I knew at a fairly young age, I wasn't all that popular in school. To be honest, I probably would have welcomed getting elected to the student council, In high school I was a confirmed nerd. I was unpopular for other reasons. I didn't join high school sports, in particular football, which in Texas is a Friday night institution; for the most part, I had a paper route which earned me about $30/month for 6-day delivery to about 90 customers, and I was saving that for college. I was about average size and speed, certainly not good enough to win a sports scholarship. How did I get the football coach's attention? We were playing touch football in high school gym class. I normally played the defensive line but was trying to catch my breath, playing deep one series. A guy named Boner (don't ask), this 6 foot rancher guy on the other team, broke past scrimmage, and I was his last opponent before the end zone. He was charging straight at me, full speed. I thought he was going to break to a side before he reached me, and I was going to play the angle to tag him. Wrong. He thought we were playing a game of chicken. He ran into me full speed; I was flying in the air from impact; he was knocked out cold (I can still recall seeing his eyes rolled back showing white). I ended up landing on my left wrist, badly spraining it (I'm a natural southpaw). The coach was highly impressed by how tough I was in playing touch football (not so much tough as stupid...) and heavily recruited me to go out for the football team. There were logistics problems (I lived at the AFB about 3 miles away and didn't have a ride). More importantly, I would have to give up my paper route, my only source of income. So I quit spring training fairly early in the process, and the coach was furious with me.
So one day in Spanish II class, my teacher (an assistant coach) one day asks me, in front of the whole class, if I knew why I hadn't been named to the National Honor Society. I was your typical fairly rare straight-A student; the thought probably had crossed my mind, but I didn't obsess about it. "It's because you dropped out of football!", adding he and the head coach explicitly blackballed me. He went on: "Football teaches you TEAMWORK. You know NOTHING about teamwork. You're selfish: you care about no one but yourself," I briefly objected, pointing out I had represented the school in winning UIL number sense and science at district. "No. You just did that for yourself. You need more than grades to get into NHS. You need to show TEAMWORK." [They would eventually admit me to NHS a couple of weeks before I graduated as valedictorian.]
Later the same year as the class incident, my same-year class met for various reasons, including choosing the most popular student in the class. I was surprised and confused to find I had been shortlisted. So we went into the hall to await the results. I lost, of course, but it seemed like this had been a devious prank to humiliate me. One of my classmates taunted me that I had lost by just one vote, that one of my friends had gone to the bathroom during the vote: what if?. Another student overheard him and set the record straight, "Dude, NOBODY voted for you; not even the guy who nominated you." It made sense. I didn't feel sorry for myself. Kids can be cruel, I don't know the motivation but I got over it. Maybe the guy who nominated me was sincere but discovered others didn't feel the same.
The only election I can ever recall winning was the head of the base altar boys on base during high school, and technically it was well deserved: I served the daily 6:30AM or so Mass before going to school. But to be honest I probably won only because my more popular middle brother backed me and whipped the vote.
I had a minor volunteer role in the Carter first campaign. But the other time I came close to getting involved with a campaign was when my middle brother ran for a south Chicago suburban school board in the 1990s. I remember my sister-in-law had uncovered some expense account scandal involving local authorities. My brother ran some of his campaign promotional material past me, although I was no political guru. I wasn't a homeowner with kids in school but I remember thinking I would have approached things differently. My brother has better people skills than me and probably was too tactful to say my ideas sucked. (I suspect his wife was running his campaign). He's never mentioned it since then; I think he lost his election, and I don't think he ever ran again for office. . Me, I could probably run for dogcatcher and not even win my Mom's vote.
In my work career I haven't had a lot of managerial opportunities, just like I had never been popular with my college students. But I had a reputation for getting things done. One of my favorite examples: I had been explicitly kept out of the loop on this IT project for a marketing research company (I think they were afraid I would intimidate the rest of the team). The goal of the project was to generate a mailing list of 17M names or so (I don't recall the specific number, but it was a large number. So for 3 months they jointly designed and tested their process. They apparently didn't check for scalability. I got an apologetic call from a manager over the weekend they're cutting the mail list; he called me Saturday afternoon with the news that the defined process was generating just one record every 15 minutes. They didn't have a chance of completing the deadline of Monday morning. Could I help? I literally developed a solution on the fly in less than 5 minutes, and I had the generated mail list by Monday. The company would have me mentor system administrators, even teach a technical seminar every once in a while. I didn't have line authority to hire or fire people, but a former boss tried to block me from going to Brazil on an assignment because she didn't trust my replacement. So while I lacked formal authority, management loved and respected me, and so I had informal authority. (This had negative effects; the rumor spread I was the managers' axeman, and I was supposed to replace my boss for developers, but they threatened to resign if I was promoted. The fact was I never had a staffing discussion with management and never said a word on the topic to anyone. It was probably just nasty office politics at my expense.)
Still, it's interesting to speculate on the improbable like somehow winning a Congressional election. (It would take a lot of help, like I'm the only other candidate and say, the press reports my opponent is a child predator.)
I have no unrealistic expectations of my impact as a libertarian rookie in a body with 434 others. I am well aware what my predecessors like Ron and Rand Paul, Tom Massie and Justin Amash have faced, with few policy wins. The one I most remember is Ron Paul partnering with Alan Grayson to get a one-time audit of the Federal Reserve.
So what kinds of things would be on my bullet list? Here is a partial, not necessarily comprehensive list:
- Reduce the Incarcerated Population. "The United States has the highest prison and jail population (2,121,600 in adult facilities in 2016), and the highest incarceration rate in the world (655 per 100,000 population in 2016)....Despite making up close to 5% of the global population, the U.S. has more than 20% of the world’s prison population. Since 1970, our incarcerated population has increased by 500% – 2 million people in jail and prison today, far outpacing population growth and crime....Between 1980 and 2013, the federal imprisonment rate increased 518 percent, from 11 inmates for every 100,000 U.S. residents to 68.1 During the same period, annual spending on the federal prison system rose 595 percent, from $970 million to more than $6.7 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars." Now obviously most of the prison population is st the state level (given its traditional police power) beyond the scope of this essay, and even discussion of criminal justice reform can get quite detailed. A significant percentage of federal prisoners are for drugs or public order (including firearms and immigration). We libertarians are particularly opposed to pursuit of victimless crimes. like drugs and immigration; we need to end the dysfunctional war on drugs (note: I have never been involved in any drug transaction of any kind, and I would recommend the same for other people, but I don't think prohibitions work, and they can be counterproductive) and liberalize unduly restrictive immigration policy. I oppose "tough on crime" virtue signaling policies like mandatory minimums, "three strikes", etc. As someone who focuses on individual liberty, there is nothing more antithetic than the notion of caging people, especially the majority of prisoners who do not pose a violent threat to others. We can address approaches like evidence-based sentencing. and other policies embraced by The Sentencing Project, Second Look Sentencing, etc.
- Enforce Pro-Life Policies. These include, but are not restricted, to eliminating the funding of abortions (except for rare exceptions), abolish federal death sentences, etc. This also includes things like ending drone attacks with high risks to collateral damage (i.e., civilian populations), selling or giving weapons to governments which target civilian populations (a prominent example that comes to mind is the Saudi government targeting civilians in Yemen).
- Downsize the Military and Our International Footprint. We cannot sustain outspending the next several nations combined on national defense. We need to withdraw our remaining troops in hostile territory like Iraq and Syria. We need to withdraw from or restructure our international alliances/commitments like the expanding anachronism of NATO . Audit the Pentagon annually.
- Rein in Government Intelligence. Here I include everything from the CIA meddling in the affairs of other nations to NSA and spying on American residents.
- Reform/End the Fed. Reduce mandates to currency stability. Audit annually. Rule-based monetary policy. No monetizing the national debt.
- End Qualified Immunity, Civil Asset Forfeiture, Militarization of the Police.
- Immigration Reform. Permanent residency and a path to citizenship of DACA dependents. Legalization of temporary foreign workers. Streamlined immigration for foreign workers with US-based job offers or permanent residency for immigrant family members and parents. Eliminated or expanded quotas to clear vetted backlogs. Expanded categories for international applicants not represented in the current system.
- Trade Reform. Repeal high tariffs and other mercantilistic policies (quotas, etc.) Pursue free trade pacts with Great Britain and other nations not in a most favored nation status. Resurrect regional trade pacts like TTIP and TPP.. Pursue mutual recognition, e.g., of regulated prescriptions and other products.
- USPS Privatization.
- Auctioning Off Federal Lands or Various Rights (Minerals, Grazing, etc.)
- Privatizing, Downsizing or Devolving Federal Entities. Obvious examples include the college loan monopoly, federal flood insurance, mortgage financing, etc. DHS is an obvious super bureaucracy; others have dubious constitutional foundations, like education, energy, TSA, and public housing.
- Fiscal Reform. We need a constitutional amendment and/or budget reconciliation rule changes to deal with massive deficits and debt. We need to whitebox all spending, to sunset regulations and funding authority, to explicitly recognize unfunded liabilities, like senior entitlements. We need to lower/flatten if not eliminate income taxes in favor of a more consumption based tax scheme.We need to eliminate moral hazard in social welfare spending and decentralize funding /authority to the state/local level. We need to shore up bankrupt programs like senior entitlements, including a possible mix of means testing, increased contributions, and deferred eligibility and diversify reserve assets.
- Healthcare. On things like pharmaceuticals, we need to reduce barriers to entry. This includes things like mutual recognition of drug approvals, liberalized approval criteria and streamlined approval processes, more robust, freer trade policies, and patent/licensing reforms. There is a long laundry list of free market reforms I would like to see including cross-state risk pools and flexible bundling of major coverages (including catastrophic), mutually-recognized licensing, lowered barriers to starting or expanding medical schools, improved competition for routine services (e.g., enlargement of nurse-practitioners)
