Making Money from War
One of the biggest problems in our system right now is that people make a lot of money from war, and those same people have a say in starting wars. If we could remove that massive conflict of interest, we could probably stop countries from embarking upon wars quite so often.

Consider for example the insanity of allowing one man to be a major stakeholder in a military contractor, and an advisor to the President of the United States! That man stands to make a lot of money if the U.S. goes to war, and he can influence the decision. This is not a hypothetical example - it is the way things work.

I can imagine a few tweaks to the current system that would prevent this kind of conflict. First and most obvious, we could disqualify people with such an obvious conflict of interest from acquiring political power. That would entail writing some new laws, but I think most people would support laws like that, just out of common sense.

So there's one action item you might take up - create or support the effort to stamp out conflict of interest in politics. I haven't found anyone suggesting this, but I didn't look very hard either.

Another possibility would be creating a feedback system, so that going to war had a bigger downside for the decision maker. As it stands, they don't even get voted out of office for embarking upon a war-for-profit, as long as the public believes the motives were unrelated and that the war was justified. Now we get into the Reality Problem of course - most of the voters don't live in the war zone, so their impressions are created second hand, by the media. Is the media fair and balanced? That's another article.

Action possibility #2 - start paying attention to free, balanced sources of news. Educate yourself on this issue by reading about Free Press.

OK, this is my first real blog entry and I have no idea what to expect. Perhaps outrage, perhaps silence. Bring it on!

Virgin Blogger
OK, we're biting off a lot here. It seems that every day I learn about yet another thing that is crazy about this world, and I'm tired of doing nothing about it. It seems that if people KNEW about some of this stuff, it would just go away, through market forces, elections, or revolutions. So I guess I'll try to apply some pressure in the right direction, and make the world a better place for us and for all our kids.

Here we go!