> Just as democracy itself stops working when everyone can vote
Um, what now? Are you saying universal suffrage is a bad thing? Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"?
Um, what now? Are you saying universal suffrage is a bad thing? Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"?
The real answer was people who aren't "wealthy property owners."
That is the central debate around forced voting.
Just like "communism" (Soviet "socialism") stopped working when variety of goods in demand became so large, and life cycles of products became so short, that centralised planning no longer had any chance not to mismanage it - that is, simply due to technological change, or in communist terms, "progress of means of production", democracy seems to stop working when free speech becomes really, really free.
I'd go on to say that, as a broad generalisation, rights and liberties of the Western world that we value so much are valuable and positively contribute to society only as long as they can in reality be only used by elites.
Sadly, concept of human rights (late XVIII century) largely preceded industrialisation, and thus the prospect of exponential economic growth that will some day make "universal" rights REALLY "universal" - evaded imagination of their inventors. They saw those rights, as a matter of course, as "universal for people like themselves", just as they didn't think of them as pertaining to women - not because they were especially sexist, but because it just didn't cross their minds...
> Immovable property owners who are able to extract rents sufficient for independence from government. That is, back to pre-Jacksonian era. Of course, there is no way to get it done because it's a catch-22: people won't vote to resign their voting rights, this is why i believe collapse is imminent.
Did you answer the inverse of my question? It sounds like you think only wealthy property owners should have the right to vote (e.g. something like the pre-Jacksonian era franchise), is that correct?
Expanding suffrage to people who depend on the government rather than other way around is easy to explain (populism: "let me create millions of new voters, they will be super happy and all vote for me"), but destructive and impossible to undo. And we are at the tail end of it now when all these people not just vote, but can also make use of free speech...
Of course, there could be in theory a multitude of ways to fix it, not just by limiting suffrage (like poll tax for example), but all of them unrealistic.
> Yes, or something like that....
> And we are at the tail end of it now when all these people not just vote, but can also make use of free speech...
Do you also think it's a bad thing for people who aren't wealthy property owners to have free speech rights as well?
When free speech could only be made use of by relatively wealthy and well-educated classes - simply due to technology - universal suffrage wasn't that bad - because political thinking of common people was still guided by those wealthy and well-educated classes, and because they weren't (and aren't) very capable of critical thinking, they were "captive audience" of a sort and mostly taken along for a ride.
But now when social media really gives usable "free speech" rights to everyone, these people live in the world where Deep State injects them with mind control chips, and White House is run by a sect of pedophiles and Trump is the only person who could save us from them...
And this free speech made universal suffrage a real, and i believe unsolvable, problem. Maybe only solvable through a social collapse (like in 1991 Soviet Union) with a new state taking the territory of the previous one, voiding it, and creating a new regime with very limited suffrage.