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“that would allow the president to submit bills directly to Congress, which would be required promptly to vote them up or down, without amendments, on a strict majoritarian basis. The essence of their idea is to strengthen the agenda-setting power of the president, whose new role would be more like that of a prime minister under a parliamentary system.”35 The problem with such a suggestion is it fails to address how difficult it is to amend the constitution, concerns over requiring a constitutional convention to be called, and the role money plays in our current political system.
Progressive Taxation
In Capital and Ideology, Piketty lays out a new redistributionist agenda which not only “calls for ‘educational justice’–essentially, spending the same amount on each person’s education” and “favors giving workers a major say over how their companies are run, as in Germany and Sweden” but puts forth as a main proposal “wealth taxes” which follow from suggestions in his first book. This tax, which he puts at 90 percent on billionaires, would be put toward trust funds for every citizen in a country like France, generating an amount worth about 120,000 euros by the time a person reached age 25.36 Piketty’s “attack” on billionaires found resonance in the recent American presidential election. Advised by economists who worked with Piketty, Elizabeth Warren proposed setting a rate of two percent on household fortunes over $50 million and three percent on billionaires. It was aproposal which –if you are to believe the polls–was well-received by Americans.37 And yet, once again, conservative politicians and Wall Street representatives were quick to denounce such plans as being “socialistic” and against “capitalism,” even though such comments went against the public understanding of what may be good for the country overall.38
A Universal Basic Income (UBI)
A number of people have advocated for a universal basic income (UBI) over the years: for example, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Andy Stern, Charles Murray and presidential candidate Andrew Yang.39 The idea is: the UBI would assist people who find themselves in such straits, allowing users to spend the money as they wished, though more extreme proposals argue such assistance should supplant any welfare payments and/or bureaucracies supporting such. But there has been little promise. Switzerland put a proposal on the ballot, on 5 June 2016, though it was rejected 77 percent to 22 percent.40 Finland actually piloted a program to 2000 of its citizens where they would receive 560 Euros a month for two years, but results suggested it was a failure.41
Separation/Succession
Separatist movements have a long history in multiple countries: Britain, Ireland, Canada, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Iraq, Turkey, Eastern Europe and Russia. Most recently, a person thinks of the separatist movements of Catalan and Scotland.
Yet, in America, calls for succession abound. There has long been talk about the states of Oregon and Washington succeeding from the Union to join British Columbia in forming a new government called Cascadia. More recently, talks have picked up across the country.
In the early 2000s, venture capitalist Tim Draper proposed Silicon Valley succeed to form its own state; the head of Stanford's Bitcoin Group, Balaji Srinivasan, called for a separate "opt-in" territory for radical experimentation; Google's Larry Page hinted at a "techno-utopian" island; and Peter Theil, an investor in PayPal and Facebook who is an avowed libertarian started the Seasteading Institute, whose mission was "to build a manmade island nation where inventors could workfree of heavy-handed government interference."42
And now, there are true political efforts being mad:: #Calexit was started in 2016 by Shervin Pishevar, an early Uber investor and co-founder of Hyperloop, after Trump was elected; and, in May of this year, seven counties in the state of Oregon voted to succeed and join the State of