Saturday 26 September 2015

LIV Voters Are The Feature, Not The Bug.

If you can't sell your vote, it's not really yours.  Twenty two countries including Australia and most of South America make it illegal NOT to vote.   That's because your vote is money in someone else's bank.  A big reason you and I have a vote is precisely because most of us are LIV.  Universal suffrage empowers new elites to compete with the traditional potentates.  

From Wikipedia
The old got their position through family ties, violence and wealth.  The new got influence  through OPM (other people's money) but not as much as they wanted.  This includes political parties and the civil service,  the tenured,  the people who find themselves running companies but not owning companies, all meta-jobs, and the new highly educated class whose opinion of their merit can exceed their accomplishment.  In my view, these very smart elite people weren't doing us a favour with near-universal suffrage. They were making it easier for themselves to steer the ships of state, adding the threat of our uninformed disapproval to their wisdom.


A feature, not a bug.
Is this too simple a story, a progression from a dominant warlord, to a magna carta cartel of regional strongmen to all propertied gentlemen, to all men, to all men and women over 21 years of age, to all over 18 years of age?  Why stop at 18?  Why not 12 or 6?  There is some residuum of common sense.
If most of us become well-informed voters, the present party system of government will be disabled.  LIV voters are a foundational building block for the status quo.


1 comment:

  1. We have a nation-shaping conflict of interest in that people who receive their income from government have a vote -- or at least a vote that is equal to one by a genuine taxpayer. Those whose income comes from government are not genuine taxpayers because they simply kick-back some of what they receive so that their actual income is simply the gross amount less the kick-back. Universal suffrage is a terrible idea but, once granted, is impossible to change without revolution.

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