The Voting Dead

by JASmius



Or "Why the franchise was once limited to property owners":

Election spending is one of the biggest problems facing America, according to Senator Harry [G]Reid, (D-NV), and many of his allies. They argue the Koch brothers and other rich Republican donors are ruining democracy.

The truth is that voters swayed by a 30-second commercial are what's wrong with democracy and America.

The problem isn't really money. The problem is that voters believe they can make decisions based on ads that are meant to be biased. Many voters are spending less time thinking about the issues than they are dedicating to posing for selfies. It is this lack of intelligent decision making that is hurting the country. [emphases added]

I think I want to have Michael Carr's love child.

No issue worth voting for or against can be explained in under a minute. Educating the group of people Rush Limbaugh calls "low-information voters" might be an impossible task and that has long-term implications for the economy.

Such as....:

In January 2009, government fiscal policy was adding 1.5 percentage points to GDP, according to the FIM. With the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009, its contribution briefly rose to 3% by mid-year. However, by 2011, this figure fell precipitously to -1%, and has ranged between -0.5% and 1% ever since. For perspective, the only negative readings from 2000 through 2009 occurred in 2006, when it reached -0.25%.

Almost sounds like a narcotic, doesn't it?

As a result, the labor market remains extraordinarily weak. While ["official"] unemployment stands at 6%, the underemployed represent 12%, and 2.5% of adults aged 25 to 64 left the labor force since the inception of the [Second] Great [D]e[pr]ession.

Most of these individuals probably would prefer to work full time or in higher-level positions that they are qualified to perform. In addition, college graduates who enrolled in graduate school due to a poor labor market are also excluded from the unemployment rolls. Therefore, the real unemployment rate may hover close to 20%. [emphasis added]

And that's what the Voting Dead - literal and figurative - voted for in 2008 and 2012, and, for all we know, will vote for again four and a half weeks from now, without ever realizing that that is what they are doing.  This is because they do not understand that voting in local, state, and federal elections isn't like voting to determine who's going to be thrown off Dancing With The Stars next week, and it's not an online survey that you can skew by clicking on the banner ad until you get carpal tunnel syndrome.  It's also not supposed to be akin to going to your neighborhood ATM.  It is supposed to be both a duty and a responsibility to be taken deadly seriously, because hundreds of thousands of our ancestors and contemporaries bled and died to both provide us with this duty and responsibility and the one-time freedom and liberty that came with it.  The very same freedom and liberty that they voted away from all of us in 2008 and 2012.

This is the one legit reason why the franchise wasn't universal in the early days of the Old Republic.  Back then voting was considered a, well, duty and responsibility to be taken deadly seriously, not a selfish, whimsical frivolity - or, put another way, then the country was a constitutional federal republic, versus the mob-rule socialist oligarchy it is today.  So it was limited to property owners, which is another way of saying to adults who had "skin in the game," as it were.  Why should people who don't want to contribute to the system but only want to leech off of it get a say in how the system is run?  You'll notice I said that voting is supposed to be a duty and responsibility, not a "right".  The Founding Fathers never intended voting to be a "right" by which parasites could assert and indirectly enforce "rights" to steal others' property and fruits of their labors.  Yet that's precisely what today's post-American rulers have inexorably brought about, for their own corrupt and sinister purposes.  And the practical effect of that is to disincentivize LIVs and NIVs from "spending more time thinking about the issues than they are dedicating to posing for selfies".

And that is why, to repurpose Jacob Mugambi Muriithi's catch-phrase, we do what we do.  We won't see the results, if any, in our lifetimes, but perhaps, just perhaps, our children and grandchildren can once again enjoy constitutional "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in a Second American Republic.

Which means our great- and great-great grandchildren will just vote it all away again.  But we can only save one or two future generations at a time.