In the year of America's tricentennial, all is placid. America has re-stratified itself into a three-tiered society. At the bottom are the "Livers," an under-educated but well-fed 80% of the population who enjoy a life of leisure. Above them (or below them) are the "donkeys," the genemod white-collar force who run the infrastructure and are elected into office by the Livers, earning votes via bread and circuses. Finally, the Sleepless are the source of just about all technological, genetic and scientific advances.
Nope -- you can't sell your votes, for one reason, because that would be unnatural, and for another, because you still only get one vote .. it just counts more or less than the vote of others.How do you feel about selling votes? Each person gets a vote. Then, politicians basically bid for those votes. It would incentivize generosity and put cash into the economy. Or party members that were lpassionate could round up their friends votes in return for, whatever, dinner?
I was inspired by BEGGARS IN SPAIN and of course, your post.
Please .. tell me why you like the sentiment.I like the sentiment but totally impractical and it would make fraud almost imopssible to detect
This kind of crap is why I think that a lot of chest thumping pseudo-patriots don't really believe in much that America stands for. All people created equal, liberty and justice for all, all of it. They're really all about an aristocracy. About some classes of people having special rights and power over the rest. They want it for their race, their gender, their religion, their sexuality, all of it. It takes real guts to face the rest of the world as an equal, and the cowardly and selfish can't handle it.
Wow -- the OP has really spiked your ire!This kind of crap is why I think that a lot of chest thumping pseudo-patriots don't really believe in much that America stands for. All people created equal, liberty and justice for all, all of it. They're really all about an aristocracy. About some classes of people having special rights and power over the rest. They want it for their race, their gender, their religion, their sexuality, all of it. It takes real guts to face the rest of the world as an equal, and the cowardly and selfish can't handle it.
Please .. tell me why you like the sentiment.
This kind of crap is why I think that a lot of chest thumping pseudo-patriots don't really believe in much that America stands for. All people created equal, liberty and justice for all, all of it. They're really all about an aristocracy. About some classes of people having special rights and power over the rest. They want it for their race, their gender, their religion, their sexuality, all of it. It takes real guts to face the rest of the world as an equal, and the cowardly and selfish can't handle it.
What booby trap?Because it is fun to poke sticks on booby trap threads without actually stepping on it
Besides, we're just brain-stormin' here, trying to solve some real problems -- nothing's being cast in cement.Sorry, but since when are socialists allowed to preach to anyone about what America stands for?
What booby trap?
My girlfriend and I were having a serious conversation about a vote-number factor.
Surely there are others who realize the value in it.
If you truly did agree with the sentiment of it, why wouldn't you want to elaborate as to why?
No one's gonna hang you for your opinion here .. are they?
Sorry, but since when are socialists allowed to preach to anyone about what America stands for? You're not exactly the shining jewel of standing behind it's founding principles, you know.
Well, yes, I didn't say determining the criteria would be a piece a' cake or that it would be "forever" or easily agreed upon by both wings of the political spectrum.It would allow society to set forth the criteria that society most values and encourage them by rewarding those who meet those criteria. Of course the poot storm that would follow would make it impossible to design the criteria and then impractical to implement. You for instanced cited having kids. That is fine with me because it gives an emotional vested interest in long term success of the nation beyond your life time, but then people will whine about it punishing gays and on and on. Despite the mythology of the founding fathers, the people who were given the right to vote were not just "rich" people, but people who most had a vested interest in the nation and the government--merchants, landowners, tax payers. Certainly imperfect system even for its time, but certainly not the sinister moustache-twirling plot that people paint it as having been.
So .. my girlfriend and I were talking the other day, and the conversation meandered to American democracy, the problems associated with it, that these unresolved problems could really damage America and have already begun to do so, and how these problems might be solved.
Rather than make this an analytical post about the problems (I'm sure we all know what these problems might be) I'm gonna skip ahead to the proposed solution bantered about: some people should have more votes than others.
To expand on this a bit ..
.. A criteria would be developed to determine a vote-number factor for each person.
Thus, for instance, a war vet, decorated above average, who went on to develop a new economic model benefiting all, management, workers, and consumers, and who had reached his 70th birthday ... he might be awarded a vote-number factor of 20 for all he's done and his age ..
.. And a young person in her early 20s who dropped out of high school and had a child out of wedlock and is on the government dole ... she might be awarded a vote-number factor of 2, 1 more than minimum just for raising a child but less than she would have received if she had been married and not on the public dole.·It would be a task for sure to create and track .. but, think about it for a bit -- wouldn't it be well worth it?
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If you believed in any of those principles, you'd be a socialist too.
Instead you enshrine selfishness.
Well, in that regard, I suppose you do follow the principles of a group of wealthy slave-owners who didn't want to pay taxes and thought that only their race, gender, and social class should vote. But you don't follow any of the lofty things they wrote.
All valid points, thoughtfully presented.It's tempting to like the idea of assigning more voting power to those that one deems to have proven more worthy of it, but honestly, I cannot think of any way to implement such a system that would have any realistic chance of avoiding being horrendously corrupted.
It certainly stands to reason that any government which controls the means by which this variable voting power is assigned would be strongly biased toward those who support that government in its status quo. I can see the criteria being manipulated to favor those who agree with certain positions taken by the government, and against those who disagree with certain positions, so that those who hold the contrary positions are rendered less powerful.
Just to look at the two example you provided. On the face, they seem like good examples of someone whose vote ought to count a great deal, and of someone else whose vote ought not count nearly so much.
I think it should be obvious that the former example is much more likely to be a conservative, while the latter is much more likely to be a liberal; so by applying your principle in any obvious way to those examples, you're tipping the system in favor of conservative points of view, and against liberal points of view. As a conservative, I certainly want my side to prevail, but not that way; not by cheating in the manner that you propose.
I can see this principle being openly abused to suppress those on sides I would support. Suppose that whatever power is in charge of setting these criteria decides that owning a gun or supporting the right to do so is harmful to society, and that those who do so ought to have less voting power. This gives those who would like to eliminate the right to own a gun more power toward the purpose of doing so, since their votes now count more than those who support this right.
Well, yes, I didn't say determining the criteria would be a piece a' cake or that it would be "forever" or easily agreed upon by both wings of the political spectrum.
But it would allow natural society to assert itself and create a kind of collective unconscious direction for the country.
Right now our country really has no direction, but merely vaccilates like a pendulum sometimes wildly back and forth .. getting nowhere, progress wise as problems continue unresolved and worsening .. while threatening to keep the fringe groups in power over the vast majority, and detrimentally.
The multiple-vote factor might help restore balance and direction to the country, and naturally so.
And, it would test whether the American dream is truly possible for all, that justice as well as liberty, that the two dynamic complements can truly co-exist in dynamic balance together for a length of time.
It would indeed take quite the giant and wise minds to set the dynamic criteria, forever subject to change as the national collective consciousness and unconsciousness collaboratively determine in the natural course of time and events.
Yes, we have already begun experimenting with this, the next step, in my opinion, of democracy.Then the more logical and less impractical system would be to move to a parliamentary system where people would have multiple votes. People could stack their votes for a single group or allocate them among the various groups that they most want to win. So if everybody had 6 votes instead of one, they could cast them all for an environmental party candidate if that is their issue or they could spread them around to some combination of up to six issue-oriented candidates and that would give the country direction as to its priorities. It is a variation on what some cities do with their council elections. Basically people get one vote per vacancy and the vacancies are filled by vote total regardless of how many candidates are in the field as opposed to using the ward system in which seats are allocated to subsets of the city and only those who live in the ward can run for the seat or vote for that seat.
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