FGC-9; everybody in Europe who wants a gun can trivially have it within a week without interacting with the criminal element or buying regulated components. That goes for modern ammunition too.
I would also revoke all the mandatory reporting and other reporting laws for therapists, and remove the ability for government to use therapy/medical records for considering licensing or security clearances. These are barriers that keep people that need therapy most from seeking it.
There are ways to mitigate, but not eliminate, the presence of traumatic situations. Whether that is the purview of government perhaps is another question.
I suspect war and bad family environment are a massive source of trauma of US persons; the path to mitigating the former at least facially is a bit more obvious.
Lawsuits are indeed an interesting way of enforcing the law. Although what I find particularly egregious is when a single party and lawyer is used to enforce the law for multiple people, keeping the payout for themselves.
For instance, Albert Dytch [0] was a party to HUNDREDS of lawsuits, seeking ADA violations for places he essentially went to only with the purpose of finding something wrong to sue for. Why isn't that money distributed across the affected disabled people rather than one guy and his lawyer? The incentives are perverse.
I dont live in USA so I dont know. But here the ruling party is losing in local elections in town, so they cut the amount of taxes aplocated to muncipialities while at the same time they ask them to deal with more issues. So muncipialities are forced to degrade the quality of their services - since they dont have enough money. Then the ruling party claims that the local politicians cannot rule properly. What is just a lie. But this lie works.
I believe it is possible it is happening at some municipal levels but my question was more directed towards your statement
>employed by American conservatives ... to deprive the federal government of revenue
which appears to refer to federal level. The general trend of federal receipts have been fairly flat above 15% for decades (except during great recession circa 2009), and the spending slightly different rising a bit above and funded by debt and/or inflationary effects.
My takeaway is here the beast has not been starved, although the beast is spending more of our children's future incomes in the form of increasing debt.
I'm sure my account will be banned soon, so let me just leave one pondering here:
Does many generations of slavery and the associated genetic selection for winning survival strategies impose shifting genetic attributes to the surviving population?
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re: below [due to rate limiting]
Appreciate the honest reply.
>The death rates for slaves was 1.8%
Ah but I suspect this was after arrival in the mainland. There was a "seasoning" process in the "west indies" where as much as 50% of slaves perished before arriving to market. And I don't think that includes the long voyage across the Pacific nor between capture and initial sale.
It's my understanding during slavery, assuming we're thinking American Black slavery here and not something else like Egyptian slavery etc, slaves were allowed to have their own families which they picked and were not selected for some sort of "superior" trait in children. The death rates for slaves was 1.8% and for whites was 1.2%, so I don't think that would have been a factor either.
I wonder if any previous human civilization did actually select slaves that were stronger to try birth stronger slaves... horrifying to think about really, but that doesn't mean it hasn't been done.
> Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves to increase their profits.[1] It included coerced sexual relations between male slaves and women or girls, forced pregnancies of female slaves, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children.
Depends. If someone seduces a doctor (see the trial of Conrad Murray who was Michael Jackson's propofil fixer who was in deep shit to multiple strippers for one night stand child support) for 20% you could take away 40k tax free and move to a quaint midwest town and come out quite ahead. Also if you're poor as dirt and just feed the kids rice and lentils and rely on (now increased) benefits and public institutions for everything else you can come ahead too. Whether this has anything to do with high fertility rates at the low income bands is up for interpretation.
Have groups of individuals been any less misguided?
Eugenics is one of those ideas that might sound good in theory, but a world in which the government has absolute control over one of your most basic human instincts is a horrible world.
In the US lower incomes are associated with higher fertility rates. This may suggest the elites, to 'solve' this problem, should bankrupt the population further and then give them lots of time unemployed to spur "free" activity taken during the boredom.