It was off topic and I concluded that your comments, especially those about the American religious right, which has nothing to do with the career unemployed (that I know of), might be those of some coterie with an agenda.

Of course “mucking about with the franchise” is dangerous. So was deciding to go into Iraq. It being dangerous in execution is not a reason not to discuss it.

I cannot agree with your final paragraph in which you appear to want to embargo discussion of solutions to large scale problems because “that’s going to go nowhere good”.

How do you know?

May 13, 2005 – Dove is featured in a Chicago Boyz Quote of the Day.

You, sir, owe my wife an apology for your laughable claim that she was “parachuted” onto this site. (If memory serves me correctly, we’ve been here longer than you; the oldest comment I can find from you is dated Nov 23, 2005.)

You also owe it to the Chicago Boyz community, and to my wife, to make a serious attempt to respond to her serious criticisms, rather than simply dismissing her out of hand because you misunderstood her.

The fact is, her criticism is valid. Democracy is subject to the unfortunate problem that the majority can overrule the minority — whether it’s people on welfare or government employees voting themselves a raise, or religious people voting for laws that make others follow some tenet of their religion, or people who don’t want nuclear waste dumped in their area voting to dump it on Nevada, or whatever. Your proposed solution to one variant of this problem (welfare) is to simply remove the franchise. This is a poor solution, and the sort of crap I expect from leftists (some of which actually HAVE argued that Christians shouldn’t be allowed vote!), not from Chicago Boyz authors.

The New Deal pretty much did away with all that. Per Amity Schlaes (The Forgotten Man) it was really the 1936 election where appeals to personal greed rather than some notion of common good became legitimate. People and groups had always voted their interest, but previously had tried to argue that their interest was also the interest of the nation as a whole (tariff policy, silver money, etc.). Starting around 1936, it became more naked greed and redistributionist, rather than arguing (maybe fallaciously or even disingenuously, but still) that the greater good was being served.

By persuasion, do you mean what the IRS does at the point of a gun? Because that is how the money is taken from those who produce and given to those on whom the government showers its largesse.

When did we start believing in class warfare?

I’m torn. 1912 or 1932? Hard to decide. I’m not sure it was inevitable after 1912, so I come down on 1932 myself.

I am not prepared for an instant to restrict the rights and liberties of some of my fellow citizens so as to make a majority for my interests out of the remainder.

So you’re not a teacher, prison guard, welfare recipient, or other entitlements recipient. Prepare to be in the minority.

If you don’t believe in democracy when the election results go the other way, then you don’t believe at all.

I simply don’t believe in democracy as the best form of government regardless of election results, as the founders did not. A balanced form is far superior.

This topic came up in 1861, and most of us consider it to have been settled some four years later.

Not really. 1861 was about dissolving the union and abolishing slavery, not instituting an unbalanced form of government. That’s why the XVI, XVII, and XIX Amendment had to be passed, not to mention the alphabet soups of the New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society and New, New Deal. They have seriously unbalanced the government we were given with detrimental effect on the longer term prospects of the republic as a whole.

Remember Franklin’s words upon being asked what form of government the Constitutional Convention had delivered; “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Not a democracy. Think, don’t jerk your knee. It’s not an easy problem, but it’s one worth considering.

I am not prepared for an instant to restrict the rights and liberties of some of my fellow citizens so as to make a majority for my interests out of the remainder. If you don’t believe in democracy when the election results go the other way, then you don’t believe at all. This topic came up in 1861, and most of us consider it to have been settled some four years later.

Rubbish. You’ve been parachuted onto this site by people who have failed to understand the discussion.

That, and having lived in California from 1980 to 2005, through its descent into unconstrained demagogic democracy, have made me give a great deal of thought to the matters that concern Verity. While Verity may doubt that an unclear they are intelligent enough to organize the collective action of government dependents intentionally to elect sympathetic local council members, the example of California noted by Alan demonstrates that in the US they most certainly are. And such an outcome is inevitable in any system which becomes excessively tilted in the direction of democracy just as other but similar evils attend excessively monarchic or oligarchic governments.

At least we’ve got hope and change coming.

There are a lot of genuine threats of that nature. It’s not a problem with any particular class of people. It’s a flaw in democracy. Speaking in the abstract, when two wolves and a sheep are voting on what to have for lunch, the answer is not to try and disenfranchise the wolves–you can’t trust the sheep acting alone to pick something wolves could digest–but to require unanimity instead of majority. Treat votes as a veto, granting voters the power to avoid oppression, not as a license to mob rule. Nothing will get done for a long time, but eventually they’ll get hungry enough to agree to something, and nobody will get eaten.

I’m not sure how that would look in the real world, on this topic. But I do know that mucking about with the franchise is very dangerous. There are many, many groups you could argue are capable of oppressing the others if they vote in bloc, who could vote for very dangerous things. Taking away their votes invites others to oppress them in turn, though, and is a train of reasoning that’s going to go nowhere good!

No. Where did I write such nonsense?”

Sorry, of course you didn’t. I was anticipating one possible approach. Look forward to the next post on the subject.

In a sense, in Britain, we have the opposite problem, which is that we had a system of law that had been accreted over many centuries, whereas your governance was by design and is more secure from interference. Ours has been handed over to the sickeningly undemocratic EU – routinely referred in Britain to as the EUSSR. And the cunning, malign Tony Blair appears to be set to become the EU’s first (unelected, ça va sans dire) president.

But both our countries now suffer a tranche of our citizenry that believes it is entitled to a slice of the wealth created by others. They are able to help themselves to our money by voting for the politician who will cater to them.

I have not been persuaded otherwise by any of the interesting posts above, though. I still think the only way to control the damage is to disenfranchise them until they become conributors. Other than initial flurries of “I have my rights!”, I don’t believe the move to remove the vote from them – other than squeals from the self-serving advocacy groups – would last long. The franchise isn’t as important as next Saturday’s afternoon’s football match, after all, and the weekly Saturday night lottery draw on which they will have spent considerable amounts of their free money to buy tickets.

Mob rule does not lead to thoughtful rule and they knewe that. The checks of a republic were an acknowledgement of that. What would be especially useful would be if those checks gave legislators a broader and longer horizon. We have seen in these bills a flurry in which no one seems to know what to do, so, instead of pausing and thinking them through, they produce messy legislation. Responsibility for future generations is always somewhat at odds with the desires of the immediate ones (when we talk about the control of factions the example I always like to give is generational because it is eternal).

The goal of universal franchise is not to pick honest and wise people. It is to gain legitimacy for the government. How can a government gain control over people who have no say in creating its laws? Gradually, the grant of universal franchise gives formerly limited government full legitimacy to do whatever it wants to some or all of what have become its subjects instead of its masters.

The founders recognized this problem. They solved it elegantly by, among other mechanisms, a federal of dual sovereignty, limited delegation of powers, devolving the question of the franchise, having the Senate elected by the state legislatures and least successfully by the Electoral College. The one thing they did not want to create was a democracy.

Small d democrats have pushed the system further and further away from the founders explicit balance of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy to full democracy. One man one vote, established as law by the supreme court in Baker v Carr is one of the most unnoticed but egregious examples of this destructive tendency.

Such an unbalanced system will not endure including a system devoid of any democratic components such as the current EU. The founders knew it and we are living it. This is the problem Mitch has to reconcile with his allergic reaction. I am sympathetic. But the ostrich method we have been pursuing will not yield a satisfactory solution.

The big problem is having an entrenched political class.Politicians are to governance what prostitutes are to love.Here the Supreme Court did much damage by not permitting term limits on Congress. States which have citizen legislators who are in session only a few months a year do much better.
Our rulers have to be accountable and what we have doesn’t do the job.This will not go away.