Stronger voting rights for those who pay higher taxes

An MIT- and Harvard-trained venture capitalist has proposed a system in which the votes are proportional to the wealth, more precisely to the total income taxes you paid last time:

Tom Perkins' big idea: The rich should get more votes

By the way, a month ago, this pundit compared the war on rich that is taking place in the U.S. to the Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews.

I've been thinking about similar types of "weighting" for 25 years but when I ceased to be a teenager, my excitement about them went down, a little bit.



Well, I've been also thinking about stronger votes for voters with a higher education, but this is a particularly problematic twist because not all schools are created equal. Education (and especially IQ) is hard to measure; it is too controversial.

I was discouraged by the apparent lack of support for the weighting but the main reason behind my decreasing excitement about these proposals was the observation (one that was probably surprising to me – but I have gotten used to it) that rich and formally educated people may do and believe some very stupid things – sometimes it looks like they are more brainwashed, more gullible, and so on.

As Richard Lindzen sometimes says in the context of the global warming gullibility, ordinary people have sense but academics don't. Sometimes it seems that the most stupid, atrocious concepts arise in the heads of the most educated and wealthiest people (like the Hollywood "celebrities"). It may be ironic but there's surely some anecdotal evidence that this is the case.




So let me return to the wealth-dependence of the strength of votes. It's a more defensible proposal, I think.




And yes, personal wealth by itself isn't necessarily something that the society has to reward. It's really the amount of money that the individual pays to the state. And it's really the total income tax that is easiest to be measured.

Perkins proposes a direct proportionality. It could be a little bit extreme and the new system could create some discontinuity in the results. However, even opponents of the idea should be able to see that Perkins has a point. The government is doing services to the citizens and those who pay more taxes should "own" and "influence" a greater fraction of the government much like stockholders with many stocks.

But one could start with the rule that a person has \(N\) votes where \(N\) is equal to \[

N = {\rm Floor}[\log_{10}(T)]

\] where \(T\) is the income tax paid according to the latest annual federal tax form or $1,000, whatever is bigger. So non-payers and tiny payers would have 3 votes, those who pay at least $10,000 and more would have 4 votes, those who pay $100,000 or more would have 5 votes, and so on.

The logarithm above is an extremely slowly increasing function and the dependence on the income could be accelerated if people liked it.

One question is whether the U.S. Congress or another parliament could ever approve such a proposal.

Another question is what the impact of the modified rules would be on the political landscape. Generally, I think that it would suppress parties that make living out of a fashionable kind of theft known as redistribution – which is a highly desirable outcome. But I am not quite sure. What do you think?

U.K. Green Party's plan for absolute power

BBC (Via Marc Morano) brought us an incredibly sounding story.

A particular extremist party in the United Kingdom, the Green Party of England and Wales (which boasts 1 deputy among 573 in the House of Commons), is planning an imminent coup in the monarchy similar to Hitler's or the communists' acts that gave them absolute power. The chairwoman calls for the dismissal of every single minister, deputy, or government agency's boss who realizes that climate alarmism is a pile of crap, so that extremist alarmist whackos who should normally be kept in psychiatric asylums may be substituted everywhere.

Fraudulent alarmist Wikipedia editor William Connolley is an apparatchik in this extremist political party.

Many of us have warned that the basic character of the climate alarmists' reasoning is structurally analogous to the Nazis' and Stalinists' reasoning but this is one of the most explicit, most political piece of evidence that they really want to get far. I am offended, angry, slightly worried, but also confident that this is just a silly publicity stunt. Natalie Bennett is an unlikable scold who may share the ambitions with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin but she is lacking their charisma.

Some more sensible politicians in the U.K. pointed out that Bennett's is a quasi-fascist policy.

The BBC article also mentions some outrageous statements by David Cameron. Guys like this one really fill me with fear because despite his bizarre identification as a conservative, he might actually be able to start to fire ministers or deputies etc. because of this utter insanity. He's a brainwashed green lunatic analogous to Natalie Bennett herself.