and is a growing source of instability. A big reason Donald Trump is having so much success is that millions of Americans feel like strangers in their own neighborhoods. The place where they grew up is now alien to them.

A solution to this is to change how people vote. The new rule would require you to vote where you were born, in addition to where you reside. That means those Yankee lunatics born in Massachusetts can still move to sensible places like Texas, but they will not be able to start voting for drunken Hibernian politicians. If Mass lets them vote absentee, then they could vote Kennedy that way. Otherwise, they give up voting in exchange for the good life in Texas.

This solves two problems. One is it solves the problem of lunatics moving to a new unspoiled place and then spoiling it by voting lunatic. The other important feature is it solves the immigration issues. This rule means those fifty million foreign born will never vote. Their kids can vote, assuming they are born here to citizens, but the foreign born will never gain the franchise. This removes the benefit of citizen replacement that is so popular with liberal lunatics.

Finally, we are on the cusp of the great automation. No one reading this will see the robot future. Your children and grand children will not see it either. We will, however, see more and more jobs replaced by robots. That means fewer and fewer people working and earning money. An obvious way to fix this is to get women out of the workplace, but that is only going to come when Islam is the official religion of the West. Look for London to pass such laws in the coming decade.

A more plausible solution will be a guaranteed income. Instead of a welfare state designed for the poor, a new system of a monthly salary for all citizens could be implemented. Alaska pays its citizens a royalty from oil sales each year based on the idea that the oil is a public good. Maybe the same approach must be taken with the robots. The robot future is a communal good so everyone gets a royalty from the robot economy.

The Swiss are about to experiment with this idea. One excellent benefit is it applies to citizens, thus depriving one incentive for migrants. The bigger issue is it junks all the social engineering ideas from a bygone era. Social welfare programs are a solution to poverty in the industrial age. In the technological age, poverty is not the issue so much as the lack of work.

Here is where it can become even more radical. The annual income could also be an incentive for marriage and stable family formation. Married couple would get a bonus for every year of marriage. That way, Yolanda here in the ghetto has no incentive to breed outside of marriage. Her stipend would not change with more kids. Her chance to boost her income would be to marry and stay married. For ghetto women, children stop being a symbol of success.

In a matriarchy, this is a powerful incentive for the males to behave. All of sudden, Darius is not such a valuable mating option when he can’t stay out of prison, while the bookish Urkel comes with the bonus of extra cash in the monthly check. The welfare state broke this relationship and black crime went along with black illegitimacy rates. Restore those family incentives and let nature take its course.