Should You be Permitted to Vote?

By Kolbold

With the advent of the upcoming political season, endless campaign rhetoric and propaganda: I wish to direct the readers’ attention to the end result, the voter. A society becomes civilized when its people are well-educated and as its people and its government values and promote knowledge.

The Founding Fathers of our society were, almost to the man, thoughtful, ambitious, well-educated and discriminate people. Most of their knowledge was self taught and the result of reading books. Universal suffrage was actually unthinkable to most of the early founders. These were men who were inclined towards requiring voters to have basic intelligence, an education or property. The Founding Fathers believed, as I do, that the long term welfare of our nation is best served by an informed, invested electorate. They felt that landowners represented this concept. They believed that such a requirement to qualify to vote was not unreasonable. When writing state constitutions it was doubted that every citizen, especially those without property, money or formal education were capable of electing sound representatives.

This may sound heartless in our time but, the presumption of our founders was that normal human beings were capable of taking care of themselves. But times were different then. Those who owned property were usually educated or literate. Nevertheless because of concerns over class warfare, property qualifications for voting were mostly eliminated by 1820. Well we've come full circle now. Class warfare is alive, well and will be front and center in every election campaign. Although the Constitution is not clear, permitting only informed citizens with a vested interest to vote is a sound one. If anyone today may be regarded as well-informed and as a vested non-land owner, let them vote. But preserve the integrity of the system and erect a bar over which people must climb before voting. We will all be better off.

Knowledge is very long term and is readily available. The Founding Fathers lived in a world where most people only traveled as far as they could walk and no one had news media or the internet. The newspapers carried news. Political pamphlets such as produced by Thomas Paine were acknowledged as such, and not considered news. They valued knowledge, information, and the free flow of ideas. They came up with a durable form of government that has kept us safe and secure for a couple hundred years. The Founders knew that knowledge is power.

The limitations that the Founding Fathers placed on "one man, one vote" were almost all designed to bias the electorate towards men of education, knowledge, and social responsibility. Men of educated views

We the electorate has become the problem. There is the category of people that work hard, pay their taxes and stay informed on issues that will affect their way of life. These are independent thinkers that formulate a position based on logic, knowledge of issues and often a position of limited government. Another group that falls in this category includes a group swayed by scare tactics employed by voting block factions such as labor unions and organizations like the AARP.

Many more of us, the third category receive much of our information in sound bytes or biased newspaper articles. These members of this electorate are, less educated, fickle or go about life never reading or hearing anything but, rock music or reality TV. Thomas Jefferson said, "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." Of course Mr. Jefferson never envisioned Oprah or Jerry Springer.

The first category, the more educated, has a vested interest in the country and its political outcomes because it affects personal earnings, investments, taxes and way of life. The second and some of the first category, unions and AARP members, in particular have only an interest in the outcome since it directly affects their public source of income, social services and housing. Their votes based on increasing benevolent government income transfer programs from the minority to the governing majority. John Adams prognosticated, “Men who are wholly destitute of property, are too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own"

Being well informed is being well armed. We should listen closely to everything the founders said. Ben Franklin stated "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!" I would imagine he was not talking about muskets. After all, he was part of this experiment we call the United States of America which has produced the greatest country in the history of mankind.