This post is addressed to Elinor Mosher and Saul
Silverman under the original thread. First let me thank you both for great
answers and though I have read many of Galbraith's books and have found him
excellent, I have not read this one - next trip to library. As to your
answer Saul, great history lesson and I'm sure accurate without the criteria of
research, anyway good enough for me.
What strikes me in the two democratic systems in
North America is why voting is considered a "right" to be invoked
instead of an obligation to be fulfilled. Surely, as these ideas of
parties and voting were discussed and it was decided who had the right to vote -
which has been expanded from property owners to everyone over a certain age -
the option was there to make it mandatory for
everyone qualified to vote. It would have been a simple matter to make it
into law, everyone who is a citizen must vote. There could have been
penalties for not voting - fines and other disincentives. As everyone has
to live under the rules that government make, it would seem to me a logical step
to ask each individual as a matter of their citizenship to indicate their
preferences.
One of my arguments for this might be that the
elite, knowing that they are always numerically outnumbered would have found it
to their advantage to make voting a "right" to be invoked by the
individual rather than a must as decreed by a law. In the cases you
mentioned Saul about the different periods of history when a major effort was
made to get the poor to vote, it would have been much simpler to lobby for mandatory voting.
Now in regards to the concept of a Basic Income,
it would seem reasonable to me to tie the "right" of a Basic Income to
the "mandatory right to vote". In
other words, if the state is going to pay you a dividend of citizenship, then it
would seem logical that the state should demand that you assume the
responsibility of choosing who will govern.
Respectfully,
Thomas Lunde
