making people buy their right to vote

Over the years, some archconservatives voiced the opinion that people who don’t pay enough taxes or are not property owners probably shouldn’t vote because they have no skin in the game and are more likely to vote for government programs that benefit them but not necessarily all those around them. And one recent incarnation of this train of thought was a post by finance writer Ian Cowie detailing his opinion on the topic, including an oversimplified, cutesy little parable to show that the poor and the middle class couldn’t make it without the tax contributions of the wealthy. I have no idea what this has to do with the idea that the poor and the middle class should just surrender all decision-making about how their country is ran to the wealthy, in essence creating a textbook banana republic, but apparently he thought it was very important and devoted just more than half the column to it. Though in his parable, he forgot that everybody pays some sort of tax and to fully allocate political powers by wealth would mean that we’d have to start deciding how much we allow people to vote based on a review of their taxes. But hey, if Cowie ever got his way, at least we’ll have partial democracy for most, right?

Now we could dismiss it as a knee-jerk reaction by a conservative commentator who really wants to have the final word in how things are ran and wants to rig the popular vote in his favor, point out the numerous flaws in supply-sider logic once again, as well as how noting that companies are not saints has become a taboo in the world of supply-side politics, but we shouldn’t. It’s not that Cowie’s argument isn’t flawed but because it’s actually a very clumsy and self-focused attempt to define what makes one a productive member of a society. If you contribute nothing to those around you or actively seek to undermine their pay or education to satisfy your own political and financial goals, you’re actually a menace to society, a parasite to put it bluntly. On the flip side of the rhetorical construct, if you pay taxes and contribute something to those around you by working, you are a good participant in a civilized society and certainly deserve a voice in how it’s ran. It’s hard to argue with that at first glance, but the devil is in the details. Everybody pays taxes, even those who work for the government, and that means everybody gets a say. If we start measuring how much one contributes to society solely based on how much he or she takes home on payday, we’ll loose track of what it is the person actually does and how it affects the society at large. Those who seem the biggest contributors may actually do the most harm.

Could we say that a CEO of a multinational conglomerate who laid off 7,000 people to make his Q3 numbers so he could get a bonus for meeting Wall Street’s expectations, then outsourced 5,000 of those jobs to some nation where workers’ legal rights are described as “nagging suggestions by busybodies,” has contributed to society in a productive way because he took home $50 million that year? He sliced off taxable income for the thousands of workers he fired. His actions actually cost society money so if anything, by that logic, we should fine him. He single handedly reduced society’s tax receipts by as much as $90 million if we assume that all of the laid off employees made between $40,000 and $50,000 a year and take all federal, state, and local taxes into account. And considering that it takes more than a year to find a job nowadays, our hypothetical CEO had an approximately $20 million contribution to society while costing it more than four times as much. As for his company, it may pay no federal taxes at all. But before you start fuming about the CEO in question, we should remember that it’s unrealistic to expect someone whose job it is to maximize his and his bosses’ profits shed tears for the economy and do whatever he can to generate jobs. That’s not what he’s supposed to do and the assumption otherwise lies at the heart of the fallacy that corporate welfare produces jobs. It won’t.

So clearly if income can’t work, what about adopting the Heinlein model suggested by one of the commenters of Cowie’s post, referring to the sci-fi classic Starship Troopers in which people only became citizens after the completion of voluntary military service? If you fought for your society, the logic of the fictional government went, then you can claim that you have a right to decide that happens to it. There’s a very clear downside there also, since it would mean that the government could be ran like a military junta, although those who experienced a whole lot of combat and the actual horrors of war up close and personally would very likely be loath to do it all over again and inflict the same trials on the next generation. This is actually another issue that went though a small wave of popularity after Robert Gates famously addressed an Ivy League audience urging them to think about military service and pointing out that while politicians and their supporters cavalierly throw the military’s might around the world in conflict after conflict, the actual burden is placed on less than 1% of the population, and that small percentage of citizens may grow very disconnected from the people they serve since they’re not just a small fraction of the society but also tend to align towards certain ideological lines.

You know what? It’s just easier and more fair to let everyone get a say without starting to prioritize voices. Why don’t we just keep on doing that instead and instead of ridiculous posturing about who’s more qualified to say what, we should focus on running a more realistic society which actually prosecutes and punishes corruption and collusion between politicians and their friends? We’d get a lot farther with solving our budget troubles and economic malaises just by doing that than by deciding on some political superclass to which we surrender all of our decisions, especially because it’s interests may actually harm those around them and if they’re granted an absolute say in all political matters, they won’t care to even appease the rest of the society.