by Neville Kennard, preaching and practicing capitalist
(followed by an appendix by Henry Hazlitt [1973],
starring John Stuart Mill [1861])

Voting, in western democracies, is a Right that all citizens, over a certain age, gain typically when they turn eighteen. It was once at age twenty-one.

The evolution of Democracy and the Right-to-Vote has evolved over the last hundred and more years. Once it was just Property Owners, and Men. Then the franchise was extended and extended. The thing about voting is that if the government does do much, doesn’t tax much, doesn’t interfere much, then voting is not considered very important. The Swiss, with one of the world’s most stable democracies, only granted women the right to vote in 1971. It was not then considered very important, unjust and “sexist” to the Swiss, thought it may now seem that way to us.

In nearly all democracies, voting is Voluntary. Only Australia, Belgium and Argentina make voting Compulsory. Why it is compulsory is a very good question. I would say that Compulsory Voting is Undemocratic! Isn’t part of a “Democratic Society” to do with Freedom? Doesn’t making voting Compulsory make us a bit less free? Of course with Secret Ballots, voting is not really Compulsory — showing up at the polling place and having your name crossed off the list is what is compulsory. Not casting a ballot, or casting a blank ballot paper, or writing some obscenity on the paper is OK. Just go to the inconvenience of making the trip to the polling place so you save yourself the threat of a fine. Dumb???

And recently there was an idea to reduce the voting age to sixteen! Allowing children to vote! The politicians may like it as there would be a whole new constituency to promise goodies to. But I think the tax-payers — the “producers” — would baulk at this one.

Perhaps the politicians, who trust us to elect them, trust us to support them with our taxes, don’t really trust us to vote for them so they make it compulsory to do so. A bit like the coercion to pay taxes.

But who should get a vote? Should it be a Right, or should it be a privilege with the right to vote being something that is Earned?

I have a very controversial, very Politically-Incorrect, very “discriminating” view on this. This view is bound to be unpopular, and it has little chance of ever gaining political or electoral support. My proposal is that to gain the privilege to vote, you must be a Net Tax Producer.

Tax Consumers, those who don’t produce goods or services for the market, should not get a vote. Welfare recipients, bureaucrats, politicians and all who Consume taxes have not earned the right to vote so they don’t get a vote.

It would be like a Corporation where the shareholders vote on company matters. With a corporation, the employees don’t vote, the suppliers don’t vote, the customers don’t vote — unless they are also shareholders — only shareholders vote on Board of Directors appointments and constitutional matters.

If only Tax Producers got to vote the politicians would be anxious to look after the productive members of the electorate, and so there would be lots of incentive to keep taxes low and government expenditure low. Pressure for government hand-outs, grants, benefits would be minimal. Welfare would revert to the private sector and the monitoring of such expenditure would be scrutinised by the benefactors and the administrating charities.

If voting was a privilege, to be earned and valued, people would be proud to be among the Voting Class, the Productive Class, and would be keen to join the privileged Net Tax Producer Class. Public Servants may even be keen to privatise their “service” so they can become members of the Voting Class.

Does this idea have any chance of being adopted? Not a snowflake’s chance in hell! But is fun to think about, if you are a Tax Producer that is. If you are Tax Consumer then you will hate it with every bone in your body. You will label the idea with every pejorative and invective you can come up with. So whatever side of the Tax Producer – Tax Consumer divide you are on, enjoy the love or hate of the idea. It ain’t gonna happen so don’t worry.

*****
Appendix
Henry Hazlitt, The Conquest of Poverty (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), pp. 202-05, the subsection titled, “Should Relief Recipients Vote?”

Should Relief Recipients Vote?

There is one political change that is practically imperative if a nation is not to be driven toward bankruptcy by relief and redistribution programs completely out of control. This is to suspend the right-to-vote of anybody on public relief.

The argument for this reform was succinctly stated by John Stuart Mill in his Representative Government in 1861:

I regard it as required by first principles that the receipt of parish relief should be a preemptory disqualification for the franchise. He who cannot by his labor suffice for his own support has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money of others. By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal rights with them in other respects.

Mill even went further, and argued that no one should have the right to vote unless he paid direct taxes:

“It is also important that the assembly which votes the taxes, either general or local, should be elected exclusively by those who pay something towards the taxes imposed. Those who pay no taxes, disposing by their votes of other people’s money, have every motive to be lavish and none to economize…. It amounts to allowing them to put their hands into other people’s pockets for any purpose which they think fit to call a public one.”

A century more of popular government has completely verified Mill’s fears.

His argument could be extended. There is a crucial difference between an unrestricted “right to vote” and the right, say, peaceably to conduct one’s own life without outside interference. For one man’s vote may affect not only his own future but that of others. Through it he exercises power over the whole community, a power that ought not to be granted to those who have shown incapacity to provide for even their own elementary needs. Few people today consider it an intolerable abridgment of freedom to restrict the issuance of driving licenses to those who have demonstrated both the skill to drive a car and the responsible use of it. The community is warranted, on the same grounds, in restricting the right to vote to those who have shown sufficient intelligence and responsibility not to steer the ship of state on to the rocks. Nearly every country does, in fact, insist that every voter should meet certain qualifications regarding age, literacy, law-abidance, and sanity. Demonstrated ability to support oneself by one’s own efforts would simply add one more essential qualification to the list.

I have one modification to suggest in Mill’s proposal. This is that all public aid, whether given in cash or kind, be extended nominally in the form of loans. The recipient would be under no legal obligation to repay such a loan, but until it was repaid he would not be entitled to vote. As an added pressure for reasonably prompt repayment, the loan would bear interest at a rate as high as the government itself was obliged to pay.

This plan would have several advantages. It would help to preserve the self-respect of the applicant for relief. A person who repaid the loan would be able to vote again with his self-esteem intact. He would feel that he had carried his own weight, and had not been a net burden on the community.

For the government too the plan would have several advantages. It would make people more reluctant to go on relief if they could get along without it. It would also make them eager to get off relief as soon as possible so that their debt would not become excessive. For the same reason many would even be willing (which they are not now) to take jobs that paid them very little more than their relief allowance. In brief, they would have more incentive to work. If they were getting, for example, a relief allowance of $60 a week, and were offered a job at $70, they would be less likely to ask themselves (as they do now), “Why should I work for only $10 a week?”

Of course there would always be some people who, perhaps through little fault of their own, had been on the relief rolls so long that repaying their accumulated “loan” and its interest would look like a hopeless task. Any incentive for them to repay in order to be eligible to vote again would be close to nonexistent. It would be advisable, therefore, to provide that anybody who had stayed off relief completely for, say, four or five years, would be eligible to vote again, whether he had repaid his relief loan or not. This would still leave a repayment incentive to anyone whose incurred obligation was so small that he could without great hardship pay it off in less than a year or two.

I am fully aware that, in the present state of public opinion, either Mill’s proposal or my suggested amendment of it will be dismissed as “politically impossible.” But unless limitations and safeguards similar to those I have been suggesting are soon adopted, the welfare burden will rise to a level that will prove catastrophic.