I'm terribly late to the party, but I can't resist commenting here. This is a wonderful post with loads of great ideas and comments. I'll go bullet style like all the cool kids are doing.

* Taxation of individuals, and more to the point enforcement of individual tax laws, comes down to prioritization. Morally, it may feel better to want the IRS to tackle the super rich, but financially, it is in fact more beneficial to audit those less capable of evasion. If the IRS can spend $5k to get $10k from several individuals, that is fiscally more useful than spending millions going after one individual that can indefinitely avoid settling up. Corporations, on the other hand, are another matter entirely. Corporations are given the rights of citizens, like free speech, due process, etc., but are not expected to fulfill the same obligations in terms of taxes, being honest with law enforcement, being eligible for military service, voting, etc. That's a whole other can of worms opened up by the SCOTUS back in the 1800s. The answer lies in removing the citizen like rights of corporations, but that's not going to happen in our lifetimes.

* Welfare serves the dual purpose of helping those who have been screwed over by circumstance and those who have been screwed over by the system. It is something that the vast majority of right wingers will claim is better served by private charities, which are invariably faith based. Even AA is a religious organization. And every person that subscribes to a faith of one sort or another will tell you that nearly all charities are faith based. You know why? Because its virtually impossible to get non-profit status and wide recognition for an organization unless it is faith based. That historical/cultural bias is reason enough for me to justify a secular/communal charity system.

* Conventional nuclear power is great, assuming it is done safely. That's the problem, though - is it economically viable to maintain conventional nuclear power plants safely? None of the arguments I've seen on either side of the issue really deal with that aspect. It basically comes down to a matter of risk management, which TEPCO clearly failed at. Implementing conventional nuclear power safely requires a really absurd amount capital, but it may be economically smart at a large enough scale. Figuring out the economics of safe nuclear power is way above my pay grade. Ultimately, I believe it is something humans are quite capable of doing, but is there enough political will to do it properly?

* Free markets are awesome! Don't confuse free markets with capitalist bullying, though. A free market assumes that everyone in the market has the same information as everyone else. That's the only way it can actually be free. As soon as one party manipulates the information available to others, the market is no longer free. That applies to everything from snake oil remedies to irresponsible mortgages. A free market doesn't mean a market free of regulation, it means one in which everyone has equal access to the marketplace, producers and consumers alike.

* Small government, or even no government, is ideal because ideally everyone thinks like you do, and has exactly the same minimal requirements that you have. In the real world, the needs of individuals in very large social groups are immensely varied. You may live your whole life without ever needing the services of a fire department. You may not ever need to protect yourself from a psychopathic killer. Hell, you may run your own website from your home and never do more than walk your kids along a deer path to a private school near you. But you are a part of a society. Your kids' teacher may live 50 miles away and need to travel along paved roads to get to that wonderful school. The web of internetworked computers upon which your income relies was first conceived by people working at public institutions. The smallpox vaccination you got as a kid was developed by a tax funded group of doctors. The nuclear power that you want to support would never have been possible without vast amounts of federal funding. Bureaucratic and corruption waste is not unique to government, and any properly organized system can minimize waste. It's not the idea of government, but its implementation that makes it wasteful. Corporations are no more immune to that waste than any other collective. It's true that waste is easier to identify and possibly eliminate in smaller systems, but very large organizational systems are required for big results like space travel, vaccinations, and imperial domination.

* Do not confuse religion with spirituality. Religion is about dogma and social control. Spirituality is about one's connection with the universe. If your neighbor believes in a grey bearded man in the sky that created everything 6000 years ago, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with his desire to eliminate the teaching of evolution from public schools. He may use the former to justify the latter, but the two are not really connected. If someone comes to your door offering a deeper connection with the universe around you through Jesus, you can listen politely, tell them that you are already plugged in, or whatever. If someone comes to your door to tell you that you and your family need to behave in a certain way, you can tell them to fuck off with a quite clear conscience.

I don't think any of these ideas are young or old, but it does take some time to refine them into something coherent. I'm 41 and I barely know what coherent or consistent means. One last thing to remember is that you are not who you were 10 years ago, or even 10 seconds ago. Every moment fresh water flows over the fall - it might look the same, but the rocks are never touched twice. (oh - now I'm just getting pretentious)

Like I said, this is really the fundamental philosophical difference between us. Personally, I think you are trying to force me to accept a false dichotomy; either help the poor and create a stagnant economy, or create a thriving economy, and hope one day the poor find a place in it.

I don't see why providing taxpayer-funded food stamps to the poor would prevent market forces from making food as cheap and available as it can.

I also think you're just fundamentally being dishonest with yourself about the capabilities of government. In many places, local government does provide subsidies for phone lines to the poor -- some of the smarter local governments negotiate a large-scale cellphone plan with one of the major carriers, and are able to provide a more useful service (cellphone vs. landline) to the beneficiaries of the program for a lower cost. I think we can both agree that the government's free cellphone plan hasn't made cellphone prices go up.

Now, if the person who winds up making the decision on the contract happens to own a big share in the company picked, or if they gave the elected official over him fat campaign donations, then I do have a problem with it. But so do the laws and oversight committees that preside over such things. I'm always open to new ways to improve transparency and accountability for how public funds get spent to minimize waste, fraud, and abuse.

But I find your claims of inescapable, entirely calamitous economic outcomes every time government collects and spends tax money to be indefensible, and more than a little silly. You need some balance in your diet of information if you think government-subsidized cellphones for a small minority of the population would drive their price from free to thousands of dollars, and their supply to contract so far as to require lotteries.

Nationalizing the entire cellphone industry and outlawing the import of foreign cellphones would probably make that happen. Problem is, that's not even remotely what we're talking about.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I think it's a question of pick your poison. We have irational fears of nuclear power thanks to movies like China Syndrome and Silkwood. Because radiation is inivisible - it has a real bogey-man quality.

But seriously, coal based reactors are very bad - belching out heavy metals that fall into our oceans, and get into our seafood, causing real poisonings.

I have been reading up on the new generation of light-water reactors- they produce an incredible amount of power with very minimal waste. For me, it's the best from a bouquet of evils.

I'm in favour of a two pronged approach of nuclear and conservation. Just replacing all bulbs in the uS with the compact flourescents would have a large effect.