Hugh McTavish
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Hugh McTavish (Independence-Alliance Party of Minnesota) ran for election for Governor of Minnesota. He lost in the general election on November 8, 2022.
McTavish completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Hugh McTavish earned a bachelor's degree from Carleton College in 1984, a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1992, and a law degree from the University of Minnesota in 2001.[1] McTavish's career experience includes founding COVID Sanity and working as its executive director, a biochemist and immunologist, a patent attorney, and the CEO of IGF Oncology, LLC, and Squarex, LLC.[2]
Elections
2022
See also: Minnesota gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial election, 2022
General election
General election for Governor of Minnesota
The following candidates ran in the general election for Governor of Minnesota on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Tim Walz (D) | 52.3 | 1,312,349 |
 | Scott Jensen (R) | 44.6 | 1,119,941 | |
 | James McCaskel (Legal Marijuana Now Party) | 1.2 | 29,346 | |
 | Steve Patterson (Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party of Minnesota) | 0.9 | 22,599 | |
 | Hugh McTavish (Independence-Alliance Party of Minnesota)  | 0.7 | 18,156 | |
| Gabrielle Prosser (Socialist Workers Party) | 0.3 | 7,241 | |
 | Joyce Lacey (Independent) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 11 | |
| Mohamed Mourssi-Alfash (Independent) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 5 | |
 | Loner Blue (Independent) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 4 | |
| Joshua Olgbolahan Jubril (Independent) (Write-in) | 0.0 | 0 | |
| Other/Write-in votes | 0.0 | 1,009 | ||
| Total votes: 2,510,661 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Cory Hepola (Independent)
Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Governor of Minnesota
Incumbent Tim Walz defeated Ole Savior in the Democratic primary for Governor of Minnesota on August 9, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Tim Walz | 96.5 | 416,973 |
 | Ole Savior | 3.5 | 14,950 | |
| Total votes: 431,923 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
Republican primary election
Republican primary for Governor of Minnesota
Scott Jensen defeated Joyce Lacey and Bob Carney Jr. in the Republican primary for Governor of Minnesota on August 9, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Scott Jensen | 89.3 | 288,499 |
| Joyce Lacey | 6.6 | 21,308 | |
 | Bob Carney Jr. | 4.1 | 13,213 | |
| Total votes: 323,020 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Withdrawn or disqualified candidates
- Mike Murphy (R)
- Neil Shah (R)
- Michelle Benson (R)
- Paul Gazelka (R)
- Mike Marti (R)
- Kendall Qualls (R)
- Richard Stanek (R)
- Scott Magie (R)
Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party of Minnesota primary election
Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party of Minnesota primary for Governor of Minnesota
Steve Patterson defeated Darrell Paulsen in the Grassroots-Legalize Cannabis Party of Minnesota primary for Governor of Minnesota on August 9, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Steve Patterson | 59.1 | 1,003 |
| Darrell Paulsen | 40.9 | 693 | |
| Total votes: 1,696 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Legal Marijuana Now Party primary election
Legal Marijuana Now Party primary for Governor of Minnesota
James McCaskel defeated Chris Wright in the Legal Marijuana Now Party primary for Governor of Minnesota on August 9, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | James McCaskel | 51.9 | 1,461 |
 | Chris Wright | 48.1 | 1,356 | |
| Total votes: 2,817 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
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Campaign finance
Campaign themes
2022
Video for Ballotpedia
| Video submitted to Ballotpedia Released Jul 17, 2022 |
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Hugh McTavish completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by McTavish's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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I am a Ph.D. biochemist, patent attorney, inventor, entrepreneur, and author. I have started two pharmaceutical companies off my own inventions. I have 21 U.S. patents, 18 scientific journal articles, have authored three books, and have started two pharmaceutical companies off of my own inventions.
Like all of us, I have had adversity in my life, and I try to turn those events for good. When I got cancer, I invented a better cancer drug and started a company around it. When Gov. Walz locked us in our homes for 6 weeks and thereby drove me and 1 in 5 of us into depression, I took that adversity as fuel and started a nonprofit COVID Sanity and wrote a book COVID Lockdown Insanity to document the harms of the lockdown response to COVID, especially the huge increases in depression, drug abuse, and deaths of despair, and how vastly those harms exceeded the benefits.
Easily my greatest invention is what I call “Jury Democracy,” and that is the reason I am running for office. It can transform the way we do government, entirely for the better.
- Jury Democracy. Empowering the people. I will call juries of 500+ randomly selected citizens to the capital to listen to the arguments and evidence from both sides on one bill or proposal, break into small groups of 12 to discuss it, and then vote by secret ballot. Every bill to become law and every important decision will require the approval of a citizen jury. Effectively, I will not be Governor, WE ALL WILL BE! Decisions will be made: (1) By reason and evidence instead of money and influence (2) By civil discourse instead of division and screaming at each other (3) By all of us, instead of by politicians and bureaucrats
- Govern with the goal of happiness, instead of GDP growth. We will measure and track happiness, depression, and loneliness as carefully as we now measure economic statistics. Toward that end I propose (1) Replace the mask mandate with a Name Tag Request. Ask that all of us wear name tag that says “Minnesota Nice” and your first name on it. It will promote connection and be a reminder to be nice. (2) The “Minnesota Siesta.” I will ask all of us to take a 15 minute walk outside once a week at 2 pm on Thursdays. This also will promote connection and happiness and exercise and being outside.
- Rewild Minnesota and share the planet with wild species. Sharing is a value we should have learned in kindergarten. I propose that over a 50-year period we rewild 50% of the land. We return it to nature and to the primary use of wild species. I want buffalo roaming wild, abundant native prairie, and wolves, cougars, and bears restored to their native range over 50% of the land. This is economically feasible, but it is only possible with Jury Democracy for reasons explained at McTavish4MN.org.
I am most passionate about Jury Democracy. It is easily the greatest invention of my life and the most important thing I will ever do. It will totally transform the way we do government. It will give real power to all of us, to ordinary people. It will give perfect proportional representation. The poor and middle class will have real power and representation. Young people, minorities, and women will all have power and representation proportional to their numbers—all without quotas or affirmative action. It will unite us and calm our divisions. When you deliberate with other jurors with different life experiences, you will find that you learn from each other, like each other, and agree far more than we have been told. And it will be making policy based on evidence, reason, and civil discourse, instead of money, influence, and division.
In addition to happiness and the environment, I am passionate in my opposition to the COVID lockdown response. This was one of the worst public policy disasters in history—it destroyed education and childhood for 2 years, threw 1 in 5 of us into major depression, threw 16% of workers out of their jobs, took small businesses from their owners without compensation, massively infringed our liberty, and created a crime wave, all without having any apparent effect on COVID cases or deaths.
Martin Luther King, Jr., is my greatest hero. I admire most all those in history who have had the courage to stand up for what they believed to be right and suffer consequences for it, including Martin Luther, Rachel Carson, Medgar Evers, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. My favorite writer and philosopher is Henry David Thoreau.
I am a problem solver and an independent, outside-the-box creative thinker. I have done that throughout my life. I invented a way to harness the green plant photosynthetic system to harvest renewable energy and invented new drugs for cancer and cold sores by outside-the-box thinking. That quality has served me with my invention of Jury Democracy. It solves the problems of division in our society and government; governmental paralysis; corruption and the problem of influence and campaign finance controlling our government; and strict limits on what is acceptable to debate made by the elites, media, tech giants, and moneyed interests. All sides will have access and the ability to get a hearing for their ideas. Then the ideas will be judged on the merits based on evidence and reasoning. And they will be judged by all of us, talking with each other after being fully informed in a fair hearing.
In addition to being an independent thinker, I am good at fairly evaluating evidence and not believing what I am told just because it comes from those in power. I learned that as a scientist. You evaluate ideas based on data and evidence, not who says them. That served me to realize what a disaster the COVID lockdowns would be and have been. The media and elites told us "we had no choice" and the lockdowns saved many lives. Of course we always have a choice, so that part is nonsense. And the media and government did not apparently consider the possibility that the lockdowns would kill people by driving up suicides and deaths of despair, as well as murders and cancer deaths. But I could see that possibility and wrote that it was certain to happen and likely that the time of life lost from those we effectively decided to kill by driving up deaths of despair and other deaths would exceed the time of life saved in prevented COVID deaths. Data shows I was right.
Jury Democracy. I hope people remember me as the father of Jury Democracy. It is not important whether I am remembered, but I would like to see Jury Democracy be implemented and spread around the world.
I think Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. I was 7 at the time.
I worked in a veterinary clinic and literally shoveled poop and loved it. I had it for a year or two.
Only if we are invaded by Iowa.
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Campaign website
McTavish's campaign website stated the following:
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Jury Democracy or Government by Informed Consent “Effectively, I will not be governor—WE ALL WILL BE! I will give the power to you!” What would be the characteristics of an ideal government? It would produce decisions in this way:
Obviously, our current system falls short of these goals. But that is necessary, right? We do not have time for everyone in society to stop their lives to carefully consider all the evidence on every issue that our government has to decide.
Jury Democracy is a system of government of having large juries (about 500 to 2,000 persons) of randomly selected citizens, where the juries constitute statistically valid samples of the citizenry or voters, make policy decisions for government after seeing full informed debate on the policy, being given full information for and against the policy, and fully deliberating and discussing the decision with equally informed citizens in the same jury. For bills enacted into law, the jury can replace one house of the elected legislature or be added as an additional house of the legislature or replace the elected legislature entirely, so every law to be enacted must be approved by a citizen jury. The jury would hear full debate from both or all sides on a proposed bill, be given all the facts and information for and against whatever bill is being considered, just like a jury in a civil or criminal trial is given, be given the required time to read the bill in full (which would already make them better informed than most legislators or congresspeople), then break into smaller subgroups of 12 persons and deliberate and argue for and against the bill under consideration within that subgroup of 12, and then each juror would vote in secret for or against the bill, with a vote in favor of 55% required for passage of a bill. A 55% requirement for passage would insure at least majority support had one been able to convene every voting-age citizen or registered voter into the jury for the same deliberations because it would be outside the statistical margin of error, which would be less than ±5% with a group of 500 or more. Each jury would be called for just one vote or issue and serve for only the time needed to consider that vote or issue, which in most cases would be only one or two days. In this way, each citizen would be invited for this jury service no more often than once per year. Probably we should shoot for about once ever four years to not burden people too much. Participation would be voluntary. In addition to considering bills to be passed into statutes, as the legislature does, large citizen juries can also consider and decide proposed regulations and regulatory decisions, as the executive branch does, and can supersede or constitute the supreme court to decide judicial decisions and the constitutionality of laws, as the judicial branch does. Jury Democracy is an improvement on traditional elected representative democracy because:
Jury Democracy is an improvement on referendum and initiative because:
My other name for Jury Democracy is “Government by Informed Consent” because every decision is made and enacted only if it has the consent of a majority of citizens after the citizens have been given full information and taken the time for full consideration of the decision. In other words, no policy (statute, regulation, regulatory decision, or final judicial decision) can be enacted without the informed consent of a majority of the citizens the policy is being imposed on. As Governor, before I sign any important or controversial bill into law, I will submit it to a citizen jury of at least 500 people. If the jury approves the bill, I will sign it into law; if it rejects the bill, I will veto it. Effectively, I will not be governor—WE ALL WILL BE! I will give the power to you! I will also submit my own bills to juries for consideration and invite non-profits and interest groups of all political persuasions to draft bills and submit them to juries for consideration. We should also have every elected legislator, whether in the majority or a minority party, have the right to submit a bill to a jury once during every 2-year period. All types of ideas can be considered, no matter how far outside the box or outside what is deemed acceptable opinion by our elites. Collectively, we have an enormous number of great ideas out there! Let’s give them a hearing! I will also use a large jury and have its decision be binding for every important regulatory decision. Do we allow a wolf hunt? I believe absolutely not! But I am willing to submit it to a citizen jury and be bound by its decision. Do we allow a copper-nickel mine to be developed and potentially (in reality, certainly) pollute our surface waters and ground waters for centuries, whether the Boundary Waters or Lake Superior, or other waters? Again, I would say no. In fact, I would say “over my dead body.” But I would have a jury hear the issue. I am confident it would reach the right decision.
In addition to destroying education for our children and young people, throwing over 300 people into major clinical depression and 127 people out of their jobs for every 1 COVID death prevented, and being the largest impairment of our freedom since slavery, lockdowns killed more Americans than they saved. Lockdowns caused more loss of life (lost person-years of life) from the deaths they have caused (mostly ncreased suicides, drug overdose deaths, alcohol deaths, and increased murders from the increased crime) than they have saved in prevented COVID deaths. I estimate 5 times the loss of life. The median person dying of COVID is an 84-year-old in a nursing home with less than one year to live. The median person dying of suicide or drug overdose is a 42-year-old with 38 years of life left. But we decided as a society to increase suicides and drug overdose deaths in order to reduce COVID deaths. I say we decided to increase suicides and drug overdose deaths because that effect was entirely predictable and was in fact predicted by me and others. The CDC now confirms that by a report that in 2020 we lost 1.5 years of life expectancy but only 1.1 years was due to COVID, meaning the lockdowns caused 0.4 years of life expectancy loss. We deliberately decided to inflict on ourselves deaths resulting in 0.4 years of life expectancy loss, which is to say an increase of about 40,000 suicides and drug overdose deaths and murders in 2020 alone, in a (failed) attempt to reduce COVID deaths. We decided to kill young people (including driving some children to suicide) to try to save 84-year-olds in nursing homes. The excess deaths caused by the lockdowns will be more than the number of U.S. deaths in the entire Vietnam War. You might also be interested to know that we lose more time of life to suicides every year than we did to COVID in 2020 or 2021 and more time of life to drug overdoses than we did to COVID. But we decided to increase deaths from the greater risks to decrease deaths from the smaller risk. In addition, and worst of all, we threw 1 in 5 Americans into major clinical depression by the lockdowns. The percentage of the U.S. population suffering from major depression (excluding mild depression) went from 8% in 2019 (already the highest of any society in human history) to over 27% during the lockdowns. I consider time spent depressed to be lost time of life. The lost time of life from time spent depressed that we decided to inflict on ourselves is at least 30 times the time of life saved in prevented COVID deaths, even if the lockdowns prevented 200,000 COVID deaths, which they almost certainly did not. Note that I have not mentioned money or loss of freedom, just deaths and unhappiness. I could also add that by the lockdowns we decided to kill more than a million people worldwide from hunger. Chapter 11 (from my book COVID Lockdown Insanity) The Trolley Dilemma: Do We Switch the Train From Track 1 to Track 2? Philosophers have a thought experiment known as “The Trolley Dilemma” that is illustrated by this diagram. Imagine there is a trolley or train coming down the track and below it on the track, in this diagram, three people are tied to the track who will be killed by the train. But between the train and where the three people are tied to Track 1, the lower track in this diagram, there is a fork in the tracks and a switch, and you are standing at the switch and you could pull the switch to divert the train to Track 2, the upper track in this diagram, to avoid having the train run over the three people tied to track 1 and save their lives. Unfortunately, however, there is a different person tied to Track 2 who will be killed if you pull the switch and who would not have been killed if you did not intervene. So you would be responsible for that person’s death, whereas you could argue you would not be responsible for the deaths of the three people on Track 1. Do you pull the switch? This is figuratively what we have done with COVID. The train of COVID was coming down the tracks and it was going to kill some people from COVID if we did nothing. So we decided to intervene with our lockdown response to divert the train to Track 2 to avoid those COVID deaths. But we forgot, or more accurately, refused to acknowledge, that there were people tied to Track 2 who were harmed, and in some cases killed, by that decision. The tables below show the choices we had, and still had throughout the year+ of lockdowns, between Track 1 and Track 2, as I have calculated them in Chapters 2-9. The numbers between Track 1 and Track 2 are normalized to one person on Track 1 whose COVID death our policies averted from the 200,000 COVID deaths (or zero to a maximum of 400,000 deaths) I estimated in Chapter 3 may be averted by the lockdowns. (So in the table for Track 2 we have fractional people; if you do not like to think of fractional people you could multiply the numbers in both tables by 10 or 100 or 1,000.) Which track do you think involved more harm? Did we cause more harm than we prevented by switching the train from Track 1 to Track 2? If Track 2 involved more harm, was it ethical to pull that switch and have the train run over the people tied to Track 2, instead of allowing it to run over the one person tied to Track 1? Now that we know what these numbers are, and once we knew these numbers by about the summer of 2020, is it and was it ethical to continue to pull that switch and continue to pursue the lockdown approach and continue to run over the people tied to Track 2? It is important to emphasize again that none of these bad outcomes on Track 2 were caused by COVID—they were caused by our response to COVID. They were caused by the lockdowns. We did not have to take the approach we took. We could have educated people about their actual risk of death if they become infected with SARS-Cov-2, and then let them make their own decisions about whether they want to isolate themselves to reduce their risk of being infected, wear a mask, etc. That is the approach Sweden took, and they had fewer deaths per capita than us (Chapter 1) and had almost none of the other collateral damage we suffered of increased unemployment, depression, suicides, and general unhappiness. My moral code says it cannot be justified to cause 19.3% of the population to become clinically depressed in order to extend life by 1 day on average. It should also be noted that the people we have imposed the sacrifices on are not the people at risk of dying from COVID. So we ordered some people to sacrifice to benefit others. In fact, we decided to kill some people, almost all of them young or middle aged, by driving them to suicide or drug or alcohol deaths, in order to extend the lives of other people, almost all of them old and in poor health and with little life expectancy left. All of the costs listed were entirely predictable and were in fact predicted, so we decided as a society to inflict those harms in order to save the lives of other persons from COVID. One of the worst parts is that when the people we have killed or harmed who were tied to Track 2 object to the decision to harm them to try to save the lives of some elderly people from death by COVID, we self-righteously scream at them that they are selfish. When people have lost their jobs or their businesses because their restaurants were ordered closed, they are shouted down that they have no right to complain when others are dying of COVID. The same happens when parents or university students complain that schools are closed and they or their children are being denied an education and the right to simply live their lives. The millions we have driven into major depression mostly don’t object or complain because they are too beaten down at this point to object and afraid that if they object people will like them even less than they do now. The people who have killed themselves, of course, are no longer around to object, and those contemplating killing themselves are too beaten down to object. I am here to say that the people tied to Track 2 that we decided to run over by diverting the train from Track 1 have every right to object. Their lives are every bit as valuable as the elderly who are dying, like all of us will die, from, in this case, pneumonia caused by a natural virus I would not have pulled that train switch. I think it was immoral to do so. Knowing what we know now, I would not continue to keep that switch pulled. I think even more clearly it is immoral to continue to keep that switch pulled. Why we might have chosen lockdowns Looking at this table it seems pretty obvious to me that the outcomes on track 2 are worse than those on track 1. And these harms were predictable. We knew the lockdowns would cause massive unemployment. We knew the social isolation we were mandating and the unemployment would lead to massive increases in depression and suicides. We obviously knew we were impairing education and harming young people by closing their schools and universities. And the experts, although perhaps not the public, knew at the very beginning of this that the infection fatality rate was less than 1% and probably less than 0.5%, so the number of deaths we have had is not much of a surprise, and even if we thought the restrictions would nip COVID in the bud and we would have almost no COVID deaths, the number of deaths prevented would only have been about five times the 200,000 I am estimating here, and therefore the harms of our policy would still have exceeded the benefits. And very soon into the spring lockdowns it was very clear the policies were not going to eliminate COVID deaths, so at that point the most you could hope for is maybe the restrictions would prevent 600,000 COVID deaths or three times the number in Track 1. Again, it should have been obvious at that point that the harms would have vastly exceeded the benefits of preventing those deaths. So why did we persist in our lockdown approach and persist in pulling the switch and running over the people tied to Track 2? I think the answer is human psychology. We were faced here with two bad choices. People would die from COVID or people would die from suicide and have their lives ruined for a period of time with clinical depression. We were faced with a choice between bad and worse, not bad and good. We are not good at facing that. We have all been raised on movies where the good guy beats astronomical odds to escape and save the day. We hoped against hope that somehow that would happen here, and we have kept hoping even to this day, when the evidence is very clear that it has not happened and will not happen and that our approach has been a disaster and caused vastly more harm than it has prevented. We need, and needed, to be adults and realize that sometimes bad things happen and the best thing to do then is move on and try not to make things worse. From the Conclusion It is not a matter of legitimate disagreement whether the lockdowns were a mistake. It is not a matter of legitimate disagreement whether an approach of no mandatory restrictions at all, but just educating people on their risk from COVID and on what modifications to their behavior would reduce that risk and then letting them decide for themselves whether and how to modify their behavior, would have been a better approach than lockdowns. Lockdowns have no advantage at all. If you think life is better than death, a long life is better than a shorter life, happiness is better than depression, more money is better than less, education is better than ignorance, child abuse and domestic abuse are bad things, and more personal freedom is better than less, then you agree the lockdowns were a mistake. How this ties into Jury Democracy With Jury Democracy, I or someone would have been able to make the arguments above to a jury. When a jury had to choose between the harms in Track 1 and Track 2 in the table above, no jury would choose Track 2 and the lockdowns. Ordinary people would not make the collassal mistake that the elites and experts made in choosing lockdowns. One of the things the lockdowns have proven is that experts make terrible, terrible decisions. Ordinary people could not possibly have done worse. One of the reasons the experts made these terrible decisions is groupthink and peer pressure. It was very clear to everyone in government and academia and the public health community which way the wind was blowing and what was the "right" position you were supposed to take. And it was clear that to oppose lockdowns would be career suicide. A jury would not be prone to that problem. Their votes will be secret and their careers will not depend on how they vote. Another reason we have continued to inflict lockdowns on the public long after all the evidence showed this was inflicting vastly more harm on society than benefit is the inability of our leaders to admit a mistake. That is human nature. When you have taken a public position, it is hard to admit you were wrong. But that will not be a problem with juries. Even if one jury initially decided to impose lockdowns, a later jury would be open to the evience this was a mistake and would not be afraid to change direction because it was not them who had imposed lockdowns--it was a previous jury. So they would not be wedded to the original answer and unwilling to see it was a mistake.
Our real goal in life is happiness. Promoting happiness should be the primary goal of government, and it will be in my administration. The Declaration of Independence says that the purpose of government is to promote “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Strangely, it does not mention maximizing GDP growth. What is the primary goal in life? I think it is happiness. Ultimately, each of us primarily wants to be happy. We want money, a good romantic relationship, friends, a meaningful job, a great new phone, a million TikTok followers, and other things, but we want those ultimately because we think they will make us happy. (By happiness of course, I do not mean just pleasure but something deeper than that. And I should say that to become happy, perhaps the best strategy is to focus on others and making them happy.) Since happiness is our primary goal as people, it should also be the primary goal of government. I don’t think it is. Our government and our system behave like their primary goal is maximizing aggregate GDP growth—not even per capita GDP or individual economic wellbeing but just aggregate GDP, the total size of the economy. That will not be my primary goal as governor; my primary goal will be to increase the average level of happiness or per capita happiness, including especially minimizing depression and loneliness. We should measure and track those things with at least as much care and specificity as we measure and track economic measures like GDP. That is how you should judge me as governor and that is how Tim Walz should be judged as governor. We are a social species and most of our happiness comes from interacting with other people. But the lockdown response chosen by Tim Walz and Anthony Fauci was to deliberately isolate everyone from each other -- order everyone to stay home, close restaurants, bars, churches, health clubs, schools, and businesses, and for the businesses that remained open order everyone to work from home if possible. And order everyone to wear masks so we cannot see each other’s faces. The policy was literally to reduce contact with other human beings as much as possible and, for the contact that cannot be prevented, order people to wear masks so they cannot see each other’s faces. If you wanted a policy deliberately designed to make people unhappy, you could not have come up with a better policy. And it succeeded. We went from 8% of the U.S. population in major depression pre-lockdowns to 27% in the midst of lockdowns. We chose to throw 63 million Americans into major clinical depression in a failed attempt to reduce upper respiratory tract infections from a disease 1.7 times deadlier than the flu. Tim Walz and Anthony Fauci effectively chose to maximize depression. I will choose to minimize it. So here are a few proposals to promote happiness: (1) Do the opposite of every policy of the lockdowns:
(2) Replace the Mask Mandate with a Name Tag Request! . I cannot take credit for this idea. I think Kramer on Seinfeld first suggested it. I would propose that the state officially ask all of us to wear a name tag like this: The state can produce them on demand for people. These say “Minnesota Nice” on them, which I hope provides a reminder to us to be nice to one another and helps promote the state as a state with nice people. We can have blank ones available outside of stores and establishments, urging people to fill them out and wear one, the same way we had masks available outside of every store. I thought of this as a contrast to the mask mandates. Masks were a visual reminder to be afraid of one another and that we were in a supposed catastrophe and we should all be depressed. They prevented us from seeing each other smile and made both verbal and nonverbal communication more difficult and thereby discouraged bonding with people and meeting new people. A name tag request, in contrast, would help us meet and bond with one another and be a visual reminder to be nice and friendly to one another. It would promote happiness and fight loneliness and depression. (3) The "Minnesota Siesta." Walk outside for at least 15 minutes every Thursday between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon, with businesses required to give all employees at least 15 minutes off in that time frame. Let's call this "The Minnesota Siesta." Again, for individuals this would be a request, not a mandate. But for businesses it would be a mandatory to give all workers at least 15 minutes off in that hour to participate. Walking is the best exercise there is and almost anyone can do it. This policy would promote being outside, exercising, and meeting others, particularly your neighbors. Other than owning a dog, those are the three best things you can do to be happier. (4) Mandatory dog ownership. Just kidding about this one. I would not make owning a dog mandatory. But it is a great way to be happier and we should promote and not discourage dog and cat ownership. Currently many apartment buildings and rental units, especially for low income people, do not allow dog or cat ownership. I would require all rental buildings with 5 or more units to allow both dogs and cats in at least 80% of their units and rental housing with fewer than 5 units to pay a tax on each unit where they choose to forbid dog or cat ownership. Some of these proposals may strike you as whimsical, but I am serious about them. Ordinary politicians propose tax breaks to bring some business to town that will hopefully generate a few jobs for a few years. That does nothing to make us happier, and happiness is really what we are after in life. My proposals above really will help to make us at least a little happier, less depressed, and less lonely.
My Modest Proposal: Share the Earth with Other Species. Understanding where I stand on any issue affecting the environment is very simple. I am on the side of protecting the environment. Whatever the issue is, figure out which position would protect the environment more, and that’s my position. My core environmental proposal is the modest proposal that we simply share this state with other species, with wolves and buffalo and sandhill cranes and wood ducks and every other wild species, and that we do that by reverting 50% of our land to nature, to the primary if not exclusive use of wild species. We in Minnesota, the U.S., and the world face two crises in this century and the 20th that are the two greatest crises in human history. Those are:
These two crises are the greatest crises in the 100,000 year history of our species, far more serious than Naziism or racial discrimination or even slavery. If those purely human problems had not been solved at one time, they could still be solved later. Species loss is irreversible. We will never see those extinct species again. Global warming is also mostly irreversible. Jury Democracy I think is our best hope to solve these crises, and I have another essay here on that topic. Mass extinction is the more serious of these two crises, although it gets much less publicity than global warming. And contrary to what you read in the media, mass extinction to date has not been caused significantly by global warming. It is caused primarily by habitat loss, which in turn is caused by human overpopulation. To a lesser extent the extinctions, particularly of insects and amphibians, are caused by pesticides and herbicides and chemical contamination of the environment. In the future as global warming and climate change becomes more severe, it will contribute significantly to this mass extinction event of the 20th and 21st and 22nd centuries, but it will never surpass habitat loss as a cause. Leave half our land for the use of other species. Native prairies and undisturbed forests, meadowlarks, otters, beavers, wolves and buffalo over half the land in our state. I want to protect the environment mostly for other species, not for humans. Humans have all the power and we are perfectly capable of protecting our own interests (although we do it in a shorstighted way that ultimately does not protect our species’ interest). As I mentioned in my values document, we have dominion over the earth and other species are at our mercy. We have a duty to be benevolent rulers and to watch out for them. Humans directly use for our own purposes the large majority of suitable land on earth. Forty percent of earth’s land area was used for agriculture (including farming and grazing) as of 2005 (Foley et al.). It would be more now. That is 40% of total land area, including all the unusable land such as mountaintops, deserts, Antarctica, Greenland, and arctic tundra. Another 3% is urban areas. Most of the remaining arable land is forest that is frequently harvested for timber and therefore is also properly classified as primarily used by humans. Another portion is used for mining. Probably not more than 10% of the world’s land area is potentially suitable for human use and remains unused. That should be at least 50%. My modest proposal is that we humans share the earth with the other species. It is a value we should have learned in kindergarten. It is selfish to take the large majority of land on earth for our own use. Half should be enough for us. We should leave half the earth, at least, for use exclusively by the other billions of species on our planet instead of our one species. Homo sapiens is like a psychopathic billionaire who alone owns 90% of the wealth on earth and complains it is unfair if anyone suggests he should be taxed or give anything to charity. Leaving half of Minnesota to other species would mean no timber harvesting on that land, no mining, and no commercial fishing. The land should be in every habitat, not all in the north woods. We currently farm just about every inch of the former native prairie of Minnesota. We should allow half our current farmland to go back to native prairie. Half of the southeast portion of our state should go back to the Big Woods of maple and ash. Half of the southwest to prairie. Half of the northwest to prairie and bogs and wetlands. Half of the northeast to pine and aspen/birch forest. We will be where we should be when wolves exist in the wild lands that cover half the state and buffalo run wild in these wild lands in roughly the southern half of the state. Is this unrealistic? We won’t achieve it in four years, I agree. But we won’t achieve it at all if we do not try and do not set the goal. With much of my agenda, when I explain it to people they immediately dismiss it and say, “the powers that be will never let it happen” and by implication therefore I should not try. I have been told many times not to run because I can’t win. I disagree. I agree with Jesse Jackson, who once said, “If you try, you may fail. If you don’t try, you are guaranteed to fail.” I want to set the goal that half of each habitat area in our state, half of each habitat area in the U.S., and half of each habitat area in the world is under the exclusive use of other species with no permanent or substantial use by humans. We are currently under 10% and mostly under 1%. Let’s start working toward the goal of 50%. Let’s actually share the planet with other species and be as great and noble a species as we constantly say that we are. The other great thing about setting a goal of 50% is we can compromise on 20%, which would be about 19% better than where we currently are for many habitats. Giving half the land and waters of our state back to nature and to other species is the best solution for the mass extinctions since those are caused almost entirely by habitat loss. We will be giving the habitat back. It is also probably the best thing we can do to address global warming. Biomass, which is the mass of living things, mostly trees and other plants above ground and their roots below ground, is sequestered carbon. Natural habitats such as forests and prairies have more biomass than farm fields or golf courses and far more biomass than suburban housing tracts or cities or pavement. So expanding natural habitats will pull carbon from the atmosphere and reduce global warming. We also of course need to work on the other portion of the causes of global warming, which is burning fossil fuels and I address that here.
Overpopulation of humans is at the root of all our environmental degradation and to a large extent at the root of our social and economic problems also. Mass extinctions are caused primarily by habitat loss, which is almost entirely caused by overpopulation. Global warming is caused by too many people burning too much fossil fuels. It is a function largely of population. The other side of global warming is the amount of carbon sequestered in trees and other living things. That is habitat loss—we log old growth forests and convert them to young forests with smaller trees sequestering less carbon, and we convert prairie and other natural environments to farmland, cities, and pavement. And, again, habitat loss and land conversion to human use are caused entirely by overpopulation. Here is a graph that I created from the data in Wynes et al. (1) and Murtaugh et al. (2) of the relative amount of carbon reduction from the commonly suggested personal actions to reduce CO2 emissions. Having one fewer child has about 7 times greater effect on the CO2 emissions you are responsible for than all other possible interventions put together. For slowing the current wave of extinctions, which again is a bigger and more irreversible problem than global warming, having fewer children would be really the only thing that matters in your personal behavior. Economic issues and overpopulation. Average individual wealth and income It is common sense that if there are fewer people there are more resources for each of us and each of us is better off on average economically. That is borne out by the data. As we all know, the less affluent countries of the world have more children per woman and faster population growth than the more affluent countries. It is usually treated that they have faster population growth because they are poorer, but it actually makes more sense that they are poorer because they have faster population growth. That fits a logical causality that lower population equals more resources per person and each person is richer on average. Wealth and income equality Not only does population growth and overpopulation make each of us poorer, but it also makes the wealth and income distribution more unequal. The Black Death in the Middle Ages was bad if you were one of the people that died, but it caused a big improvement in the economic standing of the surviving peasants and the equality of wealth. There were fewer peasants to work the land, so landowners, feudal lords, had to treat them better. Simple supply and demand. Population growth in the U.S. currently and throughout our history has been caused mostly by immigration. And immigrants come here for work, so more immigrants means more workers and more workers relative to the total population, which the law of supply and demand would predict would drive down wages for workers and worsen inequality. That is exactly what has happened. Here is a chart from the excellent and fascinating book Ages of Discord by Peter Turchin (3) tracking the correlation of inequality in the U.S. with the percentage of the population that is foreign born. The Inequality Index in this figure is the ratio of the largest individual fortune (the net worth of the wealthiest person) divided by the average annual wage. You can see that the inequality ratio very closely tracks the percentage of the population that is foreign born, with a 5 or 10 year delay. This is as you would predict from the law of supply and demand for labor. Policies in view of overpopulation An official acknowledgement from a jury that we are above the optimal population—overpopulated. As governor, I would seek simply a finding from a jury that
The press and media usually refuse to acknowledge either of these two points, which seem pretty obvious and unarguable to me. Once we acknowledge that we are overpopulated, I think it will change the mindset of people and change debate on the policies that affect population including immigration and childbearing and hopefully change some views on the ethics of allowing uncontrolled immigration and the personal ethical responsibility to limit your childbearing. Cooperate with immigration authorities and bar “sanctuary cities” in Minnesota. Immigration is the major driver of population growth in the U.S. and it thereby degrades our natural environment, decreases the economic welfare of our citizens, and drives down wages and thereby worsens inequality and exerts its greatest harms on lower wage workers and therefore differentially on racial minorities. Therefore, as governor I would cooperate fully with federal immigration authorities and push to ban “sanctuary cities” that provide sanctuary for the illegal immigrants who break our immigration laws.
My environmentalism ties in with promoting happiness. All of us love nature. Some do not like camping or backpacking or mosquitoes. But we evolved in the natural world and therefore have an innate affinity for the natural world that has been called Biophilia. Everyone feels better seeing and being surrounded by green plants than surrounded by concrete. Everyone likes seeing and being near water, as we are fortunate to often be in the land of 10,000 lakes. Everyone likes the sound of waves lapping on the shore or a brook flowing over rocks. One reason I want to protect the environment and expand experience of nature is to promote happiness. Toward that end, we should work to have more urban gardens and parks in economically disadvantaged inner city areas. It will substantially increase the happiness, sense of peace, and life satisfaction of residents of those areas. The proposal to convert half our land to nature and wilderness also feeds our happiness. Even if you are not a camper and never visit those places, knowing they exist and that we have not consigned most of the species on earth and most of the species in Minnesota to extinction or to existing only as museum pieces with tiny populations in tiny areas will feed our souls and our happiness.
Line 3. Line 3 is an oil pipeline taking tar sands from Alberta to a refinery in Superior, Wisconsin. You can learn more here: https://www.stopline3.org/#intro . It contributes significantly to global warming, more in fact than the entire economy of Minnesota. Like all pipelines, it leaks sometimes and contaminates water and land. It crosses Indian treaty lands and the Ashinaabe tribe whose treaty lands it crosses oppose it. Minnesota’s own Department of Commerce found our local market does not need Line 3 oil. I oppose Line 3. Tim Walz supported it and allowed it. Tim Walz pledged to consult with the Ashinaabe tribe before acting to allow it, and the tribe feels he did not keep his word and did not meaningfully consult with them. Scott Jensen supports Line 3. Copper/Nickel Sulfide Mining. Minnesota has a long history of iron-ore mining but has never had sulfide mining, which leaches toxic metals with sulfuric acid and is much more polluting and dangerous to our environment. Sulfide mining for nickel and copper involves extracting the ore with sulfuric acid and produces a waste laced with mercury and other toxic metals and with sulfuric acid, and that waste is proposed to be stored in earthen dams and the dams must last forever to avoid leaking toxic metals into Lake Superior and the Boundary Waters Wilderness and other waters of our state. As you may be aware, nothing lasts forever. Therefore those dams will leak. The mining companies PolyMet and Twin Metals have already had leaks at similar mines in the world in recent years, so it is a certainty they will pollute the Boundary Waters and Lake Superior—the only question is whether it is in the next decade or the next century. You can learn more about the PolyMet mine that would leak into Lake Superior here: https://www.mncenter.org/sulfide-mining. You can learn more about the Twin Metals mine that would leak into the Boundary Waters here: https://www.friends-bwca.org/sulfide-mining/twin-metals-mining/. I oppose the PolyMet and Twin Metals copper-nickel sulfide mines in Minnesota. Scott Jensen supports them. Tim Walz has refused to take a position for four years. Management of the dedicated Legacy Amendment and ENTRF funds for the environment. Minnesota voters in 2008 approved the Legacy Amendment, a constitutional amendment that increased the sales tax and dedicated these funds to clean water, parks and trails and the arts. In 1990, Minnesota voters dedicated a portion of profits from the Minnesota Lottery to create an Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund (ENRTF.) I support protecting those funds and insuring they are spent as the voters intended: to protect the environment and expand our natural lands. A citizen board reviews proposals for how to spend the Legacy Amendment funds and makes recommendations to the legislature. Too often the legislature has deviated from those recommendations. I would try to have more of those funds spent to acquire and protect new land in a natural state and a bit less on construction and adding buildings and trails and other improvements to existing parks and natural lands. Promoting more sustainable agriculture. Minnesota is one of the breadbaskets of the world, and we can be proud of that and insure it continues for generations to come. I want to insure we have healthy soils, healthy waters, and healthy rural communities. I think those things can go hand in hand. We should promote organic agriculture, no-till farming, permaculture and farming with perennial plants (for instance apple trees), and sustainable agriculture in general. Those protect the soil, reduce soil erosion and water pollution, and in most cases require more labor on the land, which will increase the population of rural communities and improve the economic and social health of rural communities. I support Minnesota’s buffer law that requires buffers of perennial plants along waterways to filter out nitrogen, phosphorous, and other pollutants: http://bwsr.state.mn.us/minnesota-buffer-law. It is one of the best laws we have enacted in the last few decades. Clean Car Standards. Minnesota has adopted a “clean car standards” rule that requires that a certain percentage of cars automakers sell in Minnesota, starting in 2024, be low emission or zero emission. I support this. Tim Walz supports it. Scott Jensen opposes it and joined Republicans in being willing to shut down state parks to try to stop it! That’s right, he was willing to block you from going to a state park because he was having a hissy fit over the idea we sell more fuel efficient cars in Minnesota. Wolf Hunt. I strongly oppose any wolf hunt in Minnesota. We are blessed in this state to have the largest population of wolves, the apex predator of North America, of any of the lower 48 states. To hunt them is the equivalent of hunting lions in Africa or Tigers in Asia, which we rightly abhor in this state. Humans should not be hunting predators. It is killing off the competition. There are plenty of deer in Minnesota to allow the wolves to have their share. I would work towards the goal of having wolves restored to their entire native range, which is our entire state and the entire territory of the continental U.S. We need to share the planet with other species, and that means having wolves in every part of Minnesota. Tim Walz opposes a wolf hunt now. Scott Jensen I’m sure supports one. Clean cars and transit. I support electric cars, but I think some are going too far in calling for a goal where only all-electric cars are sold. In my view, plug-in hybrids that can burn gasoline or be plugged in to charge a battery are preferable. Electric cars require a half hour to recharge. So they are inconvenient if not unfeasible for driving long distances. They only work as a second car for those wealthy enough to own two cars. Also, the batteries require scarce metals that will become just as scarce as oil in the long run. So I would promote all-electric cars, but more so promote plug-in hybrids and fuel efficient vehicles in general, whether they are electric, hybrid, or gasoline powered. In the long run I think the future of cars is fuel-cell vehicles that run on electricity that is produced directly from burning hydrogen or methanol, rather than charging a battery. For transit, I would promote buses, particularly rapid transit buses and dedicated bus lines on existing streets in the Twin Cities and other cities and promote and subsidize bus transit between towns and cities across the state. That gets much more benefit and transports more people and can cover more routes than light rail in the cities or inter-city rail transportation.
Jury Democracy is our best hope to solve the dual environmental crises—the 6th mass extinction event in Earth’s history and global warming. These crises were created by our current economic and political systems. The same governmental power system and economic power system and elites that brought us these crises are not going to solve them. They are going to keep digging and keep getting us deeper and deeper into these crises. These crises will only be solved by a new power system that places decision-making power with ordinary people, with all of us. That is Jury Democracy. Solving these two environmental problems requires drastic and fundamental change. Our current governmental and economic system is not capable of that change. But juries in Jury Democracy will be. But Jury Democracy is just us, pursuing our interests as individuals, which are fundamentally to be happy and to have enough material goods. “Enough” is not a concept the system recognizes. Happiness is not something corporations or the economic system really care about at all or are capable of caring about. When decisions are made by jurors, by real ordinary people in their capacity simply as people, instead of by money and influence, the system will change. In the movie Don’t Look Up, an asteroid is heading toward earth and will hit it and kill all human life on it in a month or two. When informed of this, the President is only concerned about how it will affect the midterms. Her most influential advisor is a billionaire who is only concerned that there are metals theoretically worth trillions of dollars on that asteroid and schemes how he can make money off of it. Neither of them cares about the end of life on earth and so they do nothing to divert the asteroid. That’s our current power system. Jurors in a jury would be different. They would not care about the midterms or about billionaires making more money. They would work to divert the asteroid. Likewise, jurors in Jury Democracy would be capable of contemplating and considering and enacting the real fundamental change that would be needed to stop (as much as is still possible) the current mass extinction event and global warming. I think ordinary people are very willing to make a sacrifice and to work together toward a great cause. Politicians are not. I think we have a hunger for meaning in our lives and most people are eager to sacrifice for a great cause. I think that partially explains why people were so willing to accept the enormous sacrifices imposed on us by the lockdown response to COVID. In my book COVID Lockdown Insanity, I close with this passage:
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| —Hugh McTavish's campaign website (2022)[4] | ||
See also
2022 Elections
External links
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Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on July 17, 2022
- ↑ Hugh McTavish for Governor of Minnesota, "About," accessed July 22, 2022
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Hugh McTavish for Governor of Minnesota, “Issues,” accessed July 19, 2022
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