Good question. I am having a hard time getting an answer.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights; these were all written by liberals. Yet, 225 years later, ‘liberal’ seems to have taken on a demonic connotation. Well, fuck that, I am an American and that makes me a liberal. The liberal paradigm seems to have shifted quite a bit since the Founding Fathers did their thing. And this is good, we must either evolve or die. Over the years we have seen a liberal society pursue manifest destiny, go after slavery, back down the robber barons, bust trusts, attempt to regulate security markets, provide for the social welfare of its elderly, provide minimal medical care for its citizens, and try to prevent the poisoning of the public. The American people have forgotten their roots and seem to be actively supporting the rollback of these liberal evolutionary steps. It is time to stop this.

So I will propose some approaches.

First, as I have heard before, there is a need to provide a shield for the people against the powerful/state. This can take on several permutations. It can run the gamut from preventing the use of eminent domain to give a developer land that the owner won’t sell, to protecting shareholders in corporations.

I should note that I consider corporations to be mini-states, in and of themselves. The government of the people should be governing these entities very closely. While a corporation is composed of people, of citizens, it is not a person/citizen, nor should it be treated as one.

So, for starters, how should the government work to protect the citizens from corporations? It should mandate safety, health and environmental expectations. It should mandate accounting and security management procedures, so the individual corporate shareholders/stakeholders/stockholders have a reasonable expectation of honesty. It should provide inspector general oversight of areas that have a direct impact on society and consumers. It should ensure the workers/citizens are provided decent, living wages at a minimum. Why, because the government is an instrument of the citizens, of the society they create. The government provides the infrastructure that allows the corporation to flower and there is a trade-off that society can collect on.

A democracy needs an educated informed citizenship. A valid an true sentiment, and the reason that it behooves local communities to fund and support public school education K-12. The end products should have some basic skills in reading, writing and civics. The graduates should understand the why and wherefore of this country. And that gets us our basic citizen.

This basic citizen should have the skills to do the basic jobs, to farm, to live a subsistence lifestyle, at worst.

With the growth of technology, with the increased complexities of technology, additional education is required. In our society today, we direct interested parties to colleges. It behooves the state to fund and subsidize these institutions because the products are highly skilled individuals who produce much more over the course of a lifetime than they would if they weren’t educated. Their extra production value more than pays for the cost of their education.

So, if the government is interested in developing these productive individuals, why not let them provide the means for them to go to college and improve their productivity, which in the long run benefits society? In exchange for two-three years of service, post high-school adults are entitled to receive a subsidy to go to college after the service period is over. Sort of like the post WWII GI Bill. The service doesn’t need to be military; it could be Peace Corps, or CCC, or health care. The subsidy may not pay for a Harvard education, but it should allow a student to attend a state college or university with no financial difficulties to distract from the learning.

If the government is interested in advance degrees, it may want to provide a medical, legal or other post-graduate degree in exchange for 6-10 years of service, somewhere, after graduation. At that point the graduate will be their 30’s, have lots of practical experience in their field, and can decide to stay in whatever public service they were in or move onto the private sector.

Promoting and subsidizing advanced education opportunities provides for the general welfare of society. All of society will benefit in the long run.