05.24.06
Tax-weighted democracy
In a pure democracy each individual has one vote, but pure democracy is not a good form of government. Pure democracy killed Socrates in Athens, pure democracy is you and two drunken bums in a street corner deciding by a majority vote on the allocation of the contents in your wallet, pure democracy is the dictatorship of the proletariat also known as communism, pure democracy is a majority of whites deciding that blacks should be slaves, and pure democracy is a majority of christians deciding that heretics should be burned.
Thanks to the wisdom of the founding fathers, the United States is far from a pure democracy despite what George Bush may say, what we actually have is a constitutional republic where the government is very limited in the things that it can do. We only use democracy to decide on the things that the government is not forbidden from doing. So a christian majority could not impose a national religion, and a KKK majority could not just vote to have slavery restored. In those cases and many like them there is no democracy, and that is very good.
Where things went wrong, is that while the government is forbidden from imposing a religion or from instituting slavery, it is not forbidden from "redistributing" wealth through taxation. This results in the situation where two bums and yourself are voting to allocate the ownership of the contents of your wallet. Those who don't have any money and don't care to work to get it will always vote to simply take it from those who work and "redistribute" it to themselves. In any other context that is considered stealing.
The solution I propose to this problem is to have the vote of a person be weighted by the total amount of taxes that person pays. That way, those who don't pay any taxes would not have the power to steal from those who do. People who really care about voting would overpay their taxes in order to have their vote count for more. If taxes became too high, those who pay the most of them would have the power to lower them. Interest groups could raise money to pay more taxes so they could vote more in an issue that they cared about. Lobbyists would stop bribing politicians and start paying more taxes instead, in order to buy influence. The final result would be that most taxes would be collected from voluntary donations, and very few if any would have to be mandatory.
This would still be a democracy, but without the unfair "redistribution" of wealth from those who work to those who vote. This is what I call a tax-weighted democracy. A corporation works similarly, each stockholder votes proportionally to how many stocks of the corporation they bought. A tax-weighted democracy would be more like a membership, people vote according to how much they pay in dues.
The only modification that I would make to the tax-weighted democracy would be weighting the vote of veterans higher than those of other people. Serving in the military and risking one's life to defend our country is a very steep form of tax payment which is not adequately compensated by the salary received, so this would be consistent with a tax-weighted democracy.
03.06.06
Objective Law
I spent this weekend in a law conference organized by Front Range Objectivism. The speakers were first rate, we had both academics and practitioners, and the topics complemented each other from the very abstract to the very applied. Tara Smith talked about the different doctrines on interpreting the constitution held by legal scholars today. Some of these doctrines are clearly non-objective, and even though originalism claims the high ground on objectivity, Tara Smith showed why this is not the case. Eric Daniels talked about unenumerated rights, the history of the 9th and the 14th amendment, and how the cases decided by the supreme court have radically changed the view of rights by today’s courts. It was shocking to discover that modern courts treat the 9th amendment as meaningless, and think of rights as a laundry list, whereas the original intent was to think of government powers as a laundry list. Dana Berliner talked about the case of Kelo vs. New London (which she litigated working for the Institute for Justice), what this meant for property rights, and what we can expect in the near future. Amy Peikoff talked about the history of our idea of privacy as a right, and made an interesting case for subsuming all the protections which currently fall under privacy under more fundamental rights, such as life, liberty and property.
I came away of this conference with a much better understanding of how constitutional law works. Also, I was very encouraged to find out that even though the supreme court went the wrong way on Kelo vs. New London, the awareness of the issue and shift in public opinion that came from the high profile case has done more to damage eminent domain than a supreme court ruling in favor would have done. Polls found out that 98% of people from all political persuations believe that the use of eminent domain for private undertakings is wrong. So any politician who wants a chance at getting elected or reelected is going to have to address this. As we speak, many states (including Colorado) have initiatives to make this illegal at the state level. The Institute for Justice has created the Castle Coalition site to report on eminent domain abuses, and watch the progress of the movement against it. One thing I sugested to Dana was to put up a list of the companies that benefit from eminent domain on this site, so I can avoid doing business with them whenever possible, and also, so I can short their stock.
