I seem to reread Bastiats essay “The Law” about once a year, usually on a long weekend like this one but usually in a more cursory way than I did today.
This particular time I was noting how the people he calls the “democrats” were constantly agitating to expand the voting franchise, but invariably acted tyrannically whenever the voting was done and they won.
Is that not interesting? It’s the same now, isn’t it?
And I used to argue that only people who paid income taxes should be allowed to vote. My reasoning was that if you are not paying in, you should get no say on what gets paid out. That would limit the “plundering” by people trying to vote for a living.
Then as I note he discusses also, the issue comes up that people who don’t pay in still are affected by the speed limit, and what age and where and how you can buy alcohol, and a wide variety of other issues.
But it occurs to me that in AMERICA these are separate issues. To my mind a good solution would be to allow people who pay no Federal income tax–which is about half of America–to vote in local and State elections, but not Federal elections. I could be persuaded this is a bad or unfair idea, but for now it makes sense to me.
And the OBVIOUS intent by the “democrats” then and the Democrats now is to enlist by means of demagoguery as many idiots as they possibly can, use them, then discard them until the next election.
I will ask a simple question: how much value could the opinion of a person who can’t get a drivers license be worth? No, those people respond well to organized propaganda, which is why they are such an important demographic, and avoiding the undue influence of such people–to among other things avoid the fate of the Democracy in Athens–was a very important and well articulated reason why our system was set up the way it was.
Democrats say “vote for us and get free stuff”. Or “Vote for us or those bastards will get you.” And it WORKS an awful lot of the time. They get the votes, then stop giving a shit completely, and if anyone complains they blame Republicans. But most people don’t even notice. These are people voting who don’t even watch the news, who know absolutely nothing about economics, current events, or the issues in play.
Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose.
And as Madison among others noted, democracies end badly and usually violently. And as I don’t know who pointed out long ago, once people get the idea that they can vote themselves money they didn’t earn, the whole thing launches down a greased slope.
It remains to be seen if Biden’s most recent attack on every principle of the Constitution will be stopped by adults, or if we want to establish as precedent that the occupant of the White House can just spend $500 billion dollars whenever he pleases, on whatever he pleases.