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Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

No, they shouldn't. While being an adult is no guarantee of making wise decisions, we have widely studied the failure of children to comprehend long-term consequences. We know better.

Kids should not have a vote, but I'd be willing to say parents should get two votes. No adult has a more visceral sense of societal consequences than someone concerned about creating the future their own child will hopefully thrive in.

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> No adult has a more visceral sense of societal consequences than someone concerned about creating the future their own child will hopefully thrive in.

There are plenty of parents who have absolutely no sense of this, and plenty of children who have a better sense of this than their parents, because they’ve had to learn the hard way.

Choosing to reproduce, or failing to use birth control, should not give you an extra vote.

But it does. The house of representation is based on relative population, so places like Texas end up getting more representation as their voters high some of the highest fertility and their children get counted in the census.

If our biggest issues are the state of education, the environment, the state of the economy, the security of the nation, the safety of our neighborhoods, and the civility of the society we live in, who has a bigger stake in all of these outcomes than parents?

So why not?

I mean, the argument against surely is not that having children is some existential horror or great evil, right? Civilization advances by our children doing better than we did, maybe materially, but morally, ethically, and hopefully in purpose.

Isn't that effectively incentivising giving birth for political gain? I can't see that being controversial at all.

We have people that support "replacement theory" in office right now, so when has controversy stopped anyone

> we have widely studied the failure of...

This scrutiny isn't applied to other citizens.

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