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I am generally in favor of a negative income tax, but fiddling with voting rights is a complete non-starter. Disallowing people to vote, or giving some people
by tikhonj 11y ago
I am generally in favor of a negative income tax, but fiddling with voting rights is a complete non-starter.
Disallowing people to vote, or giving some people more voting power, skews all politics in ways that are inherently hard to fix or even address. It creates a weirder incentive scheme for the government which already behaves oddly thanks to odd incentives. A plan that took voting power away from its beneficiaries would sow the seeds of its own undoing—if not in a single action than over hundreds of small amendments and exceptions. The end-game I'd expect is for most of the benefits of the plan to be chipped away, leaving only the changed voting rights.
That's really not the way to go.
- brbsix 11y agoPeople still donate to charity, don't they? Or voluntarily sign up for insurance programs? If the programs were effective in reaching their stated goals, I wouldn't expect them to be entirely chipped away. If instead the programs revealed some perverse disincentives on the other hand, I'd expect the result you described, and rightly so.
- protomyth 11y agoI'm a on the fence as your argument mirrors my own, but I can see the fear of basically voting yourself a raise with pandering politicians. I think the line of thinking is inspired by professional voting blocks which is a more as likely scenario.
- rspeer 11y agoWhy is "voting yourself a raise" something that needs to be prevented when poor people do it, but not when rich people do it?
- protomyth 11y agoCronyism and mob rule are two sides on the same coin that needs to be prevented. If 51% can take all the money in a budget from others, everything collapses.