As though the state doesn’t already do enough to magnify the power of the rich by its very nature, Walter Williams suggests that people with more money should have more votes.
Because, y’know, them pore ole bosses ….
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
Well you know the slogan, one dollar one vote! I.e. one millionaire a million votes.
Okay, Williams’s column was off-the-mark. At least he could blame space restrictions. (Although it wouldn’t be very convincing; it wasn’t the densest package of ideas I’ve ever seen.
But you’re a philosophy professor who’s writing on his own blog. You can make arguments rather than coyly cast aspersions.
Williams is wrong because (1) he doesn’t recognize that income tax isn’t the only tax and (2) he doesn’t consider unforeseen consequences of explicitly acknowledging differential sets of rules.
But his basic thrust is sound: if one group(A) gets to play around with another group’s tax rates(B), would you expect taxes on (B) to be too high or too low?
You can make arguments rather than coyly cast aspersions.
I linked to an argument I’d made previously.
Considering most of the functions of modern government can be boiled down to security for wealth, the endless griping about disproportionate funding is, well, rich.
They get the “benefit” of the state, so it only makes sense that they pay for it as long as it continues.
I feel like an ass. I was too blind to pick up on a link.
My apologies.
Ego te absolvo.
Karl Hess’s onetime buddy H. L. Hunt was also a proponent of this idea:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22h+l+hunt%22+%22more+votes%22
Robert Heinlein was also a proponent of limiting voting to the “right” people rather than the inferior masses, and not only in fictional form in Starship Troopers (and leaving aside the degree to which he actually endorses the society in that book); see his comments on the subject in Expanded Universe.
Molinari briefly flirted with a similar idea before he embraced market anarchism instead. And Isabel Paterson held that only landowners should be allowed to vote (this was mainly driven by her views on the need for regional bases for political structure; unlike Molinari, he never got past the notion that these bases had to be physical territories).
He never got past, or she never got past? There’s some ambiguity there.
Oops, I gave Isabel Paterson a sex change mid-sentence. And I don’t even have a medical license!