If you knew what you were missing, extreme poverty would be much less tolerable.  Just for a moment, imagine what it might be like if we had a government that installed a million dollars' worth of concrete for ten million instead of a billion.  How much more and better infrastructure would we have?

This is not to say that there are not so many things to be thankful for.  All things considered, the pluses outweigh the negatives by a ton.  But still...what if we didn't have a Defense Department that spent a half a billion on defective planes and didn't put new jets engines into planes being decommissioned?  How much better would our country be?

Graft and corruption are an inherent limitation of putting mere humans in charge of vast amounts of money.  We try to prevent it with rules, but one person's bribe is another person's honest contribution to a political campaign.  And if not a direct contribution, then a contribution to a cohort, or a son.  This is why we need to transfer power to 300 million citizens and out of the hands of fallible "representatives" by converting to a smart phone voting form of government.

Imagine if every act of government required a vote by any interested citizen and any bill had to be clear enough for a high school graduate to understand.  It would eliminate 600-page bills of earmarks and special favors.  And because any vote would basically be free, it would be possible to oversee directly our huge bureaucracy spending so the Defense Department can't spend billions on back-channel purchases.

Congressional approval ratings consistently hover around 10%.  We now have a chance to correct this.  At the very least, one state needs to implement government by smart phone, if for no other but to claim the title of being the first government in history to implement what will inevitably come to be how the entire world is governed in the future.

Image: Pixnio.