Judging the worth of a policy by the feelings of the most powerful is no way to build a community but it is a great way to restore feudal social order.

If you want a society where your birth doesn't determine the course of your life than we need a different measure for policies.

Policies should be judged by how they increase the autonomy of the least powerful and least able to choose among us.

People like to talk about quality of life, but being able to mak choices about your life is what fundimentally makes it yours and to the extent we take choices away from people, either economically or through regulation we are fueling our goverment with bits of others lives.

And sometimes that makes sense as a trade off, for example drug regulations do limit choices but they mostly do so by making it hard to take advantage of people who don't have the skills to independently verify the purity of a drug.

This is what regulation is good at, making sure that people who have an advantage don't abuse.

Regulation should prevent power from being abused whenever possible.

Having a few good choices is better than a lot of choices of uncertain quality or that you can't evaluate.

Having good defaults is also a great use of regulation. Trying to pick the perfect thing in every situation just isn't realistic, setting up good choices as a baseline let's people preserve congnative overhead for the choices that really matter to them

And there are choices that people should not get to make most of the time, like choosing to harm someone.

The thing we need to admit is law can't stop people from making these choices, it can only choose how to respond when they are made.

And we can create environments where people who feel at risk can seek safety.

We can try to limit the kinds of tramatic experiences that can lead to a person deciding they have to harm someone.

Lots of this work involves making better choices available to people at risk.

There is no real freedom while battling for survival under economic constraint because people born to a family that ensured they didn't have to struggle don't think you have a work ethic or whatever is justifying making survival a gift of the fortunate instead of a social duty.

We need to stop looking at the health of imagary creatures (corporations are collective imaginary friends with goverment certificates) as a measure of our success as a goverment and instead take a good look at people and how empowered they are to act for themselves.

Because being able to arrange your life to suit yourself is the truest measure of freedom.

Ironically it is difficult to get there without real governance because people don't have the same amount of power and access and information.