Posted by
CPT on Wednesday, November 21, 2007 8:47:26 PM
From a guy named RobertThink about it.... Then tell us what you think.
In Robert Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers, the right to vote must be earned by serving a two year term of Federal Service (usually interpreted to mean serving in the military, although the exact meaning has been debated , since Heinlein later claimed otherwise). After its publication, Heinleine was denounced by critics as a right-wing facist. In his 1980 anthology Expanded Universe, Heinlein wrote more about the idea of earning a right to vote, making it very clear that the system of Starship Troopers wasn't the only way things could be done.
I think I know what offends most of my critics the most about STARSHIP TROOPERS: It is the dismaying idea that a voice in governing the state should be earned instead of being handed to anyone who is 18 years old and has a body temperature near 37 degrees C.
But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Democracies usually collapse not too long after the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses...for a while. Either read history or watch the daily papers; it is now happening here. Let's stipulate for discussion that some stabilizing qualification is needed (in addition to the body being warm) for a voter to vote responsibly with proper consideration for the future of his children and grandchildren - and yours. The Founding Fathers never intended to extend the franchise to everyone; their debates and the early laws show it. A man had to be a stable figure in the community through owning land or employing others or engaged in a journeyman trade or something.
But few pay attention to the Founding Fathers today - those ignorant, uneducated men - they didn't even have television (have you looked at Monticello lately?) - so let's try some other "poll taxes" to insure a responsible electorate.
a) Mark Twain's "The Curious Republic of Gondor" - if you have not read it, do so.
b) A state where anyone can buy for cash (or lay-away installment plan) one or more franchises, and this is the government's sole source of income other than services sold competitively and non-monopolistically. This would produce a new type of government with several rabbits tucked away in the hat. Rich people would take over the government? Would they, now? Is a wealthy man going to impoverish himself for the privilege of casting a couple of hundred votes? Buying an election today under the warm-body (and tombstone) system is much cheaper than buying a controlling number of franchises would be. The arithmetic on this one becomes unsolvable...but I suspect that paying a stiff price (call it 20,000 Swiss francs) for a franchise would be even less popular than serving two years.
c) A state that required a bare minimum of intelligence and education - e.g., step into the polling booth and find that the computer has generated a new quadratic equation just for you. Solve it, the computer unlocks the voting machine, you vote. But get a wrong answer and the voting machine fails to unlock, a loud bell sounds, a red light goes on over the booth - and you slink out, face red, you having just proved yourself too stupid and/or ignorant to take part in the decisions of grownups. Better luck next election! No lower age limit in this system - smart 12-yr-old girls vote every election while some of their mothers - and fathers - decline to be humiliated twice.
There are endless variations on this one. Here are two: Improving the Breed -- No red light, no bell...but the booth opens automatically - empty. Revenue -- You don't risk your life, just some gelt. It costs you 1/4 oz. troy of gold in local currency to enter the booth. Solve your quadratic and vote, and you get your money back. Flunk - and the state keeps it. With this one I guarantee that no one would vote who was not interested and would be most unlikely to vote if unsure of his ability to get that hundred bucks back.
I concede that I set the standards on both I.Q. and schooling too law in calling only for the solution of a quadratic since (if the programming limits the machine to integer roots) a person who deals with figures at all can solve that one with both hands behind him (her) and her-his eyes closed. But I recently discovered that a person can graduate from high school in Santa Cruz with a straight-A record, be about to enter the University of California on a scholarship...but be totally unable to do simple arithmetic. Let's not make things too difficult at the transition.
d) I don't insist on any particular method of achieving a responsible electorate; I just think that we need to tighten up the present warm-body criterion before it destroys us. How about this? For almost a century and a half women were not allowed to vote. For the past sixty years they have voted...but we have not seen the enormous improvement in government that the suffragettes promised us.
Perhaps we did not go far enough. Perhaps men are still corrupting the government... so let's try the next century and a half with males disenfranchised. (Fair is fair. My mother was past forty before she was permitted to vote.) But let's not stop there; at present men outnumber women in elective offices, on the bench, and in the legal profession by a proportion that is scandalous.
Make males ineligible to hold elective office, or to serve in the judiciary, elective or appointed, and also reserve the profession of law for women.
Impossible? That was exactly the situation the year I was born, but male instead of female, even in the few states that had female suffrage before the XIXth Amendment, with so few exceptions as to be unnoticed. As for rooting male lawyers out of their cozy niches, this would give us a pool of unskilled manual laborers - and laborers are very hard to hire this days; I've been trying to hire one at any wages he wants for the past three months, with no success.
The really good ones could stay on as law clerks to our present female lawyers, who will be overworked for a while. But not for long. Can you imagine female judges (with no male judges to reverse them) permitting attorneys to take six weeks to pick a jury? Or allowing a trial to ramble along for months?
Women are more practical than men. Biology forces it on them.
Speaking of that, let's go the whole hog. Until a female bears a child her socio-economic function is male no matter how orthodox her sexual preference. But a woman who is mother to a child knows she has a stake in the future. So let's limit the franchise and eligibility for office and the practice of law to mothers.
The phasing over should be made gentle. Let males serve out their terms but not succeed themselves. Male lawyers might be given as long as four years to retire or find other jobs while not admitting any more males into law schools. I don't have a candidate for President but the events of the past fifty years prove that anybody can sit in the Oval Office; it's just that some are more impressive in appearance than others.
Brethren and Sistern, have you ever stopped to think that there has not been one rational decision out of the Oval Office for fifty years?
An all-female government could not possibly be worse than what we have been enduring. Let's try it!
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