The renting = no property tax bit is ludicrous at best. Renters pay the property tax on the land their complex is built on through their rents. They also pay for upkeep and other costs, and additionally to provide their landlords with profit.
There is no validity to the idea that wealth or property are marks of a better voting class. Now, if you want to talk about literacy and civics tests for voting, that’s at least debatable, but this is just piffle. And it all fails the test of just power derived from the consent of the governed that is at the heart of modern civilization.
Heheh. I’m just thinking about the PhD who happens to be a hillbilly that reads this. . .
As Swinger says, people who don’t own property pay taxes too, and I’ll second this. I’ve rented my residences for the past 6 years, and have still paid taxes in some form or another–be them income taxes to my state, or sales taxes to my immediate community. The idea behind these taxes are to pay for “essential functions” such as fire, police, local government, etc.
My personal feeling is that of netscape 6 and Master Wang-Ka. My dollars are paying for an economy and services. I should have the option to say where that money goes, even if I don’t exercise that ‘say’.
DougC brings up this point:
To which I respectfully counter that I don’t choose to rent, solely based on the job I have. I was ordered to come here, and the federal government recognizes that. I am compensated to a point, but the fact that in most other locations I would pay sales taxes of some sort (MT is one of the few without sales tax), leads me to the option that I should have a say in government to the point that I am taxed–even if it is limited to the municipal or county government.
That’s a wonderful principle, but it’s needed to know how to weight a vote. I mean, there have been several examples at least in history, when votes were weighted differently, not equally. Therefore, someone could get the idea to say the more property you own, the more votes you got.
It’s true that people who own a lot of property have a certain influence on politics, even without a vote (it was already posted above, wasn’t it?).
In my opinion votes only for property owners also strengthens the powers of the market, making the poor people poorer and the rich people richer.
All in all, in my opinion a right vote only for property owners would be stepping back to a level we over here left about 100 years ago.
I personally would prefer the ‘intelligence test for vote’-variant.
I read the rest of your post, but given this particular statement, I could tell you that I own 5,000 shares of Mobil Oil, but still rent my apartment.
Given the first sentence of your reply:
[GDish hijack]
. . . with all due respect, I don’t think I’ve ever read a more disgusting thing in my life (no personal offense to you). Call me naive, but how can you put a weight do a life? How can you put a weight to a vote in a peaceful change in a government?
[/GDish hijack]
In any case, if any dollar carried to the municipal or county government, I would expect that government to listen to me as a taxpayer. Same as whatever state I paid to. Same as whatever government I answered to.
But Eindal, I agree with you. With the current economy, a “vote only for property owners” would be a slap in the face to a good percentage of people in the US.
With a lot of property I mean really a lot. What I was thinking of were those rich people and corporations financing the presidial campaigns etc.
And it’s really not my idea to weight votes, it’s just the fact that historically it was often the way that people who were rich or noble got more votes than normal people and slaves got no votes. No system I’d like.
And the value of an acre not being tied in to the location? WTH? So an acre of Tennessee wetland is as valuable as an acre of Michigan Avenue? Somebody paying $2500 for a big Greenwich Village pad (with x number of dollars alloted of that rent for the landlord’s propery taxes, of course) has fewer rights than somebody in a shotgun shack paying a $300/mo mortgage?*
Also, in some communities renting is the norm; seems your method would disenfranchise students and recent grads especially, a group that most people wish would be MORE interested in politics.
Not to disparage owners of shotgun shacks or the good people of Tennessee, of course; it’s just that a man’s home is his castle but not all castles cost the same.
I think the OP has been sufficiently addressed, so I’ll focus on DougC’s theory. And while I find many things to debate in his original post, I’ll focus on a couple of things I don’t recall anyone addressing yet.
Under this system, why would anyone sell their land? You say that private sale of land would be abolished and all land sold at public auction. Where would all this land come from? If owning land is the only way you get to vote, the people for which voting is most important would never sell their land. With this idea in place, I can envision a situation in which all land is owned by a certain percentage of the country, with the rest permanently disenfranchised.
Two possibilties come from this situation. 1) Land is only passed through inheritance, meaning only certain families control the vote; 2) Land inheritance is abolished, and land is sold only when the landowner dies. Either way, land is rarely passed from one party to the other, restricting the vote to a specific percentage of the population.
Another problem with this idea is that, as the buying of land requires money, the richest population now becomes the controlling group by law (which is different than it is today, as the rich are only control the country de facto). And while this may spur another great debate (which I’m sure has been on these boards before), our society has a skewed sense of the value of one’s job. When the people who teach our kids and protect our streets are on the low end of the salary spectrum and the people that sing “Bye Bye Bye” are on the high end, something’s wrong. A society in which some of the most important jobs get the least amount of pay absolutely has to extend voting rights to all citizens.
Those who want to limit voting for the Land Owners :
Welcome back to the 19the century (and the Middle Ages).
I ask myself how you reason in real life.
Most probably like:
“Oh look there, a homeless… Let’s push his face in the gutter dirt to get rid of him.”
and
“We are The Ruling Class, everyone aside”
I sincerely wish you good luck. You are going to need it with such a mentality. And then you dare to criticise other countries and their supposed internal policies?
Salaam. A
That didn’t sound right, so I googled a bit and came up with a quote on Jerry Pournelle’s site that was just below a Heinlein quote. Maybe you juxtaposed the credits? Here is the quote I was referring to:
The “public treasury” comes from those that have property (in the broadest sense). If those that do not have it can vote themselves richer from it, how long can this continue?
Does your reasoning follows the conviction that “those who do not have” never ever can come into a situation that they become part of “those who have”?
Please explain how American Society is going to crumble by allowing a poor person, a middle class person, and a rich person just as much say in the goverment (ie one vote person). Hint: it won’t.
In a simplified way, democracy controls the way a government gets replaced. Therefore it partly is a substitute for revolutions, making change of government unbloody, because people can see that they can change things without killing the ones having power (read: property).
If people with property are given more votes than those without it it seems like a violation of the idea of democracy because the interests of the ones having property usually is keeping the property by protecting the government allowing them to do so while the government is interested in having the support of the rich people, consequently lowering taxation of the rich and rising taxation of the poor, therefore being similar to any other kind of system.
Also, taxes on the possession of land rather than on the use of land seems to me to be a pretty good way making some people poor if they possess land but don’t get money from it, because, for example, they don’t rent it to others but live on it themselves, requiring them to sell their land to people who have more property and get enough money from it.
A effect of democracy with eqal voting is that governments have to pay attention to the situation of the poor people, too, while different voting rights will enhance the unequal treatment of people.
What landlord would be so dumb as not to include it in the rental fee?[/ul]