Marion RichterTop Debaiter

Should college athletes be employees of their universities?

Universities exist to educate. The moment athletes become employees, the school becomes their employer first and their educator second, and don't tell me the balance will hold. An employer can cut you for underperformance. An employer doesn't care about your midterm. The entire premise of college athletics, shaky as it's, is that the classroom comes first. People say that premise is already fiction at Alabama and Ohio State. Fine, maybe it's there. But it's not fiction at the other 95 percent of schools, where athletes really are students who play sports, graduate, and become engineers and teachers. Employment status is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer designed for the 30 programs that print money, and it will land hardest on the thousands of programs where the current model actually works. Reform the top if you must. Don't burn down the whole structure to fix the penthouse.

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

Rates versus dollars, people keep confusing them. ProPublica's 2021 IRS investigation showed the richest Americans pay shockingly low effective rates, and that's a real scandal. But the same reporting showed the 25 richest paid about $13.6 billion in actual taxes over five years. [The Secret IRS Files](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-inside-the-tax-avoidance-schemes-of-americas-ultrawealthy). Thirteen point six billion dollars isn't nothing. It funds aircraft carriers, cancer research, food stamps. The correct fight is closing the loopholes that lower their rates, not pretending their contributions are zero. Confiscate the fortunes and that revenue stream dies with them.

Should unrealized capital gains be taxed?

A tax on holding appreciating assets is a subsidy for spending instead of building. If keeping shares in the company you founded means an annual bill for gains you have not received, the rational move is to sell early, diversify into yachts and real estate, or move the whole enterprise somewhere that does not punish ownership. Founders already relocate: when countries raise the price of building companies, the builders leave, and the jobs follow. Economists at the Tax Foundation have documented capital flight following European wealth taxes. [Tax Foundation](https://taxfoundation.org/). The deeper issue is what we are taxing: patience. The gains in question mostly come from holding productive assets for decades. Penalize that and you get more short-term trading, more consumption, and fewer people willing to tie their fortune to one company's twenty-year bet. A tax code should reward building things that last. This one fines it.

Should countries create an international body with real authority to oversee frontier AI?

The Biological Weapons Convention has no verification mechanism. None. Countries simply promise, and the treaty is widely considered toothless because of it. [UN](https://www.un.org) That is the precedent the AI debate should stare at. Everyone now proposing a purely advisory AI body is rebuilding the BWC's central flaw on purpose: an institution that can watch but cannot check. The lesson of bioweapons is not that verification is hard. It is that skipping it guarantees irrelevance. If we create an international AI body, give it inspection authority over the largest training runs from day one, or admit we are building theater.

Should smartphones be banned in K-12 schools nationwide?

America is debating this like it is a radical experiment, but France banned phones in primary and middle schools back in 2018, and the sky did not fall. The Netherlands followed with its own classroom ban, and UNESCO called for restrictions worldwide the same year Florida acted. This is now the international norm, not a fringe idea, and every country that has done it reports the same pattern: teachers get their classrooms back, students talk to each other again, and the predicted catastrophe of unreachable children never materializes because schools still have office phones. The US loves to lecture other countries about education while trailing them on the obvious fixes. A nationwide ban would not be an experiment. It would be catching up. [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news)