The Problem Is the Franchise
On Fixing Things
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One of the most infuriating aspects of the many problems we face is that they could be solved relatively easily. Like dealing with pitbulls, the solution to everything from our warzone-like cities to the uglification of our world is not complex and doesn’t require esoteric thought or study. It rather requires applying a steady amount of will over time, come what may in terms of unpleasantness and gnashing of teeth from those most affected, until the problem is fixed.
Take Social Security. Its trust fund, or the capital that was accumulated when times were better and the ratio of workers to retirees was less problematic, will become insolvent sometime in the early 2030s1 and run out by the late 2030s.2 The disability fund will run out around the same time.3 When the trust fund runs out, only ~73% of promised benefits will be able to be paid out,4 and that problem will grow worse rather than better over the years because of our awful worker-to-retiree ratio and the consequences of a low TFR. When the fund runs out, and the benefits are cut, the number of elderly Americans living in penury is expected to rise precipitously, perhaps by as much as 50% in very short order.5
There are countless ways of dealing with that lurking problem and fixing it ahead of time. Raising the payroll tax would fix it without requiring benefit cuts, though the tax would probably have to be hiked to nearly 17%, as we have waited so long to do anything about the problem;6 given the putting off of the problem that has so far occurred, it’s likely the real number will be much higher if this is ever tried. On the other hand, benefits could be cut by increasing the retirement age, which seems to make the most sense given how the average lifespan has increased since the retirement age was originally set.7 Yet better, voluntary semi-privatization of the program toward something that more closely resembles the highly effective CFP program in Singapore8, as the authors of America 3.0 recommend,9 would probably fix the problem for the long term while chipping away at the taxation burden. Regardless of which solution is chosen, the problem is eminently solvable. It just requires the solution actually being implemented.
And that is where we run into trouble. No solution that would fix the problem is at all popular with a large enough demographic to outweigh the loss of votes that would come from engaging in it. To dramatically raise taxes to fund a pension plan many believe won’t exist for more than another generation would be to turn every voter under 50 against you and your party, to raise the retirement age would be to turn a similarly large voter demographic against you, and privatizing it would have every economic populist baying for your blood. Thus, to fix the problem now rather than let it turn into some catastrophe of poverty and inflation later, as it will be without a fix, is rightly considered political self-suicide by the legislators who would have to engage in it, and so they avoid it.
The same sort of thing is true of healthcare, another increasingly perennial problem in America. A Singapore-style system10 that mandates savings for health events while using government authority to keep the provision of basic, preventive healthcare services, medicines, and the like quite cheap would probably work well here. It works well there, and the pairing of private money with disallowing ridiculous and exploitative fees is the sort of thing that tends to at least work reasonably well. It certainly works better than a system like ours that’s designed to drive costs ever higher, privatizing the gains and socializing the costs, primarily by making the healthy bear the brunt of them. But, again, it’d be unpopular; a large enough block wants to be as unhealthy as desired while knowing the nanny state will always take care of them, that it could wreak electoral havoc if that “right” to be a burden on one’s fellows was taken away. And so we have Obamacare, which disallows the insurance companies from even charging the obese more than the healthy,11 despite knowing they will cost the system more.
On much the same note, our welfare system is obscene. There are stories out of Minnesota of the Somali daycare fraudsters bidding on unmarried women who have nine to ten kids, often by different men, to bring those kids in and make the daycares look real while collecting the government handout dollars. Similarly, EBT food stamps can be used to buy everything from buffalo wings at Wingstop12 to crab legs from Whole Foods.13 The jokes write themselves, but it’s infuriating. And the reason it isn’t fixed is that any serious crackdown on the American Danegeld system would result in “urban unrest” and “get out the vote drives” that mobilize the tenement tenants against the government in larger numbers than normal and cause chaos. So instead we’re told to grit our teeth and take the fraud.
Oh, and the various leftist NGOs that work to subvert any form of order or natural hierarchy in the world, like the National Endowment for Democracy, are going to be funded as well,14 even after DOGE tried to cut them off, because the donors would cause issues if that part of the handout system were cut off.
Meanwhile, we’re told that mass deportations can’t happen because leftist women and their technically male (gelded) compatriots will get too upset watching career criminals get forcibly detained by ICE, and so we need to let the invasion continue apace for fear of alienating a voting bloc that lacks the will to do what is necessary to save America. The scary thing is that such preachers of restraint might be right: a sizeable voting block exists that vaguely wants deportations, but only if they can be effected without bloodshed, strife, or unpleasantness, and will vote against anyone who fixed the problem in an unkind way.
On and on it goes. The outflows can’t stop, the problems can’t be fixed, because the various interest groups that profit from them can always bring more influence to bear, and are often more organized and energized, than the average person who just wants the leeches scraped off of him.
The ticks have voted to reject the tick powder, and so will remain until all the blood is gone.
Therin lies our problem. The problem is the franchise, and so the problems will remain until the franchise is fixed.
The Franchise
This was known from the beginning, of course. The Founding Fathers were largely anti-egalitarian in outlook, and the system they designed included the assumption that states would maintain restrictions that only allowed landowners to vote. The thinking went that those who could manage a farm could be trusted to make good decisions, and only those who were independent of others by owning their own property rather than relying on a job from someone else could be trusted to vote their conscience rather than an interest group.
Overall, there was a perception that the landed could be trusted to at least make reasonable decisions outside of their base interests, but the underclass could not. As John Adams wrote, defending the idea of landed voting and describing how taking away that important distinction would eventually lead to a great levelling:15
Is it not equally true, that men in general in every society, who [are poor and do not own property], are also [unfamiliar] with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own? …Few men, who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest.
Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open [such a] source of controversy and altercation, as would be opened by attempting to [change] the qualifications of voters. There will be no end of it. New claims will arise. Women will demand a vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man, who has not a [dime], will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and [surrender] all ranks, to one common level.
Of course, that system was gone with the wind by the time the first third of the 19th century drew to a close,16 with the egalitarian tendencies described by Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution and Empire of Liberty leading to that disastrous outcome. Replacing it was universal white male suffrage, which eventually turned into universal suffrage.
The anti-equality voting measures lasted somewhat longer in Britain. Though the “Great” Reform Act of 1832 opened up voting somewhat, it wasn’t really until 1884 that most adult males gained the right to vote.17
Since then, things have gone steadily downhill. There is not a chance that the landed voters of old would have voted for such things as the National Health System or Social Security, as both are poorly designed systems that have only led to cascading failures and poor decisions. Some public involvement in pensions and healthcare might have been agreed upon—undemocratic Singapore has this, and it works reasonably well—but certainly not systems that increasingly hand off the entire productive capacity of the nation as a feel-good measure. The wise would have averted such problems as we now have, whether by avoiding the programs that created them in the first place, or designing them to be less generous but last without catastrophe. Mass democracy, however, could rely on cries of “give us Barabbas” to get whatever it wanted.
This same sort of problem has played out elsewhere. Everywhere, in fact. The Rhodesians designed their unique and complex system of propertied voting adapted for modernity—one that mixed educational attainment requirements with wealth requirements for those who wished to qualify to vote in national elections—because they saw the reality of Africa was not that it couldn’t be governed well, but that it couldn’t be governed well by mass democracy.
In their eyes, only the sort of men who had shown themselves to be able to steward their own lives and humble fortunes could be trusted to steward the many lives and great fortunes of the nation, for political involvement should be a form of stewardship rather than a handouts program. This worked quite well: Rhodesia was the breadbasket of Southern Africa, industrialized, had the highest standard of living for blacks on the continent, built one of the largest dams in the world18, and managed to have no real crime or corruption, all of which was quite outside the norm for Africa.
They were proven right by the horrors and bloodshed that resulted all over Africa as the European powers withdrew and left the natives to their own devices. Once the steady, undemocratic colonial hand was gone, the butchery began.
Kenya went from having a bright future to being an AIDS-ridden hell ruled by the former Mau Mau terrorists. Uganda went from being renowned for having the most pleasant highlands in Africa to being ruled by a literal cannibal, Idi Amin. The Congo, finally turned into a jewel of the colonial world by the Belgians, descended back into primeval horrors as soon as they handed it off to the natives for a “democratic” election. Zimbabwe skipped out on much of the black-on-white horrors of the Congo, but was similarly turned into a hellhole after the 1980 opportunity for a mass democratic vote.
In each case, the countries had been wisely ruled, justly administered, and relatively prosperous when in the hands of the Europeans. In each case, the opportunity for elections brought not more of the same, but rather the worst people expressing their worst impulses via scraps of paper. The franchise meant not prosperity, but mobs determined to loot their homes rather than steward them. Expanding the franchise, even just one time, brought effects little different from Armageddon.
The same is true here. Everywhere can be governed well, just not by mass democracy, as it empowers the worst and drowns out the best.
That is a lesson we must learn, and it is a problem we must overcome if the larger problems we face are to be eventually overcome. There is no fixing America, Britain, or the rest of the West without first fixing the franchise. So long as interest groups can vote to loot the country, whether through actual looting or unsustainable programs, so long as relatively uncomplicated solutions can be blocked by those who merely don’t want to suffer the consequences of having acted so wrong for so long, the same general trend will continue. Things will get worse, and we will have only the franchise to blame.
Can It Be Fixed?
While the root of the problem is clear, what is less obvious is whether it can be fixed. “The average voter won’t go for it” is as much a problem in this case as in all the others. There are numerous ways of designing a system that would screen out most of the worst elements—one that only allows net taxpayers to vote, one that forbids adult welfare recipients from ever again voting, a Rhodesian-style system, etc.—and largely fix the franchise problem. But the problem is getting there. Few people will vote to give up their personal power, particularly if their collective ability to vote is the one thing that keeps their handouts intact.
So, unless the overwhelming majority of the population gets much more anti-egalitarian, that leaves the other options.
The first is force. Political rights changed significantly in Britain after William’s Conquest of it, with society becoming much less egalitarian in the space of a few short months. Similarly, Rhodesia would never have had the voting system it got without the armed force of the Pioneer Column, nor would South Africa have gotten the (much worse) apartheid system had it not been able to overawe the Zulus and Xhosa while fending off the postwar British. That said, an armed revolution in favor of hierarchy seems unlikely and unideal, as does Duke William alighting on our shores.
That leaves procedural manipulation. The great thing about federal drug law is that it can be used to create an entire class of people who can’t vote: unless states go wobbly and Congress doesn’t reign them in, a felony conviction involves the loss of one’s voting rights. Marijuana is both ubiquitous and largely enjoyed by the sort of people who we need to block from voting, particularly if the larger, necessary correctives regarding the franchise are first to be made.
Thus, everyone on the hierarchy side of things, people who agree that the franchise is a problem and must be fixed, need to be relentlessly hounding their representatives at the state and federal levels to make anti-marijuana laws all the stronger. No legalization, no tacit allowance of it, none of the wobbliness. Not necessarily because marijuana itself matters, but because prosecuting its use is a great tactic to boot certain sorts off the voter rolls.
Possession of it should be a felony, as it is incredibly common, particularly in the voter demographics that need to be targeted. Paired with that, the DEA, Marshals, state and local police forces, and whatever other authorities are available need to be carrying out constant busts targeting as many people at a time as possible and pressing for felony convictions or felony plea deals so that the loss of the franchise is included in the punishment.
Going for broke on that could be enough to start fixing some things, and significantly whittle down the franchise, perhaps even enough to ram through a “no voting if on welfare” type law. It’s still unlikely, but is’s really the only realistic way to whittle down the franchise.
We must all constantly keep in mind that mass democracy was a massive mistake, and the only way out of pretty much any predicament we presently face is to first roll back the democracy problem. That will be difficult, and will be more complex than the solutions to the problems we need to solve. But it is nevertheless the case, and what we must remember. The problem is the franchise.
Featured image credit: Frypie, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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It used to (in 2010) just be to ~14.5%: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html
But we waited, so now it’s closer to 17%: https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/how-raise-social-security-retirement-age-while-protecting-poor
That program and its relevance: https://pensionresearchcouncil.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/WP2014-18-Koh.pdf
This book, on the whole, isn’t great. But some of the sections are interesting and full of good data, such as the one on retirement spending and retirement problems
Didn't Alexander Hamilton have some excellent suggestions viz a resticted franchise when writing as Publius in The Federalist Papers? Start there by using AI to write 3 more songs "In the style of the musical 'Hamilton' that describe Hamilton's recos for restricted franchise requirements." Turning a ship this big, listing this far, will require several tugboats, working together, over time. One massive shove won't happen.
How about we start by eliminating the fraud and waste first and then see what happens? Thank you for your attention to this matter.