What should we want in a society?

It's a hard question to answer in a short blog post, much less in a long book, or in a lifetime of writing. But let me take a stab here, in one sentence:

I want a society with incredible economic dynamism, and the social institutions to assist the losers of that dynamism.

What does that look like?

Well, for one, I want labor churn. Sure, people get hired and fired regularly. But private companies have great difficulty in laying people off these days, to the point that many are burdened with so-called zero-marginal product workers. We should make it harder for people who get fired to launch lawsuits.

This is particularly important in public sector employment, where the "no firings" problem is even worse. Public sector unions should be barred from collective bargaining, and hiring/firing should be liberalized there.

On the other side of this, I want so many people to get laid off so often by failing businesses and government agencies that the stigma of getting laid off goes away. In a world where everyone is at great risk of losing their jobs all the time, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid hiring people who have lost jobs. This is more fair than a society that makes it difficult to fire people. Those who do lose their jobs in such a system have great difficulty getting back into the labor force, because of the stigma. Stigma is good sometimes, but not on this.

This great labor churn will encourage risk-taking and will destigmatize personal failure. People learn from their failures. If we can minimize the broad consequences of failure and limit failures to the local, we will be healthier as a society.

In general, our economic institutions should be steered towards continuous innovation. This means that starting a business should be very easy. Regulation should not put in hard employment caps before certain requirements kick in; that just disincentives hiring. In general, regulation should have a light touch, and each new regulation promulgated should have to pass a rigorous cost-benefit calculation. We want food safety inspections; we want drug testing; we want (some) environmental protection. Things like Sarbanes-Oxley need to go away.

The professional guilds, in general, should be fought relentlessly, for their interests are not on the side of innovation. Licensing requirements should be reduced. We should be explicitly open to new models for service delivery: nurse practitioners providing primary care; non-certified teachers exploring new types of education in decentralized settings; computer programs producing legal documents; etc. Some of these will fail, but the successes will push the overall quality of life forward.

I'm asking for a lot here, in terms of the stresses of capitalism. A lot of safe jobs will be destroyed, with successful risk-takers essentially taking some of the money now delegated to public servants.

For social harmony, great labor churn requires a robust safety net for those who are willing to work. Unemployment benefits should be fairly generous. We should even consider temporary wage subsidies for people who get back into the labor force and take lower salaries, because we want to foster an ethos of work.

I want strong community institutions and religious institutions doing the role of keeping people mentally and spiritually sane and healthy. People who are successful should happily offer some of their free time towards those who the modern era leaves behind. I also want politics to play less of a role in daily life as well. It is bad when we self-segregate from people we disagree with. We should be able to disagree without disdain for our opponents. We should also have a high degree of tolerance for dissent.

I want the government to be largely unseen in people's daily lives. We shouldn't have to think about what's going on in Washington when we think about what's going on in Portland, or Peoria, or the Pine Barrens. This implies that presidents should reduce their public schedules. Thomas Jefferson made two public speeches in office: his first inaugural, and his second inaugural. I wouldn't necessarily have the president appear so seldom, but would it be the end of the world if no one saw the next president for a couple of weeks here or there? Do we really need to know the president's tastes in music, or his opinion about local crime stories, or his thoughts on the name of a sports franchise?

Long-term, I want people not to think of the government as being "here to help." It has a lot of things to do. People's personal difficulties should be more often responded to locally than federally, when at all possible.

Lastly, of course, we should move slowly in this direction. These are big changes, and big changes are difficult to accomplish without fostering backlash and resentment. 

This is (mildly) Utopian, obviously. But this is the broad outline of what I would like to see in the country. And if you agree with me that this would be a good place to go, you should loathe the recent state of affairs, because it is basically the opposite of my position on every single point.