policy details

This blog entry actually concerns many issues that I have written about/will write about, but none in particular.

As already discussed elsewhere in at least two blog entries, I will not be offering blog readers/potential voters very detailed policies. There are two main reasons for this.

1. I simply don't have the expertise to formulate such policies, and refuse to pretend to know where I don't. And, unlike candidates such as McCain and Obama, I don't have the money/clout pre-Election Day to hire/attract advisers who can formulate detailed policies that (whether or not they are good or bad ideas) at least use the right words so that they "sound right" or "make sense" in terms of the relevant subject matter.

2. I don't think this fact (just mentioned above in 1.) is at all a mark against me as a presidential candidate.

It does not mean that I MYSELF am an intrinsically inferior candidate to (because would have less to offer as a president than) McCain or Obama. Neither of them came up with such details themselves - THATS WHAT THEIR ADVISERS ARE FOR. Like them, I would have advisers as president (indeed, would start to acquire them immediately after Election Day were I to win).

It also does not mean that MY CAMPAIGN is inferior (on the grounds that voters then won't know what they are voting for when they vote for me). Three points in explanation.

A. It's not as if the other candidates, such as McCain and Obama, are going to stick to all, let alone very many, of the actual details that they now offer (when they do offer them, which even for them seems not to be that often). Of course, none of them are detail-wise going to go completely in the opposite direction or anything else like that if they are elected. But what this means is that, whatever details they actually offer during the campaign, all they really succeed in doing (something any careful and responsible voter will realize) is to give you a sense of their high-level goals. This leads to....

B. Like other candidates, I will be offering my high-level goals on various issues. (And, unlike them, as explained in "why vote for me", both shorter and longer versions, under "basics": I will be precisely explaining and defending these high-level goals, and situating them within a systematic philosophy, to a much greater extent than any of the other candidates.)

C. Voters are rarely remotely competent to judge on the details, and so should instead be choosing candidates based on:

i. high-level goals, PLUS
ii. evidence of/demonstrated ability to effectively choose details given those high-level goals.

And when it comes to these....

i. I will in the entries on this blog be defending my high-level goals.

ii. Concerning ability to effectively choose details given high-level goals: as I've explained in "why vote for me", you want the candidate with the best general thinking skills and the candidate who will, in choosing details as president, apply those thinking skills to advice and empirical information culled from issue-specific experts - experts both inside and outside of his/her administration, and experts on all sides of the relevant issue. I am that candidate.

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I will end with a little further explanation of the point that, with rare exceptions, voters are simply not competent to judge on the policy details relevant to an issue. I did talk about this at fair length in "Nader's 2008 presidential bid" under "commentaries", but I will go ahead and share some of that discussion here.

The ordinary voter is not remotely competent in the various intricacies relevant to, e.g., the health care issue WHEN IT COMES TO DETAILED POLICY. The ordinary US citizen knows little about the various costs of ALL the various kinds of health care, which sectors of the population tend to use which kinds of health care, what kinds of preventative healthcare can plausibly reduce the need for other kinds of palliative health care later, the proportion of health care costs that are ultimately due to administration, liability coverage, and the like rather than ultimately due to the actual provision of health care services and health care products (broadly construed, thus including pharmaceuticals, hospital gowns, MRI machines, etc.), what are the current legal rules governing HMOs, let alone what an HMO actually is. And these are just some of the very many things one has to have deep knowledge of in order to reasonably have a view on what the best DETAILED governmental healthcare policy would be. (I myself have deep knowledge of none of these things, and so -- as a candidate with no money/clout and thus presently no issue-specific expert advisers -- make no pretense of now knowing what the best detailed governmental health care policy would be.)

Given this point, as illustrated by the healthcare example, I think that voters should choose their political leaders on the basis of something that they can more plausibly be said to reasonably have some opinions on, namely, high-level goals. For example, here is a statement of a possible high-level goal: "the US should have a national health care system which provides basic health care to every US citizen, no matter their wealth and no matter whether or not they are responsible (and so at fault) for failing to procure independent healthcare".

For further examples, given recent woes in financial markets, consider the (pretty obvious) fact that (with very rare exceptions) no voter could competently judge a candidate on the basis of his/her saying something like:

"As president, I will do what I can to institute a lending policy where what a lender is allowed to lend (the amount and at what interest rate or interest rate plan) in any given case is such-and-such complex function of six factors: three general economic indicators (inflation, average performance of the NASDAQ over the last year and a half, and the value of dollars in comparison to pounds, euros, yen and rubles), and three other factors (the proportion of money the lender has already lent overall to their actual monetary holdings, the nature of the other loans the lender has already made, and the lender's own five-year history in getting back money loaned) - all of this additional, of course, to standard individual criteria (such as income and credit history)".

Or something like:

"As president, I will do what I can to institute a lender bailout policy where the proportion (if any) of debt (suffered by a lender facing bankruptcy) that will be paid off by the federal government is such-and-such complicated function of four general economic factors (the three from above PLUS average unemployment over the last three years), together with four other factors (the federal government's own budget and treasury deficits, the financial health of the top seven lenders aside from the one in question, the degree to which US citizens on the whole are putting income into savings rather than consumption, and the demand on the part of US citizens for loans [with demand for home mortgages in particular receiving such-and-such extra weight])".