Affirm or deny: Universal suffrage is detrimental to the survival of a republic.

[Doc Brown]

9 minutes ago, Taro T said:

 

While that's definitely a concern with term limits, a bigger concern IMHO is that if you are forcing the politician out of office after 6, 8, 12, or however many years but not limiting how long a staffer or lobbyist is there, then you are necessarily giving people with no direct oversight from the voters a leg up over those that actually do have oversight. 

 

There are additional issues with term limits, but again IMHO that's the big one.

Agreed.  Plus, with term limits all you're going to accomplish is having more former politicians become lobbyists who will be even more effective at using their connections and experience to get legislation through that best serves who's paying them.  It would only increase the revolving door problem.

[Foxx]

4 hours ago, IDBillzFan said:

Funny. This popped up again on Twitter. This is what I imagine it's like when TYTT tries to have a discussion with liberals.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Doc Brown said:

Agreed.  Plus, with term limits all you're going to accomplish is having more former politicians become lobbyists who will be even more effective at using their connections and experience to get legislation through that best serves who's paying them.  It would only increase the revolving door problem.

nah. put a moratorium on ex-pols becoming lobbyists. if you're going to enact term limits, you can do this as well. don't think you're beat, they want you to think you're beat.

Edited August 29, 2020 by Foxx

[ComradeKayAdams]

On 8/28/2020 at 4:24 PM, Joe in Winslow said:

Pay close attention to the wording.

 

I affirm this.

 

Oh I definitely DENY, in a wacky-waving-inflatable-arms-flailing-tube-man visual kind of way!! The absence of universal suffrage codifies power of the few and inevitably leads to plutocratic oligarchies and societal uprisings. Okay…technically you could avoid the latter with a strong enough power grip from the former…but I’d much rather gather all the rational adults in the room and find common ground on the freeloader dilemma. Some of y’all seem overly fixated on tyranny of the majority issues with democracies and republics, at the exclusion of tyranny of the minority dynamics.

 

On 8/28/2020 at 5:23 PM, Joe in Winslow said:

Do you affirm or deny that the country was more stable politically, economically and socially when the vote was restricted to landowning men than it is now?

 

I absolutely DENY, for all 3 categories given. The early U.S. automatically fails the social stability test on account of all the disenfranchised black slaves, Native Americans, females, and non-landowning (i.e. non-wealthy) non-WASP males. Most economic historians agree that the laissez-faire boom/bust cycles of the early Industrial Age were longer and more painful than any experienced in modern (post-Great Depression) American history. And in terms of political stability, why would anyone ever think the early US political history was more idyllic? They were still trying to iron out all the messy fundamental Constitution questions back then that we take for granted today, like the Tenth Amendment interpretation, the role of the Supreme Court, the need for a central bank…just to name a few. Oh yeah, let’s not forget all the Whiskey Rebellions, Hamilton-Burr duels, Hatfield-McCoy skirmishes, and Wild West lawlessness back then. If y’all think the contemporary political skies are falling on a daily basis, it might be because you are tuned in to mass media at unhealthy levels? Find a hobby! Try looking into knitting or Vinyasa yoga. Very therapeutic. Too girly? Fine. Then just get ready for the new Bills season!

 

On 8/28/2020 at 5:23 PM, KD in CA said:

That becomes easy if we have a sensible tax structure.  That being one in which we tax consumption rather than productivity.

 

But there’s nothing sensible about exclusively regressive tax structures! Why was the Sixteenth Amendment ratified in the first place? What was the socioeconomic climate like during the Gilded Age? Why did all those left-wing populist third parties keep popping up in the early twentieth century? I see that many here are struggling with the free-rider market failure problem. I recommend trying to approach this from a data-driven economics perspective and not from a philosophical one. Just try it for a bit and see what happens (random aside: I was once similarly stubbornly against quinoa dishes…until I tried a few of them and learned how to add the proper amount of cooking water. Now I love ‘em and am enjoying an exotic leftover quinoa breakfast of sorts as I type! The moral of this story is to not be afraid to try new things). Before we even entertain a policy of ceasing all taxes on productivity, we first need to push our so-called Judeo-Christian society to live up to its Judeo-Christian ideals of voluntary community service and compassion for the downtrodden. But human nature is what it is, which is why I prefer practical data-driven economics over theoretical philosophizing…the realities of human behavior are already accounted for in the data! Yay! No need to waste one’s own time like some wanna-be Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau.

[Orlando Buffalo]

I affirm it absolutely but to be a republic without allowing the people to choose which laws are enacted is not someplace I would want to live. The republic is not worth fighting for if only a few select all the laws we all must live under and we currently do not have true "universal" suffrage- you must be 18 and in many states not a criminal, which to me are obviously the good exceptions.