How about, before we try to keep "big money" out of politics and adopt ranked preference voting, we ban ill educated people and ban voting yourself other people's stuff. Voting is not a survival skill, it's a civic obligation.

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JuniperMesos 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam).

There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.

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wang_li 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer.

Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop.

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mikestew an hour ago | parent [-]

Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting

Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?

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wang_li an hour ago | parent [-]

Maybe you should learn to read at a level that you understand what I wrote? Smugness based on an intentional misreading just makes you look dumb.

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mikestew 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

Plenty of illiterate people manage to stay out of jail, you’re implying that you weren’t suggesting literacy tests for voting, so I’ll just admit to being at a loss as to your point. But if you care to take another whack at how you would suggest “we ban ill educated people”, I’m all ears.

	▲	wang_li 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I am not attempting to describe the world. I am trying to the expectations we have of the citizens of our polity. It has nothing to do with illiterate people manage not to commit crimes. I am saying that before we decide to get "big money" out of politics or we let people vote for the seven people who promise them the most shit, we should decided to put people who chose not to acquire basic skills that any human within standard deviation of average intelligence can acquire, when given 12 years of free education, into jail. It literally is not a literacy test for voting. It's an "are you a lazy piece of shit who is going to drag all of society down" policy.