What Is The Legal Purpose Of Marriage?

This post was originally an answer at Law Stack Exchange that I wrote. The fact that it is quoted from that source is not indicated for ease of reading:

The case for Western-style marriage as a way to protect woman irrevocably relying on their spouse for economic support when having children

While this isn't a universal justification for marriage, it is an economic reason for marriage that heavily drives the decision to marry in modern times in the developed world in a large share of cases.

This analysis ignores what have historically been uncommon edge cases of couples who by choice or due to infertility don't have children, who are simply swept along following marriage rules that weren't really designed for them, even though they are now far more common, often for reasons that are not primarily economic, or coincidentally benefit from marriage rules not really designed for them.

The explanation of marriage on this economic basis also explains the class divide between marriage utilization in modern societies, with marriage remaining a strong institution for the affluent, while it falls apart from the working class and poor people.

In modern circumstances

Stereotypically, and very frequently in practice, when a man and a woman marry, they have children and the woman ends (temporarily or permanently) or scales back, her participation in the paid workforce. Particularly in the case of woman who have high levels of education or specialized training, doing so dramatically reduces the woman's lifetime earnings. This factor is much less important for woman with little education and/or few specialized skills who pay a much smaller penalty in their lifetime earnings for temporarily leaving the workforce or reducing their earnings while their children are young.

So, for it to make sense for a woman to have her male partner's children with the economic sacrifices associated with that decision, she needs legally enforceable protections for the reliance she places on her male partner to economically support her.

If the relationship falls apart, in the absence of marriage, the only remedy a woman who has sacrificed her lifetime earnings to have children, is child support, which only partially compensates the woman for the cost of raising the child that she had with her co-parent on a part-time basis (as the co-parent usually has some custody rights).

But if she is married and the relationship falls apart, she is entitled not only to child support, but also to a division of marital property and often substantial alimony (a.k.a. maintenance), which reflects her sacrifice of lifetime earnings in her name.

Of course, this remedy only has value (both as a remedy if the marriage ends, and as an incentive for her husband to not divorce her in the first place), if the husband has meaningful assets from which there will be marital property to divide and/or meaningful income from which alimony and child support can be paid.

These considerations help to explain why, in the modern U.S., college educated woman who are married to college educated men or non-college educated men with good economic circumstances, are much more likely to marry before having children (the average is two years after marriage), and are much less likely to divorce, than less educated and/or less economically skilled women.

In contrast, women who have relationships that could produce children with men who are not college educated and have poor economic circumstances tend not to marry before having children (the average is two years before marriage if the couple marries at all), are more likely to divorce if they have gotten married, and are less likely to even acknowledge their co-parent on a birth certificate, because in these circumstances, marriage does not provide meaningful economic protections to the woman having children and when the father is particularly destitute or potentially troublesome, even acknowledging the father's paternity may result in her paying child support to the father and being forced to continue to have him in her life.

In "pre-modern" circumstances

In pre-modern times (i.e. when there were far fewer economic opportunities for single mothers, and contraception outside marriage was unavailable or unreliable, and women tended to have far more children during a lifetime, so really in the 1950s and earlier), failure to have the complete economic support of a husband meant that a woman without a husband and any children she had living with her, were likely to experience extreme economic privation. Very few women had the ability to economically support themselves and their children without a husband in this era (only wealthy women who had significant income generating property could manage this feat).

Also, for most of that era, the state lacked a meaningful capacity to enforce child support, alimony, or shared custody arrangements. So, in that era, a blanket prohibition on divorce absent the most extreme circumstances (and usually even then restricted people who could survive on the property that they owned alone), was the only way to legally protect a woman's reliance on her co-parent to economically support her and their children.

This extreme economic imperative overrode modern era concerns about a relationship falling apart and a couple being forced to live in a "dead" marriage.

Alternatives to modern Western-style marriage and the economics driving these alternatives

A modern Western-style marriage isn't the only possible solution to the problem of providing economic security that allows women to feel comfortable making the economic sacrifices involved in having children.

Matrilineal societies with mothers and a male relative heading a household

There are some societies where women have children outside of marriage, sometimes with many men having children who are half-siblings. In those societies, mothers frequently establish households in a non-sexual pairing with a brother or uncle or father. But, most societies historically, and most modern societies, in particular, have not made that choice.

Strong social safety nets that make single motherhood viable

In some countries with strong social safety nets and third-party child care systems, especially in Scandinavia and Western Europe, but also in some countries with Soviet-style communism, single motherhood was much more economically viable and marriage was less common, because yet another solution to the problem of economic support for single mothers was devised.

Polygyny and removing some men and women from parenthood

Historically, in societies where a large share of men lack the economic capacity to support a woman and her children, while a minority of men are affluent, polygyny (sometimes with equal wives, and sometimes with a primary wife and secondary wives or concubines or slaves) solves the economic problem. Other solutions to that situation have been for a certain percentage of women to be celibate in holy orders or as priestesses and to forgo having children. Societies with this economic make up also sometimes have significant portions of men who are eunuchs and/or who become celibate and pursue religious callings.

Polyandry

Historically, in societies where almost all men lack the economic capacity to support a woman and her children alone, polyandry (often with two brothers marrying a single wife) is known and solves the economic problem.

Comment: Do you have any comment on how civil union or domestic partnership arrangements differ from marriage, or are they just marriage by a different name for legal purposes? – Ian Sudbery 

Response: In the U.S., civil unions were invented to be marriage for same sex couples when it was politically unpopular and not constitutionally required to allow same sex marriage. Institutions like PACS (Pacte Civil de Solidarité) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_solidarity_pact in France were motivated by the purpose as well, but became popular with unmarried couples who wanted some but fewer legal implications of marriage, often childless cohabiting couples, or couples who didn't want the cultural/religious baggage that the predominant Roman Catholic church there assigns to marriage. – ohwilleke

Siblings, Conflict, and Personalities

This is a question and answer from Facebook (I won't identify the person asking the question, and if you are anyone other than the person asking the question and know what I am referencing, please don't identify them or link to the conversation in the comments). I have added paragraph breaks that the Facebook user interface makes more difficult and less natural to do, for easier reading.

Question: 

I was raised as an only child. Half and step sibs came later in life, but from birth til leaving home, it was just me. I have felt lucky about this. 

Almost everyone I know with brothers and sisters have had fraught, difficult relationships with them. Is this as common as it seems to me? If you have siblings, has it been an easy relationship or not so much?

My Answer:

Being an only definitely influences your personality, not always for the better (stereotypically, more selfish, better at interacting with adults but less good at interacting with peers, less likely to understand give and take in relationships). 

My relationship with my brother (who is three years younger) is fine, but not super close. Siblings who are one or two years apart tend to have more intense relationships, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. Twins, of course, are their own thing (and are almost always on pretty good terms with each other). Big age difference siblings start to be more similar to only children as the age gap gets greater. My two children, who are two years apart, and my wife and her sister, who were two years apart, are probably closer than my brother and I were at three years apart. 

Birth order (oldest, youngest, middle, etc.) also significantly impacts your personality and outlook on lots of thing - it even significantly predicts the side that a scientist is likely to take between two competing scientific theories. 

Both of my children benefitted in their relationships in life from having an opposite sex sibling. People who don't have an opposite sex sibling tend to be more wary of the opposite sex in early puberty. 

As an estate planner and probate lawyer for three decades (I no longer do that work), each additional sibling increases the likelihood of will contests and disputes (even in non-blended families). Families with two full siblings are usually low conflict when the last parent dies. At four full siblings it is 50-50 between high conflict and low conflict. At five or six, there are usually two or three factions among full blooded siblings, at seven or more there are almost always factions. 

Families that have half-siblings and step siblings have much more conflict than families with full siblings, although timing matters a lot. Non-full blood siblings who were pre-teens together living in the same household (or if some were pre-teens and the oldest was a young teen) interact much more like full siblings with each other and also almost never have romantic feelings for each other, unlike those who were never in the same household or started living together as teens or later who are more like roommates with each other and sometimes do have romantic feelings for each other. So sometimes in a blended family, some of the non-full blooded siblings act like full siblings to each other, while others do not.

Post-Script

On balance I think our society as a whole probably loses something of value by having more only children, and by having far fewer middle children, than it did historically, in terms of adult social interactions and in terms of having less variety in personality types when a mix of birth order related personality types is valuable.

Also, while outside my realm of personal experience, it is pretty clear that children raised in polygamous families (usually with many children with each of the sister wives), that at least in Mormon history, those children had less desirable life outcomes than children raised in large monogamous families (with a far small total number of children in the household from their shared father).

Red County And Blue County Realities

The realities of life in conservative leaning (red) parts of the United States are different than in liberal leaning (blue) parts of the United States. Roughly speaking, these distinctions play out not so much at the state level as at the county level. This post explores some of the differences in lived realities for people in blue counties compared to red counties that helps to explain their stark political differences in the U.S. as part of a more cohesive narrative that can help build understanding about their true causes. Of course, even this rather lengthy list is far from comprehensive.

Economic Productivity and Population Density

Per capita GDP in blue countries is roughly twice what it is in red counties. This is huge!

The population density in the inhabited parts of blue counties is much higher than the population density of red counties and "purple counties" which are evenly balanced between liberal and conservative leanings, tend to have intermediate population densities which are often suburban.

Ski resort towns and other counties with tourism based economies (e.g. greater Las Vegas) often have low population densities when crudely comparing permanent residents to the land area of the county, but have large swaths of land where no one lives with small dense resort style housing areas which house many seasonal residents in addition to permanent residents.

The link between economic productivity per capita and population density isn't accidental. One of the most consistent empirical laws of economics is that higher population density leads to greater productivity which makes it possible to pay higher wages and necessary to do so in a competitive employment marketplace. It holds true across cultures, across geographical regions, and across thousands of years. It has been true all of the way back to Jericho and Sumer and the Nile River Valley and the Indus River Valley to the present. It was true in the pre-Columbian Americas in North America, in Mesoamerica, and in South America.

Transit and Electric Vehicles

Public transportation is more cost effective and provides better service in higher population density blue counties than in lower population density red counties.

Red counties also have longer average motor vehicle trips than blue counties, because people are spread out further from each other, and longer average trip lengths (and longer peak monthly and annual trip lengths) disfavor all but the very latest electric vehicles relative to gasoline and diesel vehicles.

Housing, the Cost of Living, and Wages

The cost of living is much lower in red counties than in blue counties. This is mostly driven by lower housing costs in red counties (both renting and owning) than in blue counties relative to median wages, and by lower business real estate costs in red counties relative to blue countries that indirectly impact retail prices.

Lower housing prices in red counties mean that homelessness is much less of a crisis in red counties than in blue counties.

The pressure to increase the minimum wage is greater in blue counties where the cost of living is higher than it is in red counties where the cost of living is lower. A "living wage" in a blue county is higher than the "living wage" needed to maintain the same standard of living in a red county. 

Slower home price appreciation in red counties than in blue counties also means slower property tax increases over time.

Lower home prices in red counties also mean that red county homeowners who have owned their homes for many years have much less wealth in the form of home equity than blue county homeowners who have owned their homes for comparable periods of time.

A lower cost of living also places less pressure on red county residents to set aside savings that build wealth, than blue state residents who know that they need to save money to be able to afford a security deposit or down payment for a home, to afford education for their children which is critical for a blue county child's future income, and to afford other major purchases. Of course, lower incomes also make it harder to save money.

But with little home equity if they sell their homes, and less savings, and a higher cost of living in blue counties relative to incomes for less educated and less skilled worker wage premiums in blue counties, many residents of red counties are basically trapped there. They can't afford to move to a blue county even if they'd like to do so. The jaws of the trap are even tighter for red county residents with no blue county residents who are no longer working and are on fixed incomes.

Blue counties have higher housing costs because their populations tend to grow faster than the housing supply as people move their for their larger number of jobs that pay better than in red counties. 

About half of red counties, if not more, are losing population while their housing stock remains more or less the same, and even those red counties that have growing populations are growing slower than blue counties, so it is easier for the construction industry to increase the supply of housing enough to keep up with the slowly growing population. Moreover, in many red counties, populations have been declining, stagnant, or at least below the national average, relentlessly, for decade after decade pretty much starting in 1960s and almost every decade since in the last sixty years. Indeed, the percentage of the population engaged in farming has declined for almost every single decade from the 1790s until into the 2000s. These long slow declines undermine even hope for an eventual recovery or stabilization.

Since housing prices in red counties seem likely to fall, or at least only keep up with inflation, this also makes investing in maintaining and improving homes in red counties a bad investment. In contrast, in blue counties with every soaring real estate prices, keeping a home well-maintained and up to date with renovations and improvements can yield disproportionate returns, causing the existing housing stock in blue counties to be in better shape and more up to date.

More educated and skilled workers make much more income in blue counties than in red counties, which more than makes up for the higher cost of living there. Less educated and skilled workers also make more income in blue counties than in red counties, but not enough to make up for the higher cost of living there.

Tighter economic circumstances and economic stagnation in a community, also fosters zero sum game thinking, and eats away at empathy as taking care of your own becomes your priority. All potential forms of competition, from international trade, immigration, female workers competing with male workers, and non-white workers competing with white workers, all starts to look like a threat in this mindset, whether or not this is true. And, older white men without college educations, in particular, who are the core of the MAGA movement have seen their demographic's economic prosperity decline in relative terms to lots of other groups (even if it has not actually meaningfully declined even after adjusting for inflation and their own costs of living are low), through events taking place mostly in their own lifetimes.

Fertility

It is more expensive to raise children in a blue county with its higher cost of living, than in a red county. So, families in blue counties are smaller, with fewer children in response to those realities. Blue county children are also more likely to need and benefit from expensive higher education (which red county voters don't want to support funding for since higher education confers a much smaller benefit to them than it does to the children of their blue county peers).

The expansion of economic opportunities for women also greatly increase the opportunity costs for all women, in blue counties and red counties alike, of having more children. This opportunity cost has caused the number of children per woman per lifetime to fall particularly fast for less educated women who previously weren't qualified to be teachers or nurses, and had few options other than being house wives, but can now work in a variety of less skilled jobs previously held predominantly by men.

This has made the "trad wife" ideal unattainable for most families, but especially those consisting of non-college educated couples with lower incomes who need two incomes just to support themselves and one or two kids. But when women are less economically dependent upon their husbands and often have steadier and better paying work than their husbands, then families are less tight economic glue holding them together, and a provider man's position as "head of the household" is undermined.

Nostalgia

In a red county that has been stagnant or in decline for half a century or more, nostalgia for the "good old days" can be intense. High school educated people used to have incomes proportionately much closer to those of college educated workers and managers, even if the absolute buying power of those workers hasn't actually fallen, and this has gotten steadily worse since the early 1970s. In contrast, blue county college educated men have seen uninterrupted prosperity (and a lot more men have college educations now than in the 1970s). Women have seen their access to higher education and to more remunerative employment in non-traditional professions soar. Minority members are much less shut out of the top levels of the career ladder than they were in the 1960s even if they haven't reached parity, improving in relative terms. High school educated men have stagnated, in part, because of the structure of the economy (it is important to recognize that the two and a half decades after World War II were a remarkable one time only exception that can't be reproduced for the most part, and not the norm), and in part, because the average was being pulled up by smart, socially functional men who had no access to college educations then and now have gained college educations leaving their less bright and more difficult peers behind in a new economy. 

Civil rights aren't a zero sum game, but it is easy for a high school educated man prone to feeling aggrieved for economic reasons to see it that way, and women and minorities have secured a lot of civil rights that they once lacked. 

Smaller and less stable families for all but billionaires or near billionaires, it seems, has also undermined and narrowed the role of men as fathers of many children, something was was commonplace for middle class men in the Baby Boom era (although people forget that this time period was also one with much higher poverty rates than those of today until the "War on Poverty" rebalanced the status quo a bit).

The patriarchy has weakened, and they are the heirs of the patriarchy. So, of course, they yearn for the good old days, even though that was facilitated by key factors that can't be recreated with new policies.

Unions

The union narrative of the left is that unions brought us the weekend, the 40 hour work week, overtime, workplace safety, employer provided health care, and more. And, this isn't wrong. But it is incomplete.

Unions facilitate turning the economic power of workers into concrete economic gains for them in an efficient manner. But this facilitation and negotiation and political action related role only works at times when the demand for the labor of the unionized workers is great and the supply is smaller.

When there is a glut of less skilled, less educated workers, because the economy has been transformed to be less labor intensive, through automation, for example, and because other countries long ago restored the manufacturing capacity that was destroyed in World War II and no longer need to import manufactured goods to the same extent, unions don't provide workers with much in the way of concrete benefits because they don't have much to negotiate with. 

Likewise, part of the shortage of workers during the Baby Boom was because women left the work force en masse to have kids (a desire deferred during the Great Depression and World War II which were times of great scarcity), reducing the supply of workers and leaving the men who  re-entered the work force after World War II in greater demand with more economic power. This also won't recur. The many men who died or were seriously injured in World War II also shrunk the supply of able bodied adult male workers in the U.S., which is certainly not something we would like to repeat.

This, in a nutshell, is why private sector labor unions have declined steadily until just a few years ago (when worker economic power and demand was near a prolonged record high also accompanied by prolonged record low unemployment). For decades they couldn't deliver. And, since the labor market is weaker in the less productive red county economies, unions are even less effective in red counties than they are in blue counties.

Employers never like unions, but in red states, there isn't an intense worker desire to protect unions because they provide minimal benefits there, so the legal balance has tipped against unions in red states with things like "right to work laws", while in blue states, where the strong economy gives workers more power and unions more to bargain with, the balance between unions and management legally and politically has been more stable, because unions in blue states can deliver more to workers who therefore have a more intense desire to support them politically against employer attacks.

Religion

Being religious provides few economic and educational benefits to college educated upper middle class people, and can be a hinderance. And, it provides only modest economic and educational benefits to working class girls. But it provides great economic and educational benefits to working class boys (both black and white).

Religiosity is also strongly associated with uncertainty in life, especially economic uncertainty. Less educated people, on average, are at much higher risk of unemployment and prolonged unemployment during their working years. Farmers and fishermen are also subject to great uncertainty in their economic prospects due to factors like weather and the availability of fish from year to year than even "middle skilled" workers in blue counties and "urban farmers" (who work in truck gardens or indoor marijuana grows).  So, people in red counties are more likely to see religion as more important in their lives even controlling for whether they are religiously affiliated or not.

Red counties (especially in the South, in Utah, and in other Mormon dominated counties) have a far greater percentage of Christians with far less denominational variation than blue counties. Red counties are far fewer religious non-Christians (e.g., Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists) than blue counties do. So, religious diversity is not part of the everyday experience of residents of red counties.

Family Stability

The same economic instability and uncertainty, and lack of economic prosperity that makes red county residents more religious also dramatically influences their family stability.

The biggest predictor of whether a cohabiting couple will not marry, or whether a married couple will divorce, in basically every culture, is whether the woman in the couple earns more in the cash economy than the man. And, men without college educations, who make up a disproportionate share of men in red counties, are much more likely to have sustained periods of unemployment and to have mediocre earnings that have been stagnant, adjusting for inflation, for decades, than men with college educations (or even "mid-skilled jobs" and some college) in blue counties.

Also, high school educated women who leave the work force to have kids for a while receive few, if any, economic penalties to their earning capacity when they return to the work force, while college educated women who do that see their earning capacity when they return to the work force plummet. And women in red counties are much more likely to obtain some level of post-high school education than men. Indeed, programs to help women improve their education and skills often succeed in improving the economic well being of women, while programs to help men do the same rarely attract interest from men or have much of an impact.

As a result, couples with high school educations are failing to marry (the average high school educated couple has a child two years before getting married while the average college educated couple has a child two years after getting married and does so at an older age), and getting divorced when they do marry, at unprecedented high rates (in white couples echoing trends that started to appear with black couples without college educations in the late 1960s, as discussed for example, in the Moyihan report at the time).

In these breakups and divorces, where the inability of the man in the couple to be the stronger economic provider in the relationship is a key cause of the breakup, the man also has little if any ability to pay child support and alimony, or to provide a significant property division settlement (i.e. the legal rights a woman gains from being married).

The economic struggle that high school or less educated couples have to stay employed and earn a decent income after decades of wage stagnation for high school educated workers, also makes these families much more vulnerable to situations where they neglect or abuse their children, often resulting in a termination of parental rights or just child protective service intervention.

Both unstable couples, and neglect/abuse situations, means that many red county children often grow up without their father as part of the household for prolonged periods of time (echoing the experience of African-American children half a century earlier).

These trends are also exacerbated by the trend towards assortative marriage. There are fewer marriages in which one member of a couple is college educated and higher earning and the other is not college educated and has lower earning capacity. In part, this is because people have long tended to marry people of similar IQ, but now higher IQ women obtain college educations, while historically, this was much less common.

So, red county families are vastly more fragile than blue county families. This has led to a perennial state of moral panic in red counties about masculine identity and "family values" which when viewed as a moral problem prompts an attack on perceived sources of immorality and lost of masculine identity, which has led red county men to try to express their insecurity about their masculinity by trying to display that in ways other than being an economic providers, and by scapegoating LGBT people.

In contrast, college educated couples, who are much more common in blue counties, are much more likely to marry before having children, and have divorce rates that are falling to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Higher Education

In blue counties, higher education programs at all levels from certificates to associate's degrees to four year college degrees greatly increase your earning potential and pay for themselves in as little as a year or two, and usually in less eight years for all but the least qualified students in the least technical programs.

In red counties, higher education programs other than four year college degrees are a net money loser even at low community college tuitions when living at home, and even a four year degree can take as much as twenty-four years to pay for itself with higher earnings.

This is fundamentally because urban areas with healthy economies have productive ways to utilize the skilled and abilities developed in college, while rural and small town economies don't have jobs that productively utilize what someone learns from a college education.

See here and here.

Immigration

Blue counties have greatly disproportionate shares of immigrants and, in particular, disproportionate shares of immigrants who are settled residents of their communities rather than migrant workers living semi-nomadic lives. Due to their familiarity with immigrants in their daily lives, residents of blue counties are much less afraid of immigrants, who they know from experience to be good community members (at least to the same extent or more than native born members of the community) and who they know from experience are not disproportionately likely to commit crimes.

Red countries have a disproportionately smaller share of immigrants, who are often limited primarily to medical professionals and migrant farm workers. Due to their lack of familiarity with immigrants and the lack of a healthy economy, red county residents are much more likely to fear immigrants. Attitudes towards immigrants and globalization is also influenced by the reduced likelihood of red county residents to have had any higher education (as discussed above), or to have travelled abroad or to have lived in very different places within the United States (as discussed below).

Travel and Migration

Residents of red counties are much less likely to have a passport or to have traveled abroad than residents of blue counties. They are also less likely to have spent significant amounts of time living in places in the United States other than the vicinity of the place that they grew up, and even when they have lived elsewhere are likely to have lived somewhere else quite similar to the place that they grew up.

Studies of cousin marriage have shown that people in cousin marriages are less economically successful on average, primarily as a consequence of being less likely to leave the community where they grew up to move to larger cities.

Race

Some counties are overwhelmingly white, and those counties tend to be red counties that are rural or small town settings, especially in Appalachia, the rural Midwest, and much of the mountain states. The main exceptions are in New England (e.g. rural and small town areas in Vermont and Maine and Western Massachusetts) and counties defined by college towns.

Counties that are majority non-white tend to be blue counties even if they are similar to red counties in other respects, these include most of New Mexico and parts of Southern Colorado, counties with Indian Reservations (from Oklahoma to Arizona to North Dakota), and much of rural Hawaii and Alaska.

Quite a few red counties, however, are biracial. They have a white majority, and a non-white minority, usually black in the South and the Rust Belt, usually Hispanic in the Southwest, and sometimes Native American in countries near Indian Reservations and in Alaska (in the case of Alaska Natives) that don't actually have Indian Reservations or Alaskan Native communities. Few red countries, in contrast, and many blue counties, are genuinely multiracial, with significant numbers of people from more than two races or ethnicities.

Age, Health Care, Disabilities, and Credit

Residents of red counties tend to be older than residents of blue counties (except that Mormon dominated red counties tend to have younger residents).

Blue counties have more specialized and higher quality medical care available, and more medical professionals per capita than red countries which have a greater need for medical care due to their older populations. Blue states also tend to have fewer people who are uninsured since unlike some red states, they don't intentionally turn away free federal funds for Medicaid expansion and mostly don't provide state funding for health care beyond the federal minimum contribution. 

Red county residents have less interaction with medical professionals, especially medical doctors, than blue county residents, and a greater proportion of medical doctors in red counties are foreign born than in blue counties, which can impair the quality of doctor-patient interactions and communication.

Red county residents are less likely to have good health care outcomes following trauma incidents and strokes than blue county residents since they are less likely to reach a trauma center or top quality hospital during the "golden hour." More generally, red county residents have less first hand experience with what top quality modern health care can accomplish, on average, than blue county residents.

Red county men in the work force are much more likely to be employed in jobs with highly elevated rates of occupational injuries (like farming, fishing, timber work, mining, and construction) than blue county men in the work force.

A greater proportion of workers in red counties have physically demanding jobs that make it far more common for these workers to become disabled or forced to retire at younger ages than in blue counties.

Higher percentages of the population that are uninsured, and general lower levels of economic security among high school educated people who are more common in red counties also mean that average credit ratings are much lower in red counties than in blue counties, and that a very substantial proportion of the population in red counties have money judgments outstanding that can cause their wages and bank accounts to be garnished and their property seized, which can build animosity towards the legal system, and distrust of law enforcement officers who enforce judgments and of financial institutions in red counties. In blue counties where economic prosperity is more often uninterrupted and adequate health insurance is more common, in contrast, credit ratings are higher, money judgments are much more rare, and trust in the civil courts and financial institutions is much greater. Lack of health insurance also breeds justifiable fear of interactions with the medical establishment which can lead to financial ruin for many red county residents, while it rarely has that effect for blue county residents.

Self-Respect and Fragile Self-Esteem

The non-college educated white men at the core of the MAGA movement have taken immense blows to their self-esteem in many cases, and if they haven't have seen friends and neighbors who have.

The fact that they didn't go to college or went and didn't graduate brands them as a failure. They have failed to be reliable and prosperous economic providers. They have often failed to hold together intimate relationships and marriages. They have often failed to fulfill the expectations of society for fathers. They are often reliant on government payments, perhaps disability payments or SSI or Social Security, even if they earned them, rather than earning money from meaningful work.

In the MAGA heartland of West Virginia, 20% of the state's entire GDP consists of federal spending in the state less federal taxes paid from the state, and this is true of basically every county. Even if some of this is subtle, like Medicare and Medicaid provided health coverage, or a Social Security disability pension that was someone's only option to survive, a disabled man of working age who worked in physical labor all of his life, still sees receiving this support as a blow to his sense of self-respect which leaves his self-esteem as something fragile to prop up by means other than being an economic provider. Receiving government aid can feel bad even when you need it and it makes you better off because it is a constant reminder of your own failures.

Cursing the federal government and claiming you can be independent of it, reality be damned, can help compensate for the blow to one's self-esteem and self-respect that flows from being dependent upon it, even though it is counterproductive (at least in the short term) to do so.

Veterans, Hunters, Dangerous Animals, Law Enforcement Response Times, Firearms, And Crime News

Men in red countries are much more likely to be military veterans, than men in blue counties.

Men in red counties are much more likely to have engaged in recreational hunting than men in blue counties.

The higher proportion of men in red counties who are military veterans and/or have engaged in recreational hunting, means that men in red countries are much more likely to be gun owners than men in blue counties, and in particular, are much more likely to own firearms other than handguns.

Due to lower population densities in rural America, where the vast majority of counties are red counties, the average red county resident is a much greater distance from the average law enforcement responder than the average blue county resident, and as a result law enforcement response times to 9-1-1 calls are longer in red counties than in blue counties. Encounters with dangerous wildlife are also much more common in red counties than in blue counties. These circumstances creates a greater perceived need to own firearms for self-defense and the defense of others in red counties than in blue counties.

Also, while blue county news reporting typically covers a whole metropolitan area, resulting in a constant stream of news about violent crime, red county news reporting is typically hyperlocal, covering only a portion of the county around a small town, resulting in fewer reports of violent crimes near the people reading it, even though their crime rates per capita are actually higher. So, red counties tend to be perceived as less crime ridden than they are, while blue counties tend to be perceived as more crime ridden than they actually are. This interferes with the ability of people in red counties to see the connection between their high rates of firearm ownership and lax gun control enforcement and the rates of suicide and homicide and police use of firearms that they experience. In contrast, the connection seems stronger than it is in blue counties, because there is so much crime to cover in a populous metro area that only the most serious violent crimes which often involve firearms, receive news coverage, creating the perception that this is the most typical kind of crime in blue counties even though this isn't the case.

Mixed Feelings About The Tradwife Movement

I'm not disposed to think harshly of the tradwife movement, even though it is full of Millennials and Zoomers who are glamorizing an era they never lived. Those Millennials tend not to acknowledge the many serious problems facing wives in that era and may not even be aware existed. It was a time when wives often couldn't have a bank account, or at least a credit card of their own, couldn't take out a mortgage, and lived in circumstances when their husbands do do bad things to them with impunity. 

So, why am I less concerned about them?

Homemaking Can Make Sense For Most Wives Some Of The Time

For all that current norms make clear that it shouldn't be women's fate or obligation, the reality is that a very large share of all adult American women will spend a few to a great many years of their lives as full time homemakers in a married couple. 

Raising kids is a tough job. It's hard to do when both parents work. And, trying to have both parents equally share money earning and parenting responsibilities equally, rather than having them specialize their roles in the family, isn't always the best option.

Indeed, a family where a wife is a homemaker is most likely to happen these days in college educated couples, because they're the only ones who can afford to do so. 

One of the important reasons we have a legally recognized institution of marriage at all is so that mothers of young children (there are exceptions to this pattern but it is the predominant one) can feel secure and have legal protections for their well-being if they take the economic risks associated with being a homemaker within a couple for a while. 

The Economic Prosperity Of The Era Being Glamorized Was Nice.

Plenty of folks on both the left and on the right politically are nostalgic for the economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. This economic prosperity made this family structure a viable possibility for most people, because you could afford to raise multiple children, and own a home and car, on one man's income then, even if you had only a high school education and a rank and file worker job. 

There insurmountable reasons that we can't restore the sources of that prosperity

Some of the economic circumstances that made that happen can't be restored, others can. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States was a global economic manufacturing powerhouse that created lots of demand at businesses for workers who didn't have to be very educated, intellectually talented, or skilled, which was fortunately, because high school diplomas were almost as rare as college degrees are today.

In part, this was a product of the fact that World War II was fought in the rest of the world in Europe and Asia, and that war destroyed the civilian manufacturing industry, while apart from a single day at Pearl Harbor, World War II was not fought in U.S. territory leaving it unscathed. And, World War II had also established a massive industrial base that was used to conduct the war effort of the United States and its allies in the places where World War II was being fought which could be swiftly converted to civilian production when the war was over. Everyone else with the money to buy goods was outsourcing their manufacturing to the U.S. while they were rebuilding a post-war society from the rubble that the war left behind. This economic situation can't be restored. 

There are now countries with manufacturing economies all over the world. Some of these countries that got started on a low wage, lightly regulated model to undercut U.S. factories that were more expensive, like Mexico, China, Vietnam and Thailand. There are also other countries with strong manufacturing economies like Germany, South Korea, and Japan, that have much higher wages and much greater regulation but have managed to master labor-management relations better than the U.S. did and automated their operations sufficiently to make up for their higher labor and compliance costs. The U.S. manufacturing industry has followed the high wages and automation path of Germany, South Korea, and Japan, but has done so only successfully enough to keep domestic manufacturing output more or less flat with fewer workers, and a declining share of goods sold domestically manufactured. The U.S. imports a lot of the manufactured goods that it consumes from these countries, because they've developed a competitive advantage compared to the U.S. in this part of their economies.

The favorability of the 1950s and 1960s for less educated workers was also a product of the fact that manufacturing technology was still pretty primitive. There was very little automation and lots of rote manual labor that was required. Since then, manufacturing has become much more automated, and factory work now requires skilled technicians who usually have at least associate's degrees, if not more education, to run the machines that do the rote work that used to be done with manual labor. It is a transition that has been made possible because a vastly larger share of the U.S. adult population is better educated now than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. This is another economic situation can't be restored.

But, other parts of the 1950s and 1960s era of economic prosperity may be possible to restore. Lots of people don't know it, but that era was also dominated by pervasive and powerful unions who went on strike a lot, and had very high taxes on the most affluent taxpayers, which were invested in infrastructure, education, and other long term public sector investments that made our society more prosperous.

Our modern economy relies not just on having lots of people who show up to work and do their jobs, but also on the intellectual knowledge, skills, and talents of those workers. Modern technologies require those intellectual aptitudes at a level required to be sufficiently productive, and a much smaller share of the population has those aptitudes, than the share of the population that was suitable for manufacturing work in the economy of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Even in countries that have used public policy to be more equitable than the current U.S. economy, a productivity divide still exists in their workforces to a similar degree to the U.S. But, those countries use taxes and social welfare programs run by the government more heavily than the U.S. to equalize outcomes. 

A Society With Stable Marriages Into Which Most Children Are Born Isn't Unattractive.

While some of the legal and economic and social forces that kept the divorce rate low then were and are problematic, it is also true that divorce rates were very low, and out of wedlock birth rates were also very low (at least in the early part of this time frame for everyone, and in the later part of this time frame for everyone but black families with fathers who were not high school graduates). 

Nobody feels warm fuzzy feelings about divorces, even when they are the lesser evil for a married couple, and nobody wishes that a larger share of children were born to single mothers from couples that couldn't manage to stick together. 

In East Asia, they have stable marriages and few out of wedlock births at the cost of few marriages that are often late in life, record low numbers of births overall, and multigenerational caretaking pressures in marriage that lots of women aren't willing to tolerate, so it isn't impossible even though it has high hidden costs. 

In Northern Europe, they have unstable marriages, often late in life, and lots of out of wedlock births, made possible by strong social safety nets, and low but not quite as low birth rates overall, and more personal freedom and individual actualization. 

Neither leading approach in the world to organizing marriage and parenting at the societal level in the developed world is without its drawbacks. 

In the U.S., we have ended up with a system that charts a third way with an intense marriage divide associated with socio-economic class and education. U.S. marriages are almost as solid as they were in the 1960s and out of wedlock births are rare among college graduates, but marriages are increasingly uncommon and fragile when they happen among people with no college education, and couples with no college education who eventually marry, on average, have kids first, and marry a few years later. 

The reason for the divide is counterintuitive and isn't one that college educated feminists would applaud or acknowledge. The marriages of college educated women in the U.S. are solid, and their children tend to be born after these women marry, because the lifetime career earning penalty for leaving the workforce to be a homemaker when and if a wife tries to return to her pre-parenthood career, is much steeper for college educated women in administrative and professional careers than it is for women without college educations whose careers don't require lots of uninterrupted experience to maximize one's earnings.

A woman who is a doctor or a lawyer who takes six years out of the work force to raise children when they are little may end up making half or less of the salary that they would have been making at the same age if they'd not had children and continued working in that time period. In contrast, a woman who is a waitress or day care worker or receptionist or CNA is going to make about the same income when they return to the workforce after six years at home taking care of their children as their peers who didn't have kids and worked continuously at the same job the whole time do. Meanwhile, a professional doctor or lawyer husband who continues to work uninterrupted while his wife stays at home with the kids will see his income increase substantially over six years, while a husband who is a plumber or CNA or truck driver who has stayed in the work force for those six years will still be earning about the same amount as he did six years earlier adjusted only for inflation. And, the high school only educated husband is likely to have significant bouts of lengthy unemployment from time to time during which he will be an economic burden on his family which creates a powerful economic incentive for his working wife to divorce him, while a college educated husband is likely to have uninterrupted prosperity and find new, decent paying employment fairly swiftly if he loses his job for some reason.

As a result, in a college educated couple, wives who have been homemakers for a few years become much more economically dependent upon their husbands than wives in college educated couples who aren't nearly so economically dependent upon their husbands and will periodically have husbands who are economically dependent upon them. Economic dependency is the biggest part of the glue that keeps college educated couples together with kids born in wedlock, that is absent in working class couples, although better social and interpersonal skills among college educated couples, and cultural norms about marriage and parenting the emerge from peer pressures when the economic incentives work the way that they usually do for people like you, may play a modest secondary role in this divide as well.

The economic dependency of wives with many children with their husband in an economy where few occupations and jobs were open to women and those that were available didn't pay well drove the stability and frequency of marriage and of having children within marriage in the 1950s and 1960s as well, as much as legal formalities like the availability of divorces only based upon fault and ill-developed systems for reliably obtaining child support and alimony in the event of a divorce.

Now, this doesn't mean that all college educated women end up being "tradwives". Lots of Millennials and Zoomers buck tradition and just don't have kids at all and never leave the workplace and never become economically dependent upon their husbands or partners. Some of them do become homemakers and become somewhat economically dependent upon their husbands. But, even then, their college educations mean that they can still make much better money if they return to the workforce than women in the 1950s and 1960s did. Birth control and abortion mean that modern homemakers are likely to have one or two kids, rather than three or four or five of them, also making it easier to return to the workforce sooner. Divorce is now available on a no-fault basis, and child support and alimony awards are a lot more predictable and collectible so long as your ex-husband has a decent income, which college educated men generally do (and if a college educated man willfully earns less to spite his wife's ability to get child support and alimony from him, modern legal doctrines punish him severely). Wives and ex-wives today have more economic rights of their own than they did in the 1950s and 1960s in practical reality at least. And, wives today have much strong institutional and cultural support than wives in the 1950s and 1960s did if a husband is abusive towards his family.

In short, while college educated wives still have enough economic dependency on their husbands to make waiting to have kids until marriage worth it, and to make staying married worthwhile, unlike wives in the 1950s and 1960s, their economic dependency and legal status is not so low that they need to stay married even when their situation is horrible.

And, lets face it. Unless your marriage was unimaginably horrible, divorce is not a desirable thing for anyone even if it may be, on balance in someone's opinion, the best available option. 

It is the exception and not the norm for a divorced person to not rant emotionally about that experience. Shuttling kids between households under the usual shared parenting arrangement is complicated, cumbersome, takes more social skills to manage than parenting while married to your co-parent did, and leaves both resulting household for the children poorer because the large and very real economies of scale that come from living in a single household are lost and because the parents have lots the benefits that having specialized parenting v. higher income employment did. Sometimes stepparents, and prospective stepparents, really are evil towards their stepchildren and that isn't good for the kids. And, often, divorced couples with shared children have to return to the courthouse multiple times because they can't agree on how to handle inevitable changes in the parents' employment and living situations and as the children grow up and have different needs. Single motherhood is a recipe for poverty and hardship and a missing male role model for a child, even though an absent father can make living and parenting a lot more conflict-free than an involved father who the mother doesn't want as a spouse.

Trusting Your Spouse Doesn't Make You A Bad Person And Presents Less Risk Now Than It Used To.

Certainly, there is also nothing so horrible about being a woman who is an idealist who loves and trusts her husband so much that she has faith that their husband won't abuse their relationship in which she is trying her best to reciprocate by treating him well. 

The actual reality is that people are often blind to the darker potentials for mishaps in their own personal lives than they are in the lives of others from which they have more distance. 

But a little hope and trust and idealism isn't morally blameworthy. And, in any case, for better or for worse, modern day tradwives who cultivate marriages along these lines still have more institutional protections for themselves against abuses of their relationship with their husbands than their predecessors in the 1950s and 1960s did if things do go wrong, a discussed above. 

Women have more rights now which makes the relationship less of a risk if it doesn't go well even if many tradwives don't realize how much better they have it than wives did in the 1950s and 1960s and take their protections for granted. If a pregnancy threatens to lock a woman into a bad relationship and dependency for many years to come, she can unilaterally get an abortion in many states to prevent that, something that was not an option back then.

Many Tradwives don't Acknowledge That Their Lifestyle Is Only Possible With Privilege

If anything, the most prominent and outspoken tradwives of today can be faulted most for their failure to acknowledge the economic privileges that they personally as individuals enjoy which makes this lifestyle possible for them, when it isn't possible for others who aren't so lucky. 

This lifestyle is only possible if your husband is very economically successful in a way that is very stable and sustainable. Their failure to recognize that this isn't a lifestyle that is economically feasible for most people in their generation, whether their less privileged peers would want to emulate them or not, can be a problem. 

The problem is that their message can lead to economic ruin and hardship and unhappy traps for women in tradwive styles couples if the husband is not so economically prosperous and secure. The "tradwife for all" ideal can unfairly shame and denigrate husbands and potential husbands who are good partners interpersonally in a relationship, but aren't quiet so economically elite.

If you have a solid income that is economically stable, you are a desirable husband to someone who is interested in the tradwife lifestyle. But if you don't make all that much money and have an education and career that leaves you with bouts of unemployment or an unsteady income, you and your wife need to be a two career couple to make your family work economically, and that isn't a good fit to the tradwife model.

Improving Government

Government has a mix of problems. Sometimes it regulates too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it owns too much, sometimes too little, sometimes it is just operated in the wrong way. This post is a grab bag of ideas about improving it.

* Sidewalks should be publicly owned and maintained. Individual responsibility of property owners for this doesn't work because low rates of non-maintenance (including lack of prompt snow removal) makes the network of sidewalks much less valuable.

* Bicycles should usually not share roads with cars and trucks. They should use sidewalks or dedicated, protected bike paths and lanes.

* Amtrak has failed and should be shut down outside the Northeast Corridor.

* The U.S. Postal System worked well for a long time, but in the era of widespread parcel delivery services and e-mails and texts, it no longer does. Strong Veteran's preferences and higher pay than private sector equivalents don't justify it. Free mail for incumbents in Congress don't justify it. Delivering junk mail is not a good enough reason for a massive public enterprise. Fewer and fewer letters of significance are delivered that way. Money orders are no longer economically important and can be provided by private commercial banks and money services. Subsidizing rural living isn't a good reason for it.

* Occupational licensing is required when it shouldn't be. When it is required, requirements like a lack of a criminal record are often inappropriate for people who have been non-recidivist for a long enough time (about five to seven years) when the risk of future crime fades to the background level. Worse yet is construction trade licensing at the local level when it should be at the state level, fostering a high level of non-compliance. Independent legal para-professions should be allowed much more liberally, although licensing that might be appropriate. There should be a common database of licensing discipline since many disqualifying acts for one profession should also apply to others.

* Zoning and land use regulation should be dramatically paired back and places like Colorado finally realize that this is true and driving high housing prices. Deregulating is better than mandating affordable housing or rent control. Development fees to mitigate externalities of government costs caused by development, however, make sense. 

* Involuntary landmark designation is almost always a bad idea and an unfunded mandate. If it is important enough historically to preserve the government should buy it and rent it.

* Building codes are critical and non-compliance with permit requirements is far too high. But building codes are also too restrictive and the processing of building permits is much too slow. A system of private building code compliance auditors similar to the CPA system might be better.

* We should do a better job of discouraging people from building disaster prone housing in flood zones, fire zones and other "stupid zones".

* We should do a better job of encouraging off site manufacturing of buildings and large building modules.

* Property taxes are a decent way to finance local government (and shouldn't exempt non-profits and governments other than the one imposing them) but are a bad way to finance public K-12 education which is the main way that they are used now.

* Electing coroners, treasurers, clerks, surveyors, secretaries of state, engineers, and judges (even in routine judicial retention elections) is a horrible idea.

* Electing sheriffs and district attorneys and attorneys-general isn't as horrible an idea, but is still a worse idea than having elected officials appoint them, directly or indirectly.

* State and local school and college boards would be better not elected by the general public. Local school boards should be elected by student's parents. College boards could be elected by alumni or appointed by the elected official who make their funding decisions. State school boards should be appointed by the state officials who fund state K-12 education.

* Shorter ballots are better. In the England, there is one nation election in which you vote for a single legislator on a partisan ballot in a single district, irregularly, but not less than every five years absent a world war, for a government that does everything that the state and federal governments do in the U.S., with no primary elections since parties nominate their own candidates internally, and there is one set of partisan local council elections for one or two posts, and there are few referenda a lifetime, and they are democratic enough, despite having a monarchy and a house of lords. Very modest public electoral input is enough.

* I don't favor a system quite as simple as England's. But we should still have much shorter ballots.

* Rare recall elections make sense for officials who serve longer terms and perhaps for judges and other public officials who are now elected but shouldn't be.

* State constitutions and local charters should have less detail and so that changes to them should be things that require voter approval and not housekeeping measures.

* Some referenda on tax and debt issues is appropriate, but Colorado, with TABOR overdoes it. New taxes, and not new revenues from existing taxes, should get public votes. Maybe bond issues that commit a government to substantial tax obligations from general revenues but not renewals of them.

* Citizen initiatives have their place in overcoming systemic flaws in the legislative system and making elections interesting to voters. But it should be a bit harder and more structured and generally should avoid spending and taxing decisions that need to be made globally.

* Colorado mostly does the probate process right, although probate procedure could use more structure. Most states make the process too intrusive.

* When there is a single post in a candidate election, dispensing with primaries, having a majority to win requirement, and having runoff elections would be preferable to first past the post elections and to instant runoff elections.

* There would be merit to electing state legislatures and state congressional delegations by proportional representation.

* There would be merit to making state legislatures unicameral.

* The electoral college should be abolished in favor of a direct popular vote.

* The franchise should be expanded. The voting age should be reduced to sixteen. Non-citizens should be allowed to vote. Felons, even felons in prison, should be allowed to vote (in their pre-incarceration place of incarceration).

* HOAs are horrible but sometimes necessary institutions. They should be abolished or replaced where possible, and be restructured with fewer powers and less discretion where not possible. HOA covenants are routinely unreasonably restrictive.

* Municipal ordinances related to zoning and land use should have fines or other civil penalties, not criminal penalties.

* Arbitration on the U.S. model is usually a bad idea and should be banned in many circumstances.

* We should have a more pro-active way of intervening in cases where people are mentally ill or cognitively impaired, and the system for adjudicating these cases is too cumbersome.

* Single judges should not handle parenting time and parental responsibilities cases, and the best interests of the child standard should have more detailed substances to guide it. Alimony should also be less discretionary.

* There should be a right to counsel in all cases involving "persons" such as child custody cases, protective proceedings, and immigration cases.

* Forum shopping in the federal courts needs to be better restrained, and allowing a single forum shopped judge to issue national injunctions is problematic.

* After some rocky starts, regulation and technical private management of junk faxes, junk telephone calls, and even junk email has made some real progress. Social media junk is less well regulated.

* Privacy regulation often does more harm than good. Juvenile justice privacy does more harm than good in most cases, educational privacy goes too far, and Europe's GDPR goes too far. Secrecy around ownership of closely held companies is too great and the exception under the Corporate Transparency Act is far too complicated. There are places for privacy regulation but it needs to be cut way back. Secrets are often harmful in hard to quantify ways.

* Cryptocurrency serves few, if any, legitimate purposes, is an environmental disaster, and should be discouraged.

* Programs to help the poor need to have much less paperwork and red tape; means testing is rarely a good choice unless it is integrated into the tax system.

* Some tax credits for poor and middle income people, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Obamacare insurance premium subsidies, are far too complicated.

* State and local government funded free wi-fi for all would make lots of sense.

* There is a logic to allowing vouchers for religious private K-12 schools, but on balance it does too much to support religious institutions at public expense. Charter schools, i.e. public schools with autonomy from school boards, are a better approach. School choice of some kind does make sense among public ordinary and charter schools, ideally, statewide, rather than only within a school district.

* Boarding schools attached to high schools in more urban areas would be a better alternative to highly subsidized tiny rural high schools.

* We do a horrible job of managing the business of health care. The requirement that doctors be the sole owners of medical practices also forces them into being small business owners when they are ill suited to that part of their jobs and leads to bad systems and poor health care administration and bad financing arrangements. Almost every other country, in many varied models, does a better job. The current system results in overpaid health care providers (doctors, nurses, drug companies, medical equipment companies, private hospital system owners, etc.), for inferior results. Our drug prices and medical equipment prices and ambulance prices and ER prices are all vastly higher than in other countries and this isn't mostly driven by private pay medical education or medical malpractice lawsuits.

* We need to create more medical school slots. We have too few doctors and are compensating for that with too many senior paraprofessionals like nurse practitioners, physician's assistants, and midwives. We should also allow more non-M.D.'s to provide the care that psychiatrists do since the knowledge base for psychiatrists doesn't overlap heavily with that of M.D.'s and where it does overlap can be taught separately.

* The substance of pass-through taxation in taxing closely held business income once at roughly individual tax rates while allowing limited liability, is good, but the actual pass-through tax mechanism is not. Subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code is not a good approach for taxing closely held limited liability entities, it complexity, it phantom income, and more don't work well. A double taxation reducing or limiting variation on the C-corporation model would be much better.

* We do a poor job of taxing hot assets in international taxation.

* We lack adequate guidance for remote worker labor and tax regulation, and haven't updated our laws adequately to reflect the era of independent contractors.

* We over regulate many prescription drugs and under regulate supplements and herbal remedies and the like. Homeopathic remedies and other supplements need to be regulated more like drugs. Prescription drug approval when approved elsewhere should be easier. Prescription approval for experimental drugs for the terminally ill, or in a pandemic, should be easier. More non-abuse prone prescription drugs should be available over the counter or with pharmacist approval.

* Prostitution should be decriminalized or legalized to a greater extent.

* We vastly under-regulate firearms and explosives and military equipment.

* We do a poor job of commercial air travel security, imposing too much of a burden and delay for too little benefit in a security theater way, at an excessive cost and a greatly excessive externality cost. We also do a crap job of managing luggage charges and checked luggage, and we are more inefficient than we need to be in how quickly commercial aircraft are loaded and unloaded.

* Uber, etc. revealed that we over-regulate taxis, but that we do need some regulation to assure riders are safe from dangerous or dangerous to them drivers.

* Buses and intracity rail won't thrive until we make them feel safer and comfortable.

* Public energy utilities do mostly a good job, except in Texas which opted out of the national energy grid.

* Clean water and good sewage treatment should be expanded urgently to places like Indian Reservations and Flint, Michigan.

* To better disentangle church and state, the charitable income tax deduction (but not the gift and estate tax deduction) for contributions to religious organizations (but not the tax exemption for churches) should end, the parsonage exemption should end, the property tax and sale tax exemptions for churches should end, the investment income of churches should be taxed as a corporation, and the ban on politics by churches should end.

* There should be more power to compel road maintenance below some standard.

* There should be a power to compel HOAs to do their jobs for all members, similar to landlord-tenant maintenance claims.