User:Red Shogun412/sandbox/Identity and beliefs




 * Shepard identifies as a defensive liberal institutionalist and constructivist, transcendental humanist and spiritual naturalist, dipolar rationalistic panendeist, rationalist ethical intuitionist and ethical non-naturalist, postpositivist neo-Kantian, mysterian panpsychist, compatibilist, four-dimensional eternalist, bioregional Georgist/geolibertarian socialist and left-libertarian market anarchist, distributist mutualist, equal-liberty iusnaturalist, interculturalist, post-Keynesian and constitutional economist, endogenous growth and new trade theorist, bright-green environmentalist, ecological economist, deflation hawk and monetary dove, fundamental reformist, anti-authoritarian libertarian paternalist, cellular-democratic libertarian municipalist, anti-imperialist, post-Zionist, Blue Star Wiccan moralist, post-structural individualist anarchist sex-positive feminist, alter-globalizationist, cultural liberal, spiritual ecosophist, and landscape ecological-urbanist.


 * Shepard has identified Bruce Ackerman, Hannah Arendt, Aristotle, Kenneth Arrow, Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin Bache, Mikhail Bakunin, Jack Balkin, Mustafa Barzani, Jeremy Bentham, Eduard Bernstein, Alexander Bogdanov, Murray Bookchin, Ralph Borsodi, John Brown, William Jennings Bryan, James M. Buchanan, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Edwin Chadwick, Ha-Joon Chang, Gary Chartier, Erwin Chemerinsky, Raj Chetty, Noam Chomsky, John B. Cobb, John R. Commons, Richard Cumberland, Ray Dalio, Herman Daly, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, John Dewey, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Frederick Douglass, Ronald Dworkin, Barry Eichengreen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Engles, Desiderius Erasmus, Irving Fisher, Fred Foldvary, Benjamin Franklin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Giuseppi Garibaldi, Henry George, Wynne Godley, William Godwin, Emma Goldman, Paul Goodman, Antonio Gramsci, Hugo Grotius, Félix Guattari, Alexander Hamilton, Heraclitus, Moses Hess, Eric Hobsbawm, J. A. Hobson, Francis Hutcheson, Joris-Karl Huysmans, William James, Thomas Jefferson, Carl Jung, Daniel Kahneman, Immanuel Kant, Karl Kautsky, Robert F. Kennedy, John Maynard Keynes, Martin Luther King Jr., Naomi Klein, Leopold Kohr, Richard Koo, David Korten, Paul Krugman, Ferdinand Lassalle, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sanford Levinson, Abraham Lincoln, Edward Livingston, John Locke, Jack London, James Madison, Thomas Mann, James Meade, John Stuart Mill, Hyman Minsky, G. E. Moore, Benny Morris, Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Owen, Thomas Paine, Robert M. Pirsig, Georgi Plekhanov, Karl Popper, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, François Quesnay, David Ricardo, Maximilien Robespierre, Bertrand Russell, Michael Sandel, Arthur Schopenhauer, E. F. Schumacher, Amartya Sen, Adam Smith, Socrates, Herbert Spencer, Baruch Spinoza, Lysander Spooner, Starhawk, Joseph Stiglitz, Scott Sumner, Cass Sunstein, Charles Taylor, Nicolaus Tideman, Norman Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, James Tobin, Leo Tolstoy, Laurence Tribe, Benjamin Tucker, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Thorstein Veblen, Voltaire, Alexander von Humboldt, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Walzer, Max Weber, Daniel Webster, H. G. Wells, Richard Werner, Alfred North Whitehead, Walt Whitman, Gerrard Winstanley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Martin Wolf, and Richard D. Wolff as major influences on their philosophical and leadership views.


 * Shepard believes that developing countries will most benefit from free and fair trade once their economies are allowed to develop organically, allowing them to eventually be able to participate in the global economy and international affairs, and views the Cold War (specifically Operation Condor) as having emboldened neocolonial ambitions in Western bloc countries in the aftermath of post-World War II decolonisation in Africa and Asia. He also views advances in economic globalization, racial integration, and feminism as having been inhibited by the isolationist trend following World War I and the crises of the Great Depression and World War II, which continued with social-democratic protectionism during the "golden age of capitalism". As the population ages in many developed/developing countries, Shepard contends that viable options for preventing future middle and lower-class generations from being burdened by unprecedented interest rates and taxes and the breakdown of the global consumer economy should be: A combination of reversing neoliberal deregulations and privatizations, enforcing antitrust policies to promote effective competition, imposing welfare capitalism, progressive taxation to pay off sovereign and public debt, executing infrastructure-based development (alongside currency depreciation) and urban planning, implementing immigration reforms and automation reduction, a land value tax and citizen's dividend, nominal GDP level targeting, human population planning, withering away many interstate economic unions in favor of cosmopolitan fair trade agreements, and promoting free movement and education of migrants and refugees alongside remittance support to eventually reverse the human capital flight in many tumultuous developing countries; all of which will ultimately contribute to restoring a country's trade surplus, significantly reducing national debts, reversing the productivity paradox, increasing real wages, disposable incomes and fertility rates (thus warranting free movement of migrants to developing countries to improve conditions there), and improving the average utility, leading towards more developed countries, higher standards of living and social mobility, reduced economic inequality and social exclusion, zeroing population growth to an optimum level (with anti-aging strategies assisting a trend towards negligible senescence as sub-replacement fertility is reversed), leading to a steady-state economy and resulting agrowth, greater multicultural liberty, and improved sustainability and human security worldwide. Shepard also supports diminishing the wants in society and improving self-reliance and delaying the uptake of labor-saving machines until existent unemployment is effectively addressed (short-term refusal of innovation). If central banking fails to accommodate for the general will of the people in accordance with equal liberty, or if its functions are to become de facto obsolete, Shepard supports the restructuring of monetary policy within a semi-technocratic executive cabinet in accordance with semi-parliamentary governance and committed to the synthesis of Post-Keynesian economics, Georgism, polycentric law, constitutional economics and world-systems theory.


 * Shepard has advocated for a series of amendments to the Constitution of the United States to be proposed via Article Five of the United States Constitution, where the proposed amendments would encompass uncompromising fundamental principles of politics, law, morality, spirituality, and general philosophy, and would include:


 * Shepard believes, in light of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that neo-nationalism and national conservatism, are decaf varieties of neo-fascism, and that, historically and realistically speaking, populism is fundamentally incongruent and incompatible with nationalism, of which any combination thereof ought not be treated as a valid exercise of political philosophy or any leadership gravitas.