BrianGarst.com

This is what a terrible idea looks like:

America should implement weighted voting to make voting more objective and fair, and give the young more power, because the consequences of political decisions will affect them the longest. Weighted voting would restore power to twenty and thirty year olds, where it resided before the advent of medical science. With the aid of computers, it would be easy to give everyone a Voting Score, just like we all have a credit score.

Yes, let’s give the most ignorant, inexperienced and disengaged voting bloc extra political power. That sounds like an excellent idea.

Ezra Klein also highlighted the idea, though was careful to note that he did not endorse it, instead pointing out that we weight by other factors such as geography. We do this for a reason, as states are recognized as constituents with independent interests. Unlike voters, they have issues of sovereignty and their own rightful political authority to protect from federal encroachment. And we’ve seen what has happened with the erosion of their political input at the federal level by moving to direct elections for Senators, as the federal government has all but assimilated the states into administrative bodies which exist for no other purpose than to do its bidding.

The young, on the other hand, do not have an independent interest that is different from any other individual voter, they just have a longer time horizon. But does that necessarily mean they are more impacted by political decisions, as implied by the “decisions will affect them the longest” reasoning? I don’t think so.

As the government has become more and more an instrument of redistribution, I’d say it is taxpayers who are most impacted by political decisions, regardless of how much longer they have to live. As such, if we insist on mucking with voting weights, I agree with the suggestion of John Hawkins to weight by total taxes paid.

This would have the benefit of solving what is perhaps the biggest political problem of the day: the ability of non-tax payers to vote themselves benefits at the expense of an ever narrowing tax base. Voters are more likely to vote themselves benefits if they are not contributing to the costs.The burdens then fall on fewer and fewer productive members of society, which both reduces their productivity (and thus the funds available for such redistributions) but it also means a growing population of moochers. It’s a vicious, teat-suckling cycle. This is why James Madison warned of a need for “protecting the minority of the opulent.” His answer was the Senate.

Madison was not talking merely of the super-wealthy routinely attacked by leftists and redistributionists today, but of the productive sector in general, which we can largely equate to today as those who pay income tax. The point of his argument was to protect the minority interests against the majority that would abuse them. And when those who pay for and sustain government are the minority, while those who mooch off their largess are a majority, the end result can be only fiscal calamity. As younger people are less productive and carry less than the average burden of government, weighting in their favor would exacerbate this problem and hasten our headlong rush into national insolvency.

democracy James Madison political philosophy