HOME The CIRF 7 Many in the world live in safe and comfortable surroundings with bountiful food and comfortable shelter. But billions still struggle just to stay alive amidst suffering and deprivation. And the fate for many other forms of life may be one of extinction as human impacts now threaten the health of the natural world that sustains us and makes our lives worth living. The main cause of the suffering that is now increasingly threatening the welfare of all forms of life is human irresponsibility. We have the means to do much better. And we seem to share a desire to do so. What we lack is the will to think it through and use our intelligence. The following lists seven key areas where human behavior must change in order to optimize the welfare of life. Our goal must be to enhance our creativity and prosperity while providing for the greatest happiness, or good, for the greatest number of people and for all life. An inherent challenge for any society has always been the struggle to find the optimal balance between freedom of expression and the accountability or responsibility that must accompany it. 1) Financial Responsibility… The guiding principle of responsible behavior is to live within means. This is as true for government as it is for individuals. Acquiring excessive debt and deficit spending should be as reprehensible for government as it is for individuals. We have sold the vision that bigger is always better and more is never enough in order to feed consumerism. And we have ignored the dangerous trend of ballooning deficits on all levels and the leveraging of debt. Unless corrected these trends will eventually destroy our economic welfare and burden future generations with the consequences of our reckless irresponsibility. 2) Responsible Procreation... No other issue is so fundamental to the future health and welfare of any society. Thoughtless unlimited population growth is not only a quantity problem… but it is also a quality problem. We simply cannot continue to irresponsibly increase our numbers without destroying the ecological balance that nourishes us and eventually creating social and political chaos. Those producing children without the means to provide reasonable care are essentially committing child abuse. Family planning should be a major priority in any responsible society. And it should include at a minimum the willingness of both parents to responsibly commit to the welfare of a child until maturity. 3) Educational Reform... Our existing bureaucratic public school system educates children less well than school systems in many other developed nations and generally less well than many private schools. And it does at a greater cost per child. Americans spend more on public education than any other country in the world and yet student performance results lag by comparison. The causes of failure are many, but a leading contributor is our monolithic educational structure designed around the premise that all children are ready to learn the same material, at the same times in their lives, and in similar learning environments. In addition US students spend about 20% less time in school than the students of Europe or Japan, and spend more of these hours doing non-academic work. An obvious break from the hamstringing bureaucracy of government and teachers unions would be to open the system to the dynamism and creativity of the market economy. One way to do this would be a voucher system providing economic assistance allowing parents to choose freely from a varied range of alternatives in order to select those most commensurate with the needs of students. The diversity of schools should reflect the diversity of the true educational needs of students. And forcing children to attend school against their will should be recognized as irresponsibly counter-productive... both with respect to the needs of the student, the teachers, and the classroom learning environments. It takes only one disruptive student in a class of 30 to destroy the learning process for all. 4) Immigration... Just as quality of parenting and education are primary determinants in creating a successful future for our society, it is important to assure that immigrants coming to our shores have qualities that enable them to be a part of that success. Minimally, they should possess a good working knowledge of the common language, culture, and government, and should have the basic training and professional skills necessary to creatively contribute. 5) Voting Compentency… Allowing and encouraging people to vote regardless of their awareness of ballot issues makes about as much sense as allowing all to proliferate with abandon or all to immigrate without restriction. We should establish basic voting criteria based on tests demonstrating an understanding of the technical, economic, and political challenges facing our society. Voting is a right, but like all rights it should be shouldered by the responsibility of the voter to show that the right can be exercised with reasonable competency. Just as we would not permit a drunk to drive we should not permit the apathetic and ignorant to vote their incompetency while endangering all with their recklessness. 6) Equal Opportunity… Affirmative action programs were initially implemented as forms of outreach for those who had been disenfranchised as a result of circumstances beyond their control. This was done in order to further equal opportunity for all. However, due to the politics of vested interests many such efforts morphed into preference programs based on race, ethnicity or gender. Preferences based on characteristics not related to performance violate the equal protection guarantees of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution and inevitably chip away at the ability of a society to function efficiently and effectively. If a meritocracy or a performance based society is our goal, we should be blinded to differences in race or gender and also resist the economic persuasions maiking our institutions vulnerable to the influences of wealth and social connections. Affirmative action must again be goaled to extending equal opportunity to all so that as many as possible can produce and create at levels commensurate with their ability. 7) The Drug War and Governmental Intrusiveness… Acts between consenting adults should be not the concern of the government. The extension of nanny state bureaucractic regulation to include acts between consenting adults runs counter to the concept of free enterprise, results in colossal wastes of public resources, violates our expectations of personal privacy, and impedes the assumption of individual responsibility. If sex or drugs or other acts between consenting adults are to be regulated, it should be done reasonably and equitably, and in accordance with the equal protection and due process provisions of the 14th Amendment. The practice of arbitrarily stigmatizing some drugs while subsidizing the production of others much worse in terms of health and social impacts, should appear as an affront to our intelligence and the our ideals of providing for the equal justice for all. The mission of government should be limited to assuring that accurate and complete information about all drugs and services is accurate and available for all users. And it should be the responsibility of the individual to proceed accordingly. If our institutions were grounded in meritocracy and individual performance, the issue of abuse would self correct to a level of insignificance. 6149