Yvonne Dillard

Should voting be mandatory in the United States?

People don't vote because the two-party system offers most of them nothing. I'm a leftist in Mississippi and my vote for president has never mattered and never will. Forcing me to participate in a system that structurally ignores me just makes my coercion part of the pageant. [FairVote](https://www.fairvote.org/) has laid out the alternatives for years: proportional representation, ranked choice, real ballot access. Do those and watch turnout rise on its own. Until then, mandatory voting is a mandate to endorse a duopoly.

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

The Waltons are the perfect case study in dynastic wealth. The heirs of one retail fortune collectively hold hundreds of billions, NONE of it earned by them, while the company built its empire on wages so low that workers needed food stamps. The Institute for Policy Studies tracks this in its Billionaire Bonanza reports: [IPS Billionaire Bonanza](https://ips-dc.org/billionaire-bonanza-2024/). Taxpayers subsidized the labor costs, the family kept the compounding returns, and now the grandchildren are billionaires by birth. This is aristocracy with a smiley face logo. If fortunes can't be passed down intact, the incentive to hoard them collapses.

Should the federal government break up Big Tech companies?

People forget the last big breakup took over a decade of litigation and the company it targeted, IBM, was already losing its grip by the time the case ended. The Justice Department's IBM case ran 13 years and was dropped in 1982 as without merit, after burning enormous public and private resources. Big Tech markets move far faster than courts. By the time a breakup order survives appeal, the market may have reorganized itself: search is already being disrupted by AI assistants, and TikTok came from nowhere to challenge Meta. A breakup designed for 2020's market could land in 2030 like a museum piece. Faster tools exist. Ban the specific conduct, like default-placement payments and self-preferencing, and enforce it quickly. Structural surgery on a patient that is already changing shape is a gamble with the whole digital economy. The DOJ case against IBM is a cautionary tale in how slowly these cases move: [Stanford](https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/corporate-monopolies/government_ibm.html).

NIL changed the picture more than either side admits. Stars can already earn millions, which was impossible five years ago. Maybe the answer is stronger NIL plus revenue sharing, without reclassifying all 500,000 athletes.

Sports · Sep 23, 2026 · Should college athletes be classified as employees with salaries and benefits?

Strongly disagree that authority is even desirable. Centralized control over AI development is a single point of failure and a prize for whoever captures it. Distributed safety research beats one global gatekeeper.

Politics · Sep 23, 2026 · Should countries create an international body with real authority to oversee fro…