I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.
Isn't Citizens United essentially what the author from the Substack is describing here?
That really fixed things south of the border, didn't it?
I know there's some precedent in the Founding Fathers vision of voting rights only being bequeathed to White male landowners.
But "Money = Votes" may shut out the parasitic liberal class, but also newly disenfranchises your average centrist and right-leaning wagie in different ways.
I would say having to be a net tax payer should be a requirement, but a tax weighted vote would be disastrous, as it would only further cement the influence of billionaires.
I wish we would go to a "merit=votes" system. Everybody can have one vote as a sop to the universal suffrage crowd, but it goes up from there. Graduated high school? +1. Served in the military/Peace Corps/Americorps? +1. Net tax payer? +1. Pick whatever indicators you like for being a "good citizen" and productive member of society and assigned bonus votes to them.
In a scenario like that, someone rich like Bill Gates would get the extra vote for being a taxpayer, but he never served in the military and quit college before graduating, so he'd lose those sorts of votes. The goal would be to concentrate the maximum amount of votes in middle class taxpayers (both an absolute numbers and in votes per person), leaving predatory rich people and welfare parasites both unable to muster enough votes to be a deciding force in an election.
Isn't Citizens United essentially what the author from the Substack is describing here?
That really fixed things south of the border, didn't it?
I know there's some precedent in the Founding Fathers vision of voting rights only being bequeathed to White male landowners.
But "Money = Votes" may shut out the parasitic liberal class, but also newly disenfranchises your average centrist and right-leaning wagie in different ways.
I would say having to be a net tax payer should be a requirement, but a tax weighted vote would be disastrous, as it would only further cement the influence of billionaires.
I wish we would go to a "merit=votes" system. Everybody can have one vote as a sop to the universal suffrage crowd, but it goes up from there. Graduated high school? +1. Served in the military/Peace Corps/Americorps? +1. Net tax payer? +1. Pick whatever indicators you like for being a "good citizen" and productive member of society and assigned bonus votes to them.
In a scenario like that, someone rich like Bill Gates would get the extra vote for being a taxpayer, but he never served in the military and quit college before graduating, so he'd lose those sorts of votes. The goal would be to concentrate the maximum amount of votes in middle class taxpayers (both an absolute numbers and in votes per person), leaving predatory rich people and welfare parasites both unable to muster enough votes to be a deciding force in an election.