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From: turner@ucbesvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: re: RE: voting (semi-FLAME)
Message-ID: <7500076@ucbesvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 20-Feb-84 23:08:00 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbesvax.7500076
Posted: Mon Feb 20 23:08:00 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Feb-84 00:28:20 EST
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Nf-From: ucbesvax!turner    Feb 24 20:08:00 1984

Give more voting power to those with more money?  Let's turn that one around:
have a guaranteed national income, collectible only when one presents proof
of having voted (or proof of inability to do so).  This would certainly bring
voter participation up from its rather disgraceful level.

The obvious counterargument: poor people will then start voting themselves
ever larger pieces of the pie.

But so what?  The middle classes of industrialized nations have been doing
this for decades.  (I think Karl Marx says somewhere that capitalist democracy
will meet its Waterloo when voters discover that they can vote themselves more
money.)  Legislative checks and balances could probably keep this process
under control.

Best of all, this program could result in a net decrease in welfare spending,
simply by redistributing wealth with less bureaucratic overhead.  Any student
who has been through the paperwork blizzard of applying for financial aid can
tell you that.  Food stamps are a similar hassle.  Friends of mine who have
worked for state and federal welfare agencies willingly admit that the
application process is often one of *mutual* humiliation.  How much better
to simply go up to a counter and say, "here's my voter's stub and ID."

Some will object that citizenship should be its own reward, and that this
would only encourage frivolity at the polls.  Yes, it would probably bring
the "noise margin" up (currently at about 4%, I'd say), but I think that
people would in general take voting a little more seriously.  And if
citizenship is its own reward, why *aren't* people voting?  Is it that they
feel like they don't count?  That they aren't asked to make real decisions,
or that no decisions that politicians condescend to allow them to make are
worth bothering with?  That happens to be the way I feel.  Ask someone who's
poor--they'll probably tell you the same.
---
Michael Turner (ucbvax!ucbesvax.turner)