WHAT IF

What are you pondering?  Fortunately personal pondering has not yet been censored; we can do it in the privacy of our own heads.  I don't have answers for everything, but pondering can be helpful. While this list is not comprehensive or meant to offend or even offer answers, it opens long chains of if this, then that, and if this, then that, and if this, then that that can explore many alternatives.  In this light, please take this in the spirit of discovery, not dogmatic definition.

  What if our culture considered health a personal responsibility rather than a governmental responsibility?

             What if we hadn't spent more than a trillion dollars in Afghanistan?

             What if chemical drift and genetically modified organism trespass were adjudicated as violations of property rights?

             What if education were considered a parental responsibility rather than a state responsibility?

             What if pharmaceutical companies had to convince people to patronize their products without any government endorsement, collusion, or stamp of approval?

             What if I could sell quiche, raw milk, and pepperoni to my neighbors without a bureaucrat standing between the voluntary transaction among consenting adults?

             What if drug addicts had no societal safety net and had to face the consequences of their decisions by themselves?

             What if taxpayers did not subsidize any institution of higher learning and they had to compete for student clients based on empirical graduate career performance?

             What if we adopted the Singapore quick and cheap punishment by caning rather than expensive, extended, and recidivism-encouraging prisons?

             What if we sold all the public lands to the millions of folks desperate to escape burning, dysfunctional cities and establish homesteads?

             What if we refused to buy meat from animals raised in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)?

             What if everyone facing mandatory vaccinations in their workplaces walked off the job for a week?

             What if we brought all our military personnel home and quit meddling in other people's problems?

             What if we didn't give the homeless anything?

             What if nobody would play a violent video game?

             What if nobody would visit the breakfast cereal aisle?

             What if we had chipped all the trees that burned in wildfires and used that biomass to build compost piles and soil fertility?

             What if no one bought anything with high fructose corn syrup in it?

             What if we practiced mob stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization with all our domestic herbivores?

             What's your "what if?"