They vote for the people who will vote for the bills they want to see offered on the floor.
But, they’re not.
There are precedents in history. For instance, Britain, before the reforms of the 1830s, featured a corrupt patronage system where influential gentlemen who supported the government (what we would call “administration”) currently in power would be rewarded with sinecures, lifetime offices with fat salaries and few or no duties. And, under the tax system of the time, it was the poor who mostly paid for those salaries.
It’s all relative to the incentive to work isn’t it?
I’m afraid you’re not including the whole story here - lobbyists represent numberless industries, interests and organizations, and it is a lock that you belong to many of these yourself and that you have no problem lobbying the government when you want your own opinion heard.
Oh, of course. I view lobbyists as an inescapable evil. And if business interests are lobbying for benefits, then non-business interests better match their effort if they’re going to get their fair share.
My point is that Huerta88’s schtick about the rich not wanting to manipulate governance to their financial benefit is laughable when we have such a clear example of them behaving otherwise.
Are you defining everyone who is not independently wealthy, everyone who has to work for a living or depend on welfare, as “poor”? So defined, they are “the vast majority in any society.” But that’s not the definition used in daily discourse nor any government’s official definition.
Nope just the opposite. I am defining everyone who lives off of welfare as poor, and that the more welfare benefits that are supplied the higher the wages must be to compete with welfare, therefore welfare disincentivizes work. Why work for minimum wage when I can live in public housing, received food stamps and get on Medicaid?
And if you can’t influence the system peacefully, why work? Revolution is your only real option: They’ve locked the door against you, so batter it down. The French, Russians, and Chinese all learned that the hard way.
One of the biggest reasons we don’t have violent revolution in this country is the fact the vast majority of adults can vote. Whether they do or not seems to matter less than whether they can.
Well that is a good argument regarding property rights. I expanded the meaning a little to say essentially, “No representation without taxation.”
This “the poor will vote themselves welfare” argument reminds me of this quotation attributed to “Alexander Tyler”:
This has been a proliferating spamvirus for some time. However:
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The person to whom it is apparently attributed is actually Alexander Frasier Tytler (Scottish-British lawyer, 1747-1813), not Tyler.
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He never said or wrote any such thing; no part of the quotation can be traced back earlier than 1943.
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If he had said it, he would have been wrong. No republic in history – not Athens, not Rome, not France, not Germany, not any other – has ever self-destructed via the plebs voting themselves largesse from the treasury. Republics have self-destructed in several other ways, but not that way.
Oh, and BTW, Ben Franklin never warned against letting Jews into America, either. It’s the same sort of canard.
Umm, what the hell are you talking about? What does this have to do with anything?
Is this some sort of really clever Godwin?
Franklin wasn’t an anti-semite > it was anti-semitic propaganda by liberation magazine > therefore linking voting rights to property rights is anti-semitic > therefore anyone who wants to do so is HITLER!!! ???
Well, of course not! Hitler didn’t base such rights on property, he based it on racial purity! Wholly different barrel of horseshit!
Just another instance of the kind of silly UL that can propagate in the Internet age – specifically, the kind that sounds serious and credible because it is associated with history or historians or historical figures.
Have you ever lived in a project ? Eaten the kind of food you get with welfare coupons ? Have you, in fact ever lived, hell, ever talked to someone living in the kind of squalor that lies below minimum wage (which itself leads to really shitty living conditions) ?
No one lives like this by choice.
Well, the poor so defined are not the vast majority of American society (or any I know of). They’re a small minority. And a vote is all they’ve got.
I’ve seen a message-button at SF conventions: “Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.” Which is clever, and funny, and a lie. In real life, democracy is four sheep and a wolf voting on what to have for lunch, because in real life, the sheep (i.e., the poor, working and middle classes) collectively outnumber the wolves and that’s the only defense they’ve got.
I have friends who could be working and are receiving welfare, so yes. They have told me straight up that they could work but they don’t really want to. Never lived in a Project, but I’ve seen some nice ones and I’ve seen some crappy ones. I know people who have a pretty good deal with the low-income housing.
I agree with everything except your last line. I accept that it sucks being poor/homeless. But a significant part of the reason it sucks is the company it puts you into – i.e., that of other poor homeless people. But recognizing it sucks is not proving that there aren’t significant volitional aspects to it. Choices that are made/not made that perpetuate the poverty. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, most everyone is among “the poor” at some point in their life – when their skills, their age, their circumstances combine to make them capable of generating not much income. But most of us figure out how to gradually work our way out of living, as many of us did in school, at a hobo-level of subsistence.