It’s Friday, the wife and I have some friends in town, and I am more than ready for the weekend. But first, let’s quickly discuss a concept that’s germane to the current election environment – a poll tax. Who says I can’t kick off the weekend with fun?
For those of you who don’t know, poll taxes are exactly what they sound like – fees that individuals must to pay before they can vote. While I don’t support the idea of individual poll taxes, I do favor the idea that we should only allow voting rights to individuals that have “skin in the game”. Let me elaborate.
From a principle perspective, if we allow everyone to vote regardless of whether they’ll end up being a net tax payer or net tax receiver, there will be a tendency for those who don’t have to actually pay taxes to vote to take money from others. Essentially, those individuals who are dependent upon receiving money from the State, (which is actually just transfer payments from other private citizens, since the State has no money), will tend to elect people that will allow them to continue to collect money without having to contribute to the funding of the government. In practice this amounts to a group of people voting to have a coercive State with the power to “redistribute” (i.e. STEAL) the income away from the individuals who earn it.
Some may argue that a restrictive voting law is discriminatory. I disagree. I do not care what race, color, religion, or any other group a person belongs to. What I do care about is that those who are voting to grant the State its powers have something at stake based on their decisions. There is some historical precedent for this. When the country was founded, there was a requirement that one be a land owner to be eligible to vote. Many folks have argued this was put there to exclude slaves because they were banned from owning property. I also realize that women were not able to vote, which I as a libertarian completely oppose. While these were certainly factors pertinent to that time period, I would argue that the intent of requiring voters to own land was not just focused on precluding races or genders. In my opinion, its primary intention was to limit the growth of government. If you were a land owner and the State was trying to expand its powers, you would have every incentive to elect people that would prevent the State from exercising its monopoly of force against you. I’m not suggesting that this specific land ownership requirement would be valid today, but I do think we should establish some method for preventing those individuals who are net beneficiaries of State theft from voting to “legitimize” that theft.
A topic to be continued…