Universal citizenship a bad idea?

[Owen Sparks]

Here is an idea I would like to submit to all you Libertarian leaning forum members.

Back in the early days of our republic, only property owners could vote,
hold public office or serve on juries.

This was because only property owners payed taxes!

In other words, These who pulled the wagon got to steer. Those who were just along for the ride did not.

This was to ensure that this country did not devolve into a democracy with the majority using the power of the legislature to vote themselves other mens property. If this mechanism had remained in tact there would be no such thing as the "welfare state" as we know it today.

In the opinion of many in the Libertarian movement, there are basically two types of Americans:

Tax payers and tax consumers.

Tax payers are those who work, earn and produce. They serve their fellow man by providing goods or services that others want or need.

Tax consumers are those who receive their sustenance from the public treasury either in salary (like the ever burgeoning bureaucracy) or in the form of direct payments like welfare or food stamps.

If you understand anything about economics, you know that government
DOES NOT PRODUCE ANYTHING. They only take it away from those that do,
and give it to those that do not in order to buy their vote.

My question to you is: Should only tax payers be allowed full rights of citizenship? That is the right to vote, hold public office and serve on juries?

 

[Oohrah]

Something that I never thought of, but it does make a bunch
of sense. How would it be determined, a filled out W-2? I
wonder, as it seems to be very easy to obtain citizen papers.
confused

 

[Kentak]

Then those that pay twice the taxes as you should get two votes, and those that pay 20 times the tax should get twenty votes. Right? It's logical.

 

[ArmedBear]

Universal citizenship is a bad idea.

Unconditional citizenship by birth is a bad idea, now that there aren't any former slaves who need to be granted citizenship. Wierd stuff happens in the Southwest, because of that provision.

I just don't know how exactly you determine who is to have the right to vote.

Property isn't a terrible idea, actually. (Note that more than 2/3 of US households live in a home they own). Those who own part of the community, no matter how small a part, have a VERY different perspective towards it. Talk to some old hippies who own places in San Francisco. Compared to their renting (and squatting) neighbors, they're downright conservative.

Taxes are another, though lots of people file a W2 and are net recipients of tax dollars.

 

[GEM]

So all the rich dudes who avoid paying taxes, wouldn't be able to vote!

I'm for it.

What about spouses who don't earn anything? Just parasites for an extra deduction on taxes!

Nope - if you are a citizen and and reach voting age you can vote.

Why not have intelligence tests or personality tests? That would eliminate the current administration. Get my point.

 

[pcosmar]

Interesting,
This will require some thought. Are you talking about land owners only being able to vote? What of those that rent, but are still productive contributing taxpayers?
And if you are speaking of taxpayers, What of those that pay tax, but produce nothing? Even those on welfare pay tax. Those who work for the government pay tax on money that came from tax.
It seems it would take a total restructuring of the system.
I am thinking it would raise more questions than I could answer.

 

[yhtomit]

I sense this thread might get locked soon for having precious little to do with firearms; however, in a mild attempt to correct that, I'll point out that one of my favorite things about (my perhaps false) understanding of Swiss democracy is that voters traditionally marched / traveled / gathered to the polls *armed* (w/ swords, not sure if firearms, too); my understanding is that this tradition is either no longer observed or is only observed as a quaint tradition, and in only a few places. Can anyone Swiss enlighten me?

This argument (that only taxpayers should be voting citizens, if I haven't harmed anything in that compression) is a good reason to institute a national sales tax (*or* the Fair Tax, or a Jack Kemp-style flat tax, or or or) and quickly dump the IRS, or at best gut it to whatever skeletal form is needed for sales-tax or other simplified tax collection. The idea of the bumper sticker on my car ("Only Taxpayers Should Vote") is *not* to disenfranchise people; rather, it's to encourage participatory citizenship, both because people are better stewards of money when they know it (at least some of it) is theirs, and because it's insane to establish a system within which lots of people (what percentage?) can vote (or rather be bribed for votes) for ever-bigger public-trough giveaways, yet never pay for them -- that's the job of the productive citizens.

If *everyone* pays an equal percentage of their income as taxes -- and I am not actually *defending* income taxation -- then suddenly, in the sense of contributing to the commonweal, everyone is a productive citizen for the purpose of tax revenues.

timothy

 

[quatin]

Anyone ever watch "Starship Troopers"? You get to be a citizen only when you have served the state. Now that is an idea. You can't vote for war unless you're part of it.

 

[General Geoff]

Why not have intelligence tests or personality tests? That would eliminate the current administration. Get my point.

^^Most politicians are not stupid. They're just evil.

 

[TallPine]

Eliminate elections and voting, and just choose people for public office by means of a lottery.

Couldn't be any worse that the current system, even if the village idiot's name got pulled out of the hat

 

[fletcher]

IBTL, but I have no problem with only allowing taxpayers to vote.

 

[Glock Glockler]

Why not have intelligence tests?

I like the idea of it, it works well with driver's licenses. If someone is so dull that they don't understand how our country and economy work how can they be expected to make a good decision regarding elections, and everyone else has to live with their bad choices.

At the very least we should end stop handing out citizenship to people simply because they're born here. Everyone who wants to vote or hold public office should have to go through the same citizenship process that a foreigner does.

 

[geekWithA.45]

Suffrage is the word you're looking for, or the franchise. This is separate from "citizenship".

"These who pulled the wagon got to steer. Those who were just along for the ride did not."

Universal suffrage has fundamentally resulted in those who are along for the ride wresting control of the wheel from those who pull.

No matter how abundant a society is, the distribution of wealth is usually skewed, such that those who haven't always outnumber those who have, and innevitably, voting themselves largesse at public expense ensues.


Even if you posit a "fair" distribution that looks like a normal curve, you by definition have a situation such that 50% of the population has less than the other 50%, and all it takes is one bleeding heart to tip the balance in a majoritarian excercise.

Like Armed Bear, I know of no ethical or moral way to divest those currently posessed of the franchise of their vote, nor have I an foolproof way to determine who can and can't. Furthermore, it's even more difficult to prevent such a sorting system, no matter how open it is, from being fraudulently gamed for prejudicial reasons.

 

[ConfuseUs]

There's always the proto-Fascist model Heinlein used for society in Starship troopers: Only veterans are extended the full priviledges of democratic society, everyone else can just shut up or join the army.

I assume that under your regime only individuals who are proven not to have been a net tax consumer would be allowed to vote on the grounds that only they contribute to society. However, does a police officer contribute to society under this plan? I guess not, even though they contribute in a non-financial sense to society by looking for and arresting people who break the law. The same "lack of contribution" applies to many other government employees as well.

Therein lies the crux of the problem: Sure, government does not contribute economically to society. However without a good government to provide a framework of enforceable rules to base an economy on (property rights for example) a society just doesn't work as well.

 

[SoCalShooter]

Couldn't be any worse that the current system, even if the village idiot's name got pulled out of the hat

That reminds me of a joke by Lewis Black, where he has a monkey shoved out of plane somehwere over the US with a parachute, when the monkey lands the first person he meets and takes the hand of is the next presidente.

Back on topic here, I agree with armedbear, no universal citizenship and to be honest I say lets not admit anyone else into the country at this point.

 

[Owen Sparks]

GEM said:

So all the rich dudes who avoid paying taxes, wouldn't be able to vote!
_____________________________________________________________

It's EXACTLY that attitude that has led to the mess we are in now.

According to the 2006 IRS records the top 50% of wage earners payed 96.7%of Federal income taxes.

The top 25% payed 84.6%

And the top 1% of wage earners payed a whopping 36% (over a third) of their gross income in federal income tax!

OS

 

[SoCalShooter]

re: Owen Sparks

how about we do away with federal income tax?

 

[Chrontius]

I'm in college, and I work full time ($7/hr). If circumstances were different, I'd be a tax consumer, even though I pay income tax; that works out to $1,120/month before tax, roughly $800/month after. The cheapest college apartment I can find is $400/month, and my various insurances add up to > $400; where does this leave me?

Food stamps and medicare, baby. And 40 hours a week.

Where does this leave Wal-Mart employees? The ones that are told in their employee handbook how to file for medicare? Definitely out of a vote, since they're on taxpayer nickel. But if they can't vote, what happens when the people who want them to work sixty-hour weeks for marginally more money repeal worker protections?

Of course, they'd never do that. The FBI would never lie to Internet providers to get access to data, either.

I don't intend this to come across as vindictive or anything, I just want to point out that this argument fails in the case of low-income workers.

 

[SoCalShooter]

Re: chrontius

Dude how many hours in a week are you working?

 

[ConstitutionCowboy]

How's this:

If you get a check from the Government(other than the military and social security), then you do not get to vote. People in public service shouldn't be voting for their own pay scale. People writing, passing, enforcing, or adjudicating by the law should get no say in their tenure in office. We can make that the Twenty-eighth Amendment.

Woody

 

[Alphazulu6]

If you dont pay taxes and/or are not legal citizens you do not vote. 100%. Same for those on welfare. Seriously folks. My stance is if you dont pay the salaries, light bills, and pick up the tabs of all these special interest programs liberals are creating you dont have any business dictating where the tax money goes or how it is spent.

Yeah... pretty sure many wont agree but hey its my tax dollar, its your tax dollar and we all can put our 2 cents in on what to do with it. Those that dont put their two cents in the hat shouldnt have the rights to say what to do with the money in the hat (aka give their hypothetical 2 cents).

 

[quatin]

That's fair though unless there's a flat tax system. Someone who paid 10x more than you on their taxes for the same service to exist should get 10x the service. Rank the service based on how much you paid for it.

 

[JesseL]

This smacks of trying to fix a broken system by breaking it a little more.

By my principles and reckoning:

• Taxation is theft. You can rationalize it until you're blue in the face, but it won't alter this simple fact.
• Forcing people to live under the rules of a government that they have no voice in is slavery.
• Universal suffrage is a pretty poor way to run things (tyranny of the majority and all that), but it's the best we've got (for now) and it beats the heck out of having an aristocracy.

 

[atk]

SoCalhooter,

Chronitis is implying that he's working 40 hour weeks.

($7 per hour) x (40 hours per week) x (4 weeks per month) = $1120 per month

 

[3fgburner]

There's always the proto-Fascist model Heinlein used for society in Starship troopers: Only veterans are extended the full priviledges of democratic society, everyone else can just shut up or join the army.

You're confusing Heinlein's book (which was considerably more libertarian) with that abortion of a movie by Verhoeven. In the book, there were several other services besides the military which qualified for the franchise.

David Weber, in The Shadow of Saganami, has an interesting note in a throwaway line. He has a character discussing taxes, who mentions that you can only vote if you've paid at least one cent more in taxes, than you've received in unearned government money. The "unearned" part means subsidies and welfare type stuff, not military or civil-service salaries. I could definitely see that as a criterion for voting. Note, by the way, that pensions would qualify as an earned benefit, not as a transfer payment.