Hour 1: A Declaration of Independence from Unchecked Technological Tyranny

An “unfettered free and open Internet” policy originally made sense to nurture a promising nascent Internet experiment.  But as the past quarter century has proven, a permanent trajectory of anarchic impunity to harm others for a mature Internet is mindless madness. 

There is no liberty, equality, or justice in anarchy.  It is past time to civilize America’s “Wild West” Internet policy.  It’s time for “We the People” to call for full restoration of constitutional authority over the U.S. Internet.

There are three chief tyrannies of U.S. Internet unaccountability policy. First, it inhumanely prioritizes protecting technology over protecting people. Second, it unjustly grants technology impunity over people. Third, it disruptively empowers technology to control and govern people without any rights, due process, or access to justice.

220 years after America’s founders declared independence from King George’s tyranny, our government in 1996 unwittingly imposed a revolutionary and utopian technology policy experiment on Americans without the consent of the governed.

It was a benign experiment in 1996, when the Internet was an electronic bulletin board used by a small percent of Americans an average of 30 minutes per month.  A well-intentioned, bipartisan consensus abdicated government authority over the nascent Internet to accelerate the Internet’s buildout and adoption.  It succeeded at that goal.

However fast forward to 2022, U.S. Internet policy is now outdated, anarchy on autopilot that is disruptively infusing and integrating into most everything, everyone does everywhere for work, life, and play.

As a result, Internet harms are out of control.  For example, most Americans or a loved one have been victims of either cyber-attacks, cyber-bullying, or cybercrime.  100,000 Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses per the White House in large part because 97% of pharmacies online are illegal per the FDA. 

Why is it important for American citizens to declare independence from unchecked technology?

First, the history of five Administrations, thirteen Congresses, and seventeen Supreme Court Justices together—neglecting to protect people and minors from attacks, harms, and crimes online—screams that technology and corporate interests captivate U.S. Internet policy and that people don’t matter online.

Second, for a quarter century there’s been no meaningful oversight or review of the results of this unaccountability policy experiment on autopilot.

That national negligence spotlights how America is devolving away from constitutional government of the people, by the people, for the people, to unchecked government of technology and money, by technology and money, for technology and money.

Third, America’s founding Declaration of Independence is the original source and legitimacy of people not tolerating tyranny, of the American people’s “unalienable rights,” and of “the right of the people to alter or abolish” “any form of government that becomes destructive.”

America’s double standard of Constitutional authority and accountability offline but approved anarchy online has proven destructively divisive and disruptive throughout America.

Fourth, our Constitution empowers citizens to exercise their First Amendment rights to freely speak, assemble, and petition our government.  Thus, We the People grassroots are the most legitimate and essential driver to restore Constitutional authority over the U.S. Internet.

Fifth, an independence petition with twenty grievances empowers citizens with a peaceable and civil voice individually and together to publicly declare their desire to live free and independent from unchecked technological tyranny.

Sixth, America’s online anarchy policy subverts most everything good offline in America and Americans.  We need freedom and independence from self-defeating Internet policy that nonsensically makes America its own worst enemy.

Finally, seldom does the future of our country pivot on one policy.  However, here it does.

Current Internet policy sets the default authority for much of America as ungoverned, unaccountable rule-of-code.  If modernized and rationalized, future Internet policy would reset the default authority as Constitution limited-government and rule-of-law.

Where Internet policy goes, so goes America’s future.  Do Americans want the 21^st Century to empower technology to control and govern people, or to empower people to control and govern technology?

Restore Us Institute’s national petition of a Declaration of Independence from Unchecked Technological Tyranny, offers a time-tested solution of restoring Constitutional authority over the U.S Internet that can bring more hope and confidence in our futures.

Most Americans and their government know the Internet is rife with out-of-control problems.  However, what they don’t know is their universal cause is U.S. Internet unaccountability policies that enable the worst in us, government, and America.

Not knowing the cause of the problem blinds Americans and their government from seeing the opportunity of a universal solution and cure for the chaos the government is causing itself.

The solution and cure is the Government doing its sworn duty “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” in restoring full Constitutional authority over the U.S. Internet in U.S. policy.

Same rules and rights offline-online. Equal protection under the law. Illegal offline illegal online.

Link to the article: https://townhall.com/columnists/scottcleland/2022/09/21/draft-n2613362

Hour 2: ""Does the World Face an Underpopulation Problem?" with Marian L. Tupy 

Marian L. Tupy is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and co-author (with Gale L. Pooley) of the new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (Cato Institute, August 31, 2022).  To learn more, visit www.Superabundance.com Marian is also the co-author of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting He is co-author of the Simon Abundance Index, and editor of the webisite HumanProgress.org 

Does the World Face an Underpopulation Problem?

By Marian L. Tupy 

Humans impact the world in both good and bad ways.  In a new book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, my co-author and I have revisited a subject that’s intimately connected to population growth: resource scarcity.  This debate goes back to the 5^th century BC, with both Confucians and the Greeks agreeing that population growth needed to be controlled lest excessive fecundity overwhelmed the food supply and famine ensued.  The English prelate, Thomas Malthus, resurrected the idea in his influential Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, and people have been arguing about the advisability of population growth ever since.

The debate has given us the Chinese one-child policy (1980–2015) and mass sterilizations during India’s Emergency (1975­–1977).  HBO’s Bill Maher joked a couple years back that “the great under-discussed factor in the climate crisis is there are just too many of us and we use too much shit.”  More seriously, Patrick Crusius, the shooter of 22 people in an El Paso Walmart wrote, “Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country.  But god damn most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle.  So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources.  If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”  The stakes, in other words, are as high as they have ever been.

The relative scarcity of resources is typically measured by looking at prices.  If prices rise, resources are deemed to be getting scarcer, and, if they fall, more abundant.  The media sometimes scare their readers by reporting “nominal” prices (hence all the headlines about food and fuel prices being at a record highs), rather than “real” prices, which take into account inflation.  It was on the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals that the Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich and the University of Maryland economist Julian Simon bet $1,000 in 1980.  If the real prices went down over the next decade, they agreed, Ehrlich would pay Simon.  If they went up, Simon would pay Ehrlich.  Ehrlich lost.

The problem with real prices is that they ignore changes in incomes.  Typically, though not always, individual incomes increase faster than inflation.  That’s because people tend to grow more productive over their lifetimes and across time.  Contrast the productivity of workers equipped with shovels and those driving giant excavators.  While real prices are measured in dollars and cents, time prices are measured in hours and minutes.  To calculate a time price, all you need to do is to divide the nominal price of a good or service by the nominal hourly income.  That tells you how long you must work to afford something.

Consider U.S. manufacturing workers.  Between 1900 and 2018, the time prices of pork, rice, cocoa, wheat, corn, coffee, lamb and beef fell by 98.4%, 97.6%, 97.1%, 96.7%, 96.1%, 93.8%, 78.6% and 75.5% respectively.  That means that the same length of time that bought 1 pound of each commodity, now buys 62.6, 41.1, 34.8, 30.5, 25.6, 16.2, 4.7 and 4 pounds.  While people cannot eat rubber, aluminum, potash or cotton, the prices of these commodities are valuable inputs in the production processes that impact the prices of goods and services, and hence the overall standard of living.  Their time prices fell by 99.4%, 98.9%, 98.2% and 95.8% respectively.  All the while, the population of the United States rose from 23 million to 328 million.

What happened to global time prices of resources?  They fell by 84 percent between 1960 and 2018.  The personal resource abundance of the average inhabitant of the globe rose from 1 to 6.27 or 527 percent.  Put differently, for the same time of work that he or she could buy one item in the basket of resources we looked at, he or she can now get more than six.  Over that 58-year period, the world’s population increased from 3 billion to 7.6 billion.

Surprisingly, we also found that personal resource abundance increased faster than population in all 18 randomly chosen datasets that we analyzed.  We call that relationship “superabundance.”  On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed.  But how does all that superabundance happen?

Musk offered a clue to the answer in the above-mentioned speech.  He noted that “I don’t know that we should really try to live for a super long time.  It is important for us to die because most of the times people don’t change their mind, they just die.”  Superabundance, in other words, is a product of the human mind.  It is ideas that lead to inventions, which, after they have been tested in the marketplace, lead to innovations that drive economic growth and increase the standard of living.

But large populations are not enough to produce superabundance—just think of the poverty in China and India before liberalization.  To innovate, people must be allowed to think and to act.  Such people can create tremendous value.

In conclusion, the world is a closed system in the way that a piano is a closed system.  The instrument has only 88 keys, but those keys can be played in a nearly infinite variety of ways.  The same applies to our planet.  The Earth’s atoms may be fixed, but the possible combinations of those atoms are infinite.  What matters is not the physical limits of our planet, but human ability to reimagine the use of resources that we already have.

Link to the article: https://townhall.com/columnists/mariantupy/2022/09/18/does-the-world-face-an-underpopulation-problem-n2613218