I'm an odd sort of Democrat.

I believe in "small government" at the federal level. I believe in a balanced federal budget and the reduction of the national debt. I believe in mandatory term limits for elected officials at the federal level. These are all traditional "fiscal conservative" beliefs.

I believe in personal liberty and responsibility. This is a "classic liberal" belief (now apparently coopted by conservatives).

I believe in the Constitution literally. I believe the powers of the federal government are limited to "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty." I don't believe centrally-organized entitlement programs are a mandated responsibility of the federal government. This is a view held by many Republicans.

Where I begin to lean left is in the specifics of free market economics (and the conflation of religion and state, although I won't get into that here).

Corporations and other business entities, under most state laws, are treated as citizens. Just like you and me. They have all the rights of citizens. They pay taxes. They may redress grievances by calling upon the judicial system. They can declare bankruptcy and so forth.

Small companies are treated largely the same as large companies. They have the same general tax structures and guidelines and rules of conduct. And about the same amount of bureaocratic overhead in the form of paperwork and so forth.

But many corporations, large corporations, aren't just citizens. A large corporation is a citizen in a seventy-foot hydraulically-powered metallic exoskeleton with rocket launchers and machine guns. It doesn't mean they're not friendly and they won't say hello to you on your way to the mailbox, but all that armor sure is scary.

In the past, companies were reasonably small. It certainly streamlines systems to treat them as "large citizens". You can reuse a lot of law that way. Not sure how to rule in a case involving a company? Look on the books for how others ruled in a case of the same nature involving a "small citizen". Simple. Less thought required.

The problem with this design is that large corporations, with their 70-foot metallic exoskeletons, have a lot more influence than the typical citizen. They also cannot be punished in the same way as normal "small citizens" for committing crimes or misusing their influence (are you going to always put the president or CEO of a company in jail if his company does something against the law? How much time and money will it take you to find out who the actual wrongdoer was?). Worst of all, they are obligated by their promises to their shareholders to make as large a profit as possible as a primary goal. Where there is profit, there is loss, and the loss is often borne by the underrepresented: the environment, the populace's civil liberties, and the "small citizen's" tax dollars.

I believe that the treatment of large corporations as "a large citizen" by state government is a case of premature generalization. As a programmer, I think I can spot this flaw fairly easily. If you are an experienced programmer working with a team of junior programmers, you need to fight this tendency tooth and nail to deliver a good piece of software. Often a junior programmer, left to his own designs, will design a system with such sweeping generality that it can neither be built nor, if by some miracle it is built, put to use by its intended audience.

In the civic sense, lawmakers are the junior coders. We need to allow them to see that the generalization of corporations as "large citizens" is premature. Either that, or "environment" and "civil liberties" must also be treated as citizens under state law and given an even more massive hulking exoskeleton than all of the corporations combined. The first solution, de-generalizing the problem, is more elegant. The second solution, giving equal representation to the environment and other underrepresented "citizens" via centralized power is unworkable, subject to corruption, and tremendously expensive. It is a code design that can never be completed.

Instead of using the law to rule against corporate interests once they've violated it, let's try to convince legislators to stack the deck in favor of individuals from the start. Let's not tolerate corruption and graft. I'm not saying that small companies ("lifestyle companies") should bear the same burden. But let's try to make sure that there are real consequences for "going big".

To this end, I propose:

• Large corporations and other business entities be taxed federally at a rate dramatically higher than the rate under which individuals and small companies are taxed. States are encouraged to do the same.
• Tax cuts never be given to large corporations without a matching tax cut for individuals and small companies (preferably a larger tax cut for individuals always).
• Large companies be held to a higher standard of worker benefit compensation: they must provide affordable benefits, period. No gerrymandering of schedules to deny workers who don't classify as full time employees due to a two-hour difference in work time. They get benefits, period.
• Large companies should be required to have a higher standard minimum wage than small companies.
• Large companies who have business dealings with negative environmental impact should pay mandatory fees into a state fund to help with environmental cleanup in each state in which they do business. Penalties are not enough although they should also be kept.
• Large companies who provide national defense contracting should be mandatorily required to pay into a state civil liberties fund. The civil liberties fund should be used to keep organizations like that state's ACLU afloat and armed with lawyers.

I believe if the founders of our nation were alive today, they would agree with most of this. The Bill of Rights is largely a document describing what the government cannot do. We need a similar Bill of Rights describing what corporate interests cannot do.