Limiting the franchise

This is a response to the discussion currently taking place at Lawrence Auster's blog regarding his ideas for limiting suffrage in the United States, titled "Limiting the franchise."



Mr. Auster,

A few points on your discussion about your entry concerning “limiting the franchise” of our republic:

1. It is extremely important that we look at this rationally, realistically, and pragmatically, basically meaning that government should not be organized around idealistic or theocratic concepts. What government you, or anybody else thinks, is most in line with religious principles, is absolutely irrelevant. It is not the role of government to socially engineer society along secular or, especially, religious lines. The single most important function of government is to defend the nation and protect the natural rights of individuals and their families. The second most important function of government is to protect private property and enforce contracts. These are both key to the proper functioning of any kind of society or market economy.

2. I see no reason why women should not be allowed to vote. Should they not be allowed to work, either? If women are purged from the workforce, our economic capabilities decline automatically by at least 50%. Anybody who says that women should be eliminated from the workforce is basically calling for the destruction of the United States. People who think this way should be ignored and relegated to the fringes, where they belong. Albert Speer understood this when he took control of German war production in 1942 and allowed women to take a more active part in the workforce, much to the dismay of many highly ideological party leaders. Because he did so, along with many other reforms, he managed to quadruple production by 1944, prolonging the war. Imagine where Germany would have been had they done this a decade earlier? Terrifying thought, is it not?

3. As inferred in the previous statement about women, the organization of the world outside a nation’s borders is just as important as the organization of the society inside them. Any form of governmental organization that will weaken our ability to project power in our defense or economically compete with other countries should be immediately rejected. Alexander Hamilton was right when he said, “It had been said that respectability in the eyes of foreign nations was not the object at which we aimed; that the proper object of republican Government was domestic tranquility and happiness. This was an ideal distinction. No Government could give us tranquility and happiness at home, which did not possess sufficient stability and strength to make us respectable abroad.” Let’s face it: all of your cherished religious beliefs and views about women will not matter after your brains have been splattered across your living room floor as you rushed to protect your wife from being raped by foreign invaders who are occupying your country because your policies rendered it too weak to compete with others.

4. While limiting the franchise to those who own property is certainly preferable to the system that we have today, there are serious problems with this. What is to prevent large property owners from utilizing the government’s coercive power to maximize their property holdings via eminent domain laws, thereby slowly, but surely, eliminating large portions of the electorate and turning the country into an oligarchy?

5. As for the “taxation without representation” argument, I do not understand why it is wrong for a person to pay taxes if they being protected by the government or utilizing any other kind of governmental services. A better quote would be “no service without representation,” ie, the government cannot call upon you to serve if you are not represented in government. I believe that the best system of government is one where the members of the government and the electorate are those who have served their nation and everybody else who has not are excluded. Of course, this would cut the electorate down significantly (those who have served make up about 3% of the United States) and would include both men and women.

6. How could one possibly enforce a system of democratic rule where the only ones who are enfranchised are married men? If women want to vote, they could easily shut down society. Think about it: all they have to do is quit getting married. If you want to dissolve marriage as a viable social institution, then this is the way to go. Too many people get married for all the wrong reasons nowadays, and the purpose of marriage continues to erode by the day. Do we want to accelerate this fact by creating a system where marriage is linked to political power?

7. Another net result of linking political power to being male and married is the effects it could have upon birthrates. Families will want to maximize their political power relative to other families, and how better to do so than to develop means by which to have more male children? Imagine the effects this will have upon society as a whole. Since families will want to have more male children, the ratio between men and women will slip from 50/50 to a male majority, with a significant percentage of males therefore being unable to marry. Not only will some families have much more political power than other families, but you will create a huge segment of society riddled with social dysfunction due to the fact that they, the men, will be unable to marry due to a lack of single women and will direct their social energies elsewhere. Imagine the crime wave and the alienation that will result from this.

8. On top of all of this, Laura mentions how in this form of representation families will become a “corporate body” recognized by the state. This gets into previous arguments that I have made regarding families seeking to maximize the number of male children that they have and utilizing the coercive power of the state to extend familial power. Basically, the results of this type of society, where families are dominant, is that it will become something like what exists now in Iraq, ie, clan and tribal loyalties will dominate society (for a more Western example, look at the past 700 years of Italian history). This is not a pretty thought, and if one thinks nepotism is bad now, just wait until family becomes the primary element of society recognized by the state.

9. Back to my statement regarding limiting the electorate and makeup of government to those who have served the nation, I still think that this is the most ideal system, with a few nuances. The fact of the matter is that government should be as meritocratic as possible, and the only functioning government bureaucracy with a true sense of meritocratic mobility is the military. I believe that other government functions, like medicine, education, the judiciary, the civil service, and emergency services, could be similarly meritocratic if they were organized nationally along military organizational lines, providing more upward mobility to what are now local and state functions while helping areas that have personnel or material shortages. And while true positions of power in government, like the legislature and upper echelons of the executive branch and judiciary, should still only be made up of those who have served, positions in specialized government agencies requiring certain expertise should not be so limited.

10. I do not believe that the military is any more meritocratic than any kind of society organized around a market economy. But whereas those who join the military generally do so for somewhat nationalistic reasons, those who stay outside the military and work within the marketplace do so for economic reasons. This leads towards different attitudes regarding the self and the nation, and lends support to my argument that those who have experience in the federal service will work more towards the interests of the nation.

I hate to say it, but many of my beliefs flow from my readings of Robert Heinlein. He was a very smart man. But more than anything else we need to be realistic here. For those who want a Christian theocracy, I suggest they go join the Reconstructionist la-la-land centered on R.J. Rushdoony and his Institutes of Biblical Law.