Ten Novel Policy "Commandments" from Adam Garfinkle

Adam Garfinkle, one of our country's leading public intellectuals, shares ten brilliant, actionable policies to fix our troubled polity

Adam Garfinkle Substacks weekly at “The Raspberry Patch.” Author of 13 books, former State Department official, former editor of The National Interest, former founder (with Francis Fukayama and other foreign policy experts) and editor of The American Interest, Adam holds a BA, a MA, and a PhD in International Relations — all from the University of Pennsylvania. Adam served as speech writer to Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condolezzaa Rice. He’s one smart, sensible, knowledgable, and connected dude.

I asked Adam to provide some ideas for fixing America. I think each is better than the others. You judge.

The Ten Enhancements

Larry recently presented ten policy ideas in this space, mostly on fiscal matters, thus demonstrating that good ideas are not all that hard to come by. He also thereby showed, without having to spell it out, that getting any good idea not already in prominent circulation adopted as policy is nigh on impossible in the present U.S. political environment, which is dominated by two mostly brain-dead yet preternaturally arrogant major parties.

Full disclosure: Larry and I know each other from some years back when we tried to help to stand up a third party to challenge our idea-free elites who are, with a precious few exceptions, currently engaged in a protracted if absentminded effort to wreck our country. Alas, through no fault of ours, that attempt failed.

Larry satisfied himself with ten statements, as did the Holy One, Blessed be He, at Sinai. Me, too: Only ten policy ideas are mentioned below, all in abbreviated form. Some are my creations; others are borrowed and adapted; none are genuinely in circulation.

Like Larry’s, my ten “commandments” don’t fit neatly into either a conventional Democratic or Republican policy box. Hence, none stands much chance of enactment short of a near national face-plant that rekindles reformist energies in earnest, transcends the current two-party dead end, and spins up a new generation of leaders. But cheer up: That day may not be as far off as you think.

1.     New Pioneer Zones: The Federal government should create pilot national pioneer zones in every state on leased public lands, to be run by the states, modeled after the Homestead and Morrill Acts of 1862. These Zones would help spread equity, build social capital, mitigate urban poverty traps, and act as experimental stations for new best-practice laboratories for agriculture, craft-based manufacturing, infrastructure, healthcare, education and more.

2.     Voluntary National Service/Baby Bond Initiative: Modeled on the CCC and the GI Bill, each new U.S. citizen would receive at birth both a social security number and a Treasury Dept. bank account containing $10,000. Three-quarters of that account, to which tax-free deposits may be made by family members and friends, will be available to the account holder--with 18 years of compounded interest--upon reaching age 18 on the condition that the account holder devote 18 months of skill-based apprenticeship work in one of ten national service categories. The rest of the account, with years of compound interest, will be available upon retirement in return for volunteer elder service of specified types. If the account holder declines service, his or her Baby Bond is forfeit and returns to the general program resource pool.

3.     Create a public utility model for critical information technology: The internet and its technical accouterment now clearly qualify as critical infrastructure, and we have a time-tested public-private model for managing that infrastructure: a public utilities model, consisting of private companies administrated in partnership with multi-jurisdictional government oversight. The transnational nature of information technology functionality and current ownership renders this objective difficult to realize, but not impossible. The current absence of any significant regulatory framework in the United States for ultra-high-tech, including AI, is ultimately untenable in a liberal democratic framework. Concurrently, the Office of Technology Assessment, destroyed by Congress in 1995, needs urgently to be reinstituted in new form to manage future assessments.

4.     Housework: The House of Representatives needs to be significantly enlarged, but not centered in Washington, DC. Contrary to the design of the Founders, the size of the House has been frozen since 1911, leading to a massive negative and democracy-damaging shift in the citizen-representative ratio. Using a distributed system methodology, in which Congressmen spend most of their time among their constituents and in closer liaison with local and state government, a larger House could balance against the pro-rural and pro-conservative structure bias of the Senate.

5.     Encourage states to split their Electoral College votes like Nebraska and Maine do: Abolishing the Electoral College to create a single jurisdiction for the only fully national elections we have is a terrible idea; it would, among other things, worsen the already neuralgic rural/urban divide and set the people who provide our food against the people who eat it. But we can solve most of the structural imbalance problem inherent in the EC by having states split their electoral votes either by congressional district or by overall vote percentage totals. No constitutional amendment would be needed to do this.

6.     The Senate must end the supermajority rule. The supermajority rule contributes to polarization and legislative stasis. It is a mere rule, not a law, and so could be easily abandoned if party leaderships agree to stop using the rule as an alternating political bludgeon against one another, depending on which party holds a Senate majority. Americans must insist on it.

7.     End gerrymandering: The State of California some years back ended gerrymandering by empowering a neutral commission to translate census data into fair representational districts. If California can do it, any state can do it using that same model. Americans in afflicted gerrymandered states must insist on it.

8.     Demote all culture war issues from the Federal level: No remit whatsoever exists in the Constitution’s enumerated Federal responsibilities for any Federal legal position on abortion, homosexual marriage, or any related matter. Allowing these faith-based and hence uncompromisable struggles to plant themselves in national-scale discourse has toxified American politics now for decades, contributing mightily to the polarization, incivility, and anger that characterize contemporary American politics. No stable fair-minded solution to any of these questions exists at the national level; all attempts to leverage solutions politically, whether via the Congress or the courts, eventually only make things worse by generating seething backlashes that never dissipate. American leaders in all three branches of government must cooperate to disentangle civil rights and administrative regulations associated with culture war issues in such a way as to expunge them from the Federal level. Hard work, yes, but it can be done.

9.     Tax advertising: Advertising that provides no price-point or objective product/service information and that is intrusive should be taxed heavily by state and/or Federal government as the diseconomies they are. We tax most other services, including airplane fares and hotel rooms for example, and taxing advertising would be no more difficult or expensive to collect. This would usefully raise revenue and drive advertising culture away from deceptive brainstem-pointed and glitzy but vacuous consumer lures.

10. Ban public school funding via property taxes: Using property taxes as the main basis for the funding of public schools is inherently biased against poorer school districts and violates the principle of equal opportunity for America’s children. Some state supreme courts have ruled it unconstitutional (Ohio, for example) but have struggled to enforce their rulings. Congress should ban the practice nationally and the courts should in this unusual case recognize the supremacy of Federal law as a civil right issue (14^th Amendment) and support the ban. Other legitimate needs exist for private and commercial property taxes, but education should be wholly funded from general revenue pools in which all members of the community have an equal vested interest.

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