opinions 7
the brown daily herald Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Universal suffrage is immoral Oliver Hudson Opinions Columnist In the United States, any citizen who is at least 18 years old and not a convicted felon has the right to vote. Most of us accept and celebrate our universal suffrage. But is it a good idea? In my view, no. Not every adult U.S. citizen should have the right to vote. Instead, only those who pay taxes to a government should be eligible to vote in that government’s elections. So, for example, under this system, an adult paying sales tax in Rhode Island but no federal taxes would qualify to vote in Rhode Island state elections but not in federal elections. Restricting the right to vote to taxpayers is moral and practical. After all, what is a vote? A vote is a piece of control over how the government spends taxpayer money. Every government program, every enforced law and every action taken by the government is funded from tax “revenue.” This includes government debt, since it must eventually be repaid, and inflation, since it is a tax on the purchasing power of the dollar. Thus, to function, government takes money from group A and distributes money — in the form of benefits and programs — to group B. Membership in group A and group B may or may not overlap. It follows that universal suffrage is immoral. Is it right that someone who pays
nothing to a government should be able to vote to decide how that government spends other people’s money? Most would agree that controlling how your neighbor or friend spends his or her money is morally wrong. Why, then, do we accept that it is right when government is the middleman between you and your neighbor or you and your friend? Many will say this comparison is not fair because the government taxes not to steal, but for the good of the public. So
er the old adage “nobody spends someone else’s money as carefully as his own.” If only those contributing voted, money would be spent less freely, since voters would begin to treat the public tax dollars more like their own money. This increase in fiscal responsibility in the government would be a great measure today, when the U.S. government is $16 trillion in debt, not adjusting for unfunded liabilities. In general, universal suffrage encourages high spending and deficits. When ev-
It is in the interests of the economic health of the United States to restrict access to the ballot.
if you went to your friend and told him you’re taking his money to donate to charitable causes “for the good of the public” that would be fine? It is noteworthy that we call one case stealing and the other taxation, but they are effectively the same. Your neighbor’s money is his money. Therefore, only he gets to “vote” what he does with it. The case ought to be no different for the government. Only those contributing to the public treasury ought to have a vote in how it is spent. Apart from being moral, a tax qualification for voting is practical. Consid-
eryone votes, but only a small fraction pay most of the taxes — the top 20 percent pay 94 percent of all income taxes in the United States — there is incentive for those not paying to vote for greater spending and deficits since they won’t have to worry about picking up the tab. We morph into a society of producers and free riders. Practical reasons then suggest it is in the interests of the country’s economic health to restrict access to the ballot. While my proposal would do a lot of good, it must be taken a step further to be complete.
The weight of a person’s vote should be proportional to the fraction of total revenue he contributes to the government. This, however, presents problems with certain taxes — such as the sales tax — in determining how much a person has paid to the government. But it could be applied quite easily to certain taxes, such as the income tax. Thus, if person A contributes 100 times more than person B in income taxes, person A should have 100 times more voting power than person B. This is the logical extension of the earlier case. What I am proposing is not a radical, backward idea from a time when voting restrictions were used to exclude certain groups from voting on the basis of gender or race. In fact, what I am proposing is the practice of many societal institutions. Consider the business world. If you own stock in a company, your shareholder’s vote is in proportion to your ownership of the company. The U.S. government should be no different. We all own a portion of the government. We ought to elect our representatives, just as stockholders elect their boards of directors, in proportion to our ownership. A vote is a right, but it should be a privilege. Oliver Hudson ’14 thinks the 53 percent should move to Galt’s Gultch. He may be contacted at oliver_hudson@brown.edu.
System change not climate change Luke Lattanzi-Silveus Opinions Columnist We’ve had two “once in a century” hurricanes in the last two years. When Hurricane Irene hit last year, it was supposed to be an extraordinary event. But this year Hurricane Sandy far surpassed it. It killed at least 113 people and cut power to 8.5 million buildings. And, as is always the case with environmental disasters, people in poor and working-class communities were most affected and the last to receive government help. So yes, climate change is real. It also affects people today, not just in the future. Hurricanes have become more frequent, and so have droughts. Pollution personally affects the working class through chemicals from nearby factories and incinerators that cause cancer and respiratory illness or through heat waves that kill more than 400 people every year. But let’s take a step back for a moment. Why are we even at this point? Why are we releasing deadly chemicals into the environment? Why don’t we have a real system of public transportation? Why do we recycle so little? Why do we not only use tons of oil and coal to produce power, but also give huge government subsidies to oil and coal producers? It is not because a cleaner reality is unfeasible. There are plenty of very viable ways to produce electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. For example, there’s solar energy. We would only need to cover 1 percent
of the Sahara with solar panels to power the entire world. And it’s not because of choices made by ordinary people either. Municipal waste — the waste that you and I produce — accounts for as little as 2 percent of total waste. The Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t offer estimates of how much of the rest of the waste is recycled. The problem is systemic. The problem is the profit motive and capitalism itself. It is simply not profitable to produce in an ecologically friendly way. It costs much less to produce without having to worry about pol-
sands of bright people are wasted in careers spent persuading us to scrap what we have and buy their shiny new product. This packaging, and the products that we are convinced to replace, become trash. The people in the advertising industry are spending time selling us products we don’t need when they could be figuring out how to avoid destroying our planet. Responsible consumption is not the answer. It cannot work as a strategy to tackle such a global problem. Most people do not have the luxury of paying that much more to consume something that is “green” or “or-
The problem is systemic. The problem is the profit motive and capitalism itself.
lution controls or the effects that you might be having on people nearby or on the planet. The Darwinian process of the market tends to bankrupt any firm that might produce sustainably in favor of those who can sell more cheaply at the expense of sustainability. As a result, we are left with firms that focus on short-term profitability at the expense of our collective long-term interests. But capitalism is wasteful in other ways. Tons of packaging and hundreds of thou-
ganic.” Besides, the best market strategy for firms wanting to appeal to “green consumers” is to do the least amount necessary to be “green.” They might curb their emissions a little, but it’s far too little to really slow climate change. We can and should fight for meaningful regulations and reforms, like the creation of the EPA and the Clean Air Act in 1970. But this is not something we can regulate away, either. As soon as the mass movement
that created these rules and institutions dies down, they will slowly be weakened by the corporations. Those corporations will lobby, buy elections, fund huge media campaigns and threaten to move money and jobs abroad to make sure the political system slowly repeals the gains we have made, as they have over the past 40 years. Without a popular movement to back it, the EPA has become a shadow of what it once was. And large corporations have learned to avoid the rules of the Clean Air Act. The problem is systemic, caused by the relentless pursuit of short-term profit upon which our economic system is founded. This means the answer is system change. Green technology is out there, but it is simply less profitable than pollution. In order to use it, we need a society where workers control production, and the goal is meeting our needs, not making a profit. We need a society in which we can democratically plan our economic priorities and not leave them up to the shortsighted chaos of the market. In short, we need socialism. In capitalism, those who choose how we produce have a vested interest in polluting. In socialism, we would collectively choose how we produce. And it is in our collective interest not to pollute. Estimates say that environmental collapse could occur as soon as 40 years from now. Within our lifetime. Time is short — we need socialism now! Luke Lattanzi-Silveus ’14 believes that we still have time to save the planet and can be contacted at luke_lattanzi-silveus@brown.edu.