No, I don’t find it controversial. I find it very clear cut. There is no such thing as being qualified to vote. That only 35 year olds owning property should be permitted to vote is like saying only wise, judicious men should be permitted to rob banks.
Let’s try again:
- Liberty does not mean stealing property with majority vote. Theft and liberty are diametrically opposed.
- In the real world people are different, both genetically, and because of their life experiences. This means that they have different qualifications and valuations. In fact, this is the cause of social cooperation in the first place, and why voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial.
- Children, who lack such life experiences, who have not yet asked themselves difficult and profound questions, and who are not able to control their desires, should not be allowed to decide the structure of any society. They are to be governed by their parents, and when they are old enough to sustain their own lives, they are to get real-world experience.
“Only those inclined to support my favored policies should have a say.”
Not at all controversial - all too typical, actually.
I suspect you’d find the majority of economics textbooks the same way.
Explain. This only makes sense if you believe that voting in itself is a form of theft.
Yes, because in your world, theft = “social justice.” I know, I know.
You don’t understand marginal utility. Don’t blame textbooks for your own confusion.
Majority vote at least has the benefit of maximizing self-management to a greater degree than minority rule does. Of course, the fact that you see currently existing wealth distribution as just (attacking taxation as “theft” is evidence of that), is simply an illustration of the fact that you intend to defend the gains made by state-enforced capitalism. If you were consistent, you’d actually support massive redistribution, as all property has its ultimate origins in force and fraud, either through direct inheritance, or through creation made possible through theft of productive resources.
And age is a poor means of measuring different experiences to begin with, and different experiences are not synonymous with greater capacities to make informed and rational decisions beyond that, which is why we generally avoid granting greater political rights to a 65 year old than to a 40 year old, despite his or her (gasp!) probable possession of “greater” life experience.
And support of hierarchical governance is a position of the authoritarian, not of the libertarian. Of course, the lunacy of classifying those under 35 as “children” demonstrates the fallacious nature of this sentiment even more than a standard appeal to the age restriction of 18 would. What’s ironic is that the segregation of the young into a deliberately separate and more restricted category would probably socialize them in a manner that would prevent the acquisition of life experiences even more.
Of course not. My opposition to capitalism should illustrate that. But my only point has been that the propertarian outlook is simply an extension of the same moral foundations that the social rightist possesses: Poverty is not caused by social factors that predetermine the fate of individuals, but by the personal character flaws of the poor, such as a lack of individual responsibility and self-reliance. Since social welfare programs steal from the hard-working and redistribute to the idle, thereby rewarding their laziness, they are immoral. That you would mandate property ownership as a condition of political participation indicates that you have the same view of the poor as having weak and flawed characters and prone to theft if given the opportunity.
I generally find your comments alternately amusing and irritating, but the pretension that you know more about economics than me somehow manages to hit both. Good show!
It means elections should exist no more than bank robberies should.
It means elections should exist no more than bank robberies should.
How many times do we have to explode your argument before you realize that no one takes you seriously? You’re a mystic who says that shadow and sunlight are the same. Your definition of capitalism is precisely that–your own.
Force means making people do things they don’t want to do. It doesn’t mean preventing people from taking what they desire. Property can either be voluntarily accumulated, structured, and maintained (liberalism), or it can be distributed by decree and privilege (socialism). Property is always owned, the question is, who owns it, and how is it acquired?
You’re right, it’s not set in stone that a 35 year old is in anyway more intelligent or capable. But, as a general rule, a 35 year old will tends to have more knowledge and experience.
I haven’t done this.
Really? How so? How does preventing an 11 year old from voting retard his social and intellectual maturity?
What about elections in a corporation or a partnership?
There is a place for votes in a free market. The vote has to be exclusive and based on a valid property right.
Plus elections in militias and chess clubs. Based on whatever the club decides. Probably a membership card.
You don’t know anything about economics. You don’t even understand the positions you support. At the same time you’re a Marxist, Neo Walrasian, Post Keynesian, Neo Ricardian, and none of them at all.
Poverty is the result of government coercion and interventionism. The term poverty has been rendered absolutely useless by socialists who are trapped in intellectual limbo. The man/woman who earns $40,000 a year, who drives a car, has warm water, and a television set has been arbitrarily defined as “poor.” And yet, when you look around the world, in regions who have accepted your failed philosophy, the term poor means something entirely different. It means people who die of starvation, who wake up in the morning and search for water, and entire nations which are absolutely obliterated by a single earthquake. The moronic individual, who never thought it necessary to open a book, or go to school, earns a much higher wage than his Indian counter part, for example, because the nation he lives in has accumulated, acquired, and structured capital. If you took even a moment to look around the world, and ask yourself why Americans live so much better than the Chinese, former Yugoslavians, South Americans, and Africans, you would see the truth. If you ever stopped and asked yourself why the super-market has goods from all over the world, which is brought to you, and which charges a price you’re more than willing to pay, you would quickly drop your childish ignorance.
Instead, you blindly follow film makers and those who study linguistics.
Well “whatever the club decides” is not saying much. There are economic factors to consider.
When Hoppe set up the Property and Freedom Society, he explicitly made it a monarchy to avoid the co-opting that happened to Mont Pélerin Society.
And it’s the definition of the majority of the U.S. public, since they haven’t been enlightened by Economics in One Lesson and the profound teachings of Peter Schiff. I think you’ll have to accept that if you want to play a consistent game of defining words according to popular understandings of them, you’ll be on the losing end in many instances. 
And in the case of your defense of the wealth and resource distribution generated by our current economic system, it’s clearly an example of improperly shifting from an ideological defense of laissez-faire free markets (which is fairly cute and harmless, as there’s no practical threat of its existence), to a defense of actually existing capitalism.
That would be a fairly sound response to Marko’s comment about immature 35 year olds. It has absolutely no bearing to my own comment, which was that the generally greater knowledge and experience of older people had no specific relation to their ability to make informed and rational decisions about political issues, which is why 65 year olds are not granted more voting power than 40 year olds, as I noted. What is relevant is the actual ability to make informed and rational opinions about the future, and since empirical research indicates that such abilities are acquired in early to mid adolescence and since adolescence and well-defined age restrictions are actually only recently developed social constructs anyway, the “voting age” (and its equivalents) should be decreased and eventually abolished.
I have not claimed that you have.
I didn’t cite voting specifically, though it’s likely that exclusion from the political process is a factor in the generation of apathy and disinterest in it. But exclusion from the acquisition of responsibility will only naturally result in the underdevelopment of self-management abilities. As put by John Darling, “[there is a] common-sense perception, endemic in our culture, of children as rather silly and immature, unfit to be given responsibility. Yet such a view is clearly in danger of being self-confirming; for where children are seen as silly and immature, they will not be given responsibility, and where they are not given responsibility, they are likely to remain silly and immature.” But it’s something that I’d expect a libertarian to understand, not you.
I sympathize with your argument–though you’re only implicitly stating it. But anarchy to me is a chimera. I may be wrong, but I’m not yet convinced.
testing.
Absolute drivel. If anything, I’ve been excessively neoclassical in my approach, not sufficiently integrating heterodox insights. Of course, the fact that you didn’t actually offer any economic criticism is telling; you simply declared my position wrong without elaboration. This represents the extent of your abilities, I’d say.
Gee willigers, there’s differences between absolute and relative poverty? This sad little rambling only proved my point about your economically bankrupt moral view to an even greater degree; there’s absolute ignorance of the legitimate constrictions on social mobility that afflict the U.S. to a greater extent than other developed Western nations. You blindly follow a marginal heterodox school that has contributed virtually nothing to modern economics and has had its greatest achievement demolished by superior socialist argument.
Which is fine, but until you do you can not claim your position is backed up by logic as you did. 35 is an arbitrary limit. Logic can not tell you why it is any better than 34 or 36. You are a natural rights guy. What gives a 35 year old the right to vote but denies it to a 34 year old?
Whenever I do, you vanish. Go back to our prior discussions and respond.
I chose this school of thought because it explains actual economic phenomena. You’re forced into neo classicism because this “heterodox school that has contributed virtually nothing to modern economics” has entirely obliterated your false prophets and their doctrines.
By the way, I responded to you last comment, but it’s being reviewed. I linked about 4 definitions of capitalism. it may remedy your confusion.