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Who Should Vote? Who Should Vote?
Jules Troy and William Dwyer agreed on a proposal often found here as well as on other discussion boards serving Objectivists, libertarians, and conservatives. They asserted that people on welfare should not be allowed to vote.
As nice as that might sound, the proposal lacks logical rigor. The most basic problem is that in a politically mixed economy, everyone is on “welfare” one way or another. Do you never use the United States Postal Service? Do you never use the public streets? Have you never attended a public school? In the context of positive welfare, are you a government-licensed engineer, barber, electrician, school teacher, or undertaker (or any of 50 other occupations commonly regulated for the monopolistic benefit of their practitioners)?
If I may infer the intention, Jules Troy and William Dwyer most likely meant direct aid to individuals such as food stamps, food bank, rent subsidy or placement in public housing, and similar programs including cellular telephone subsidy. The problem with the blanket assertion is that each of those is a different program, administered by a different level of government.
In my city of Austin, Texas, the city-owned electrical and water utility, Austin Energy, offers several programs.
You can claim that these power company programs are “immoral” but it remains the company’s right to offer them, regardless of whether the company is public or (ultimately) private.
What about a subsidy for veterans or disabled veterans? Presumably you would allow that, but it would fall within your proscription against “welfare.” Therefore, any veteran who took the benefit offered would lose their right to vote. To me, that would be a gross injustice. I believe that a veteran cannot receive enough compensation. Like Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers, I believe that being a veteran should be the basic qualification for voting. Regardless of my prejudices, surely you do not intend to take the right to vote away from a wounded veteran just because their local electrical company lowered their rates?
You might claim that a rational person plans for retirement. I intend to work until I die and die when I can no longer work. That is my choice. But let us go with your assumption that people should save money so that they can enjoy not being productive late in live. What happens when their pension fund is looted?
From the U.S. Department of Labor: How will your employer’s bankruptcy affect your retirement fund? http://www.dol.gov/ebsa/newsroom/fsbankruptcy.html
Hostess puts retirement fund into executive pay:
City of Detroit, State of Rhode Island loot pension funds http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926
You can claim that that is their hard luck and no burden on you. But, deprived of basic resources, they will drain your bank account with their crimes, their diseases, their homeless occupation of the streets. It cheaper to subsidize them than to punish them. In fact, that is largely true: it costs $60,000 a year to house a prisoner. Give one $30,000 a year to live without working and you are money ahead.
That brings us to the basic problem of why people who work at productive careers should support those who do not. We need to get past the undefined collectives. Children are one set. A child who grows up deprived of basic needs becomes a problem for others in society later through crime and other anti-social (anti-rights) activities. It is cheaper to care for the child now. Morally, it is not the child’s fault – and especially not that their parent fails to care for them.
It is true that Andrew Carnegie (and many heroes of the Horatio Alger novels) worked his way up in factories to become an industrialist and philanthropist. In an Objectivist world, we expect much more of that: Corporations would employ children who learn reading, computer programming, astro-navigation, and meta-genetics while working. But what about the here-and-now? Ayn Rand was explicit in differentiating a free society from the present. See “Government Financing in a Free Society” in The Virtue of Selfishness. If you claim that in a better future those who cannot pay a poll tax will not vote, that is one proposal, in isolation. If you claim that “someone on welfare should not vote here and now” you are back to the problems stated above. Everyone is “on welfare”; and some people “on welfare” deserve to vote.
You cannot assert just anything that feels good. You must show the ethical and metaphysical-epistemological foundations of your claims.
“It is not enough that dogs succeed. Cats must also suffer.”
In The Secret of the League by Ernest Bramah (often cited as a precursor to Atlas Shrugged), when producers take back the government from the socialists, they make public voting like corporate voting: shares are expensive; and you can buy more shares, and therefore more votes. It may be that a public voting share should cost at least a day’s wages ($100 here and now) or perhaps $35,000 (a median wage for a year here and now). It may be that one person should have more than one vote. But deciding that is a matter of the philosophy of politics, which Rand called “very complicated.” It is not what you feel is just, but what is objectively just that matters.
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