Who Should Be Allowed to Vote

Should we really care who votes?

Target Liberty reader David K. emails:

Robert,

If you recall Robert A. Heinlein’s book, Starship Troopers discussed suffrage only being extended to military veterans, I think the starting point for who gets to vote is obvious: Transfer payments. If you receive any sort of transfer payment from government (Nat’l, state, local) you are ineligible to vote. Only true tax payers are allowed to vote. Granted, this can get very sticky about what constitutes a transfer payment, and I’m sure some marginal cases could present conundrums, however in broad terms:

• Government employees can’t vote;
• Government contractors can’t vote;
• Social Security recipients can’t vote;
• Government retirees can’t vote;
• Medicare/Medicaid recipients  can’t vote;
• Welfare recipients can’t vote;
• Any kind of subsidy (e.g., farm, export, student loan) recipients and their employees can’t vote.

The flower shop owner, the baker, the plumber…any one who doesn’t receive a payment from government gets to vote.

Extend this to the state level, and also local (e.g., the public school teacher paid by property taxes).

It should eliminate any issues of race or sex. I say should, because I’m sure some prog would raise an issue with the disproportionate number of minorities on the dole. 

Still, as a thought experiment it may be a place to start. Recipients of tax revenue should not be able to vote themselves more money through the threat of violence via candidates for office.

Best,

David (retired federal employee and current govt contractor, a non-voter since 1996)

RW response: 

I understand the sentiment here but I don't really want anyone to vote.

If we start getting technical about who should be able to vote, we are at the same time, in our own way, sanctioning the rule of some people over others by the voters we "approve of." I am for the PPS, which would require no voting.

I really don't want Paul Krugman, the Boston University economics faculty, Sheldon Adelson, Arthur Laffer, George Clooney, Lady GaGa, Beyonce or many others having a say (a vote) in how I live. 

In fact, I don't want anyone to tell me how to live.

I would rather spend my time promoting liberty than a technical trick that might reduce some spending.

That said, in my post, Countering the Socialists: The Five Freedoms Proposal, I did suggest that foreigners be allowed in on a Freedom Visa where they would never be allowed to vote as part of the condition of being allowed into the United States. But that was more of a realpolitik sop to the anti-immigrant right who hold the view that immigrants will always vote lefty.

I personally, don't care if immigrants are allowed to vote or not--I would never waste time battling the issue one way or the other. For me, the battle is for liberty and I don't want to get sidetracked battling technicalities of how the state should be structured.

Further,  I believe the real battle is fought way above the masses who vote. They are simply reflecting the prevailing paradigm set by, as Keynes would put it, scribblers of the past.

Which is to say, if I am going to be scribbling, as I do, it is not going to be about the structure of voting but the structure of society. To the degree freedom's value becomes appreciated in society, the voting will follow. And if total, wonderful, full freedom becomes the desire of the masses, then voting will simply disappear.