Thoughts on the reality avoidance of the “elites,” from VDH:
…tokenism is not the only reaction when postmodern liberal dreaming ends up in concrete premodern catastrophe. Escapism is a related response. I don’t think Dream Act supporters in Santa Monica or Atherton wish to live in, or visit much, Parlier or Orange Cove. When CSU presidents retire from Central Valley campuses, they usually frown and head to Palm Springs or Monterey. Doctrinaire liberalism is predicated on the notion of escapism, that one has the means and know-how to ensure that children do not go to the schools whose curriculum and policies follow your own utopian thinking. Or that you make sure your “wind and solar and millions of green jobs” windmills are obstructing someone else’s view. Or that the first high-speed rail link connects Fresno with Charles Manson’s prison in Corcoran rather than cutting a wide swath through Bay Area suburbs.
Medieval exemption is yet another response to liberalism. As I wrote in 2008, I watched with curiosity as tony Palo Alto neighborhoods sprouted bigger Obama campaign signs on their lawns, even though the owners were by definition one-percenter segregationists (East Palo Alto and Redwood City are a mile — and a solar system — away). The mansions of an Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards are expiated by their owners’ always louder liberal outrage. No one really wishes to live in a world governed by the laws of contemporary liberalism. So the architects escape it and justify their flight by finding a suitable token, a convenient scapegoat, a secular priest like Obama to offer them penance for their sins of enjoying elite privilege.
When we talk of tokenism, escapism, or penance, we are still in world of symptoms, not the etiology of the malady. All can understand the very human desire to support a liberal crusader like Barack Obama among those who pay no income tax, belong to the near 50% who receive some sort of government aid, or are part of the one-sixth of the population on food stamps. Self-interest is an understandable motivation. It explains why the public employee and teacher naturally worry more about pay increases than the tax wherewithal to pay for them.
But for the more elite and influential progressive, affluence has allowed liberal orthodoxy to evolve to its theoretical limitations. There is a reason why 90% of professors — life-long tenure, summers off, guaranteed pay raises — are liberal and 70% of small-business people are conservative. The more removed one becomes from the elemental struggle to eat one more day — and never in the history of civilization have so many been so exempt from such existential worries — the more one enjoys the luxury of pondering more cosmic issues such as extending Social Security disability payments to youths suffering from attention deficit disorder or mandating gay history in state public schools or saving the smelt.
California is on its way to becoming Greece.
If you’re a member of the Cult of the State. and still think, after all the lessons of history and the experiences of the 20th Century, that the State is our best friend, and the more power and money we give it (or more preceisely, we let it take), the better off we are, you’re already in pretty serious reality avoidance.
Society of, by, and for the crickets. In October.
I would be interested to see, an experiment, how a nation would fair if the franchise was restricted in some manner to make sure that individuals who voted had “skin in the game” for those results. That’s how Britain operated at first, when voting was for land-holders.
The problem I have is how you define the franchise. How narrow would you be willing to go? At what point do you lose the “broad base” of democracy that serves as a collective check on power and becomes just another ruling elite.
Land owners?
Equity owners?
Anyone who works at a business they own equity in?
Anyone who pays more in taxes than they receive from the government in salary and/or benefits has “skin in the game.” So do wounded veterans and others who suffered in public service.
To do this properly, we’d first have to explicitly breakdown SS & Medicare into the two categories “investment” and “wealth transfer”.
I happen to think they would be worthwhile regardless: Making the SS checks explicitly state on them a breakdown of “This is your money being returned” and “This is money given to you by others because you didn’t save enough.”
Welll, the simplest approach would be to only offer government benefits above a certain level in return for relinquishing the right to vote in the next election, under the argument that a citizen’s independence and perhaps judgement must inherently be compromised by becoming a dependent.
Another way to state it is that a citizen’s interest in maintaining their government benefits, when those benefits are large fraction of the citizen’s income, inherently overwhelms the citizen’s own independent interests and thus their free judgement and the exercise thereof. It’s like letting heroin, crack, and meth addicts vote on drug policy, or Congressmen vote on Congressional salaries. When is the last time Congress voted itself a pay cut, and how could we expect a low income voter, to whom benefits are critically important, do what rich Congressmen refuse to do to themselves?
I don’t think anyone would go for such a policy, and it’s probably not Constitutional (although it could be implemented as a voluntary system of not voting, and if the promise is violated then the government asks for its money back), but there are benefits to the plan, such as providing at least some disincentive to getting on government welfare and other programs, along with eliminating the direct connection between the number of people on such programs and the number of people voting to expand such programs in a positive feedback loop.
As for the liberal elites, they’re like the drug lords whose underlings pedal crack in the inner cities, creating crime infested ghettos where the cartel bosses wouldn’t step foot.
Gets fuzzy – what about gubbmint employees – the massive population of bureaucrats whose rice bowl depends upon Congress spending on the bureaucracy?
Similar to the Wisconsin public unions debacle.
My idea: disallow the franchise of any non-disabled individual who has been on public relief for more than an arbitrary length of time, say four years; said franchise freely restorable once the individual has been gainfully employed at anything other than a nonprofit or municipal job for four consecutive years (to prevent vote farming). This will eliminate the career-dole recipients from the voter pool (and from the jury pool, which is a side bonus).
To insure against attempts to game the system, prosecute voter fraud as a federal felony with a minimum of twenty years’ sentence. Offer a Federal bounty for information leading to the arrest and conviction, et cetera.
I say twenty years in the electric chair!
Other options:
People who pay a net-positive income tax.
People who pay $threshold total tax.
—
The system is arranged to be able to punish people-who-own-capital. Punks don’t have capital. And the Blue Model is arranged such that no one ever accrues or needs capital.
The article isn’t about limiting franchise, it’s about people who vote for policies that they have no intention of (and have every ability to avoid) dealing with the consequences of. It’s about people who, since they don’t have to deal with effects of those policies, continue to be clueless as to why those policies don’t work, and don’t much care either.
Congress frequently exempts itself from the laws it passes. The 1994 “Contract with America” worked to change things but that was long ago. Only “little people” have to live by the rules.
Would those who advocate putting low income families into suburban neighborhoods like having them for next door neighbors, or would they retreat into their gated communities? Would those who advocate higher taxes on “the rich” (a term that’s seldom defined) be so quick to raise taxes on themselves? Since anyone is free to pay more than they owe in taxes but very few people choose to do so, the answer is likely no.
I’m assuming your questions are meant as rhetorical as we already know the answers. In every single instance that the elites have had a chance to live by the rules they choose to impose on the rest of us, they have preferred not to. Their sense of entitlement rivals that of any feudal nobility.
The politicians who crow the most about supporting public schools and limiting school choice always send their own kids to private schools. The Hollywood types who complain the most about global warming and carbon footprints, only do so after exiting their private jets and entering a near by limousine. In every instance, they refuse to accept the effects of their own beliefs. That’s why they are unteachable.
Heinlein had the answer – Starship Troopers.
But then you’d have still had President Carter and Wes Clark could’ve still run– but Reagan would’ve been barred. Service, while admirable, isn’t a guarantee of wise leadership.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan#Military_service