Human Suffrage

Here's a question: who should be allowed to vote?

For example, should people in prison be allowed to vote? Should children be allowed to vote? Should an unemployed hobo be allowed to vote?

Well, I can't hear your answers, so here are mine:

A person in prison should be allowed to vote, because if there is a candidate (or law) who is trying to make the crime that the prisoner was imprisoned for legal, this would clearly be something that would be of interest to the prisoner. The same goes for any candidate or law that changes the parole rules, the level of evidence required to put someone in prison, the types of evidence that can be admitted to court, or the level or type of punishment that can be meted out. We might wave the prisoner's right to vote at such a time that we become certain that we have a perfect justice system that will be permanently in agreement with the voting public's opinion. But we are a while off from that.

Children should have a vote by proxy. Children's political interests are as real as anyone's, but their understanding of their political interests is low. Parents should vote for them. This should arguably give parents the right to vote once for themselves and once for each of their children. Of course, this only holds if we can trust the parent to act in a child's interest, which is demonstratively not always the case. Ideally, each child should have someone voting on their behalf. Someday we will work out some system that implements this in a realistic way. In the meantime, we should ignore this issue.

The unemployed should be allowed to vote for the same reasons that a prisoner should be allowed to vote. I hope that the reasoning here is self-evident.

The common theme here is that people who have a personal interest in the laws being made should have the right to vote on those laws. I am writing from within a representative democracy, so as far as I am concerned, every citizen has the right to vote in every election. If I lived in a direct democracy this would not always be the case -- I might not need to be part of a vote on a law regarding the legalization of marijuana, as I have no interest in the mater, either direct or indirect. I do have an interest in a law on social security, as I hope to retire one day, a law on military funding, as I both pay taxes and am at risk if we are invaded, and laws on immigration policy, as I enjoy neighbors who speak Spanish but dislike ones who speak French.

Of course, our laws on military funding and immigration policy are also of direct and pressing interest to the rest of the world. Iran would have loved to have voted on our military budget; Mexico would love to vote on our immigration policy. More importantly, many Mexican citizens would love to vote on our immigration policy. They have a very direct and personal interest in this matter. Some various foreigners have a life-and-death interest on some issues of American policy, which surely gives the the right to vote -- certainly more right than I have to vote based on a few percent change in my tax rate. Pretending that their needs are less important just because they are not American citizens is no different than refusing the vote to women or blacks or Catholics.

Amazingly, this is not generally considered to be self-evident. Our legal (and therefor our moral) universe is not held to contain all of Earth or all humans, but rather all of our countrymen. This is obviously purely arbitrary. There is no moral or legal benefit to being bombed in Cambodia vs. America... or perhaps more relevantly, being tariffed in China vs. America. The only difference, the difference between life and death or profit and bankruptcy, is which side of an imaginary line you are on. And you don't get to decide which side of the line you are on.

This is not an obvious boon to the universal human right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.

Therefore, this is not in compliance with the United States Constitution. Nor for that matter, does it comply with common sense or human decency. And while there are barriers to getting a universal vote, it is reasonable to suspect that most of the world will help with the local polling stations. Those who wont allow their citizens to vote should obviously have a proxy assigned to predict what is in those citizens best interests, and vote accordingly.

Of course, there will be those who say that someone has to look out for the Americans, and the whole point of having a country is to have a political unit that will look after the people who belong to it. Obviously, there is some logic to this argument, but just as obviously, this argument only works if each political unit has approximately equal political power (or, if you like, equal power per citizen). It makes no sense to say that a wealthy nation has the same need to advance itself on the world stage as a small, starving nation.

The only moral thing to do, then, if we truly see the default human state as that of a being of moral worth and consider all humans to have approximately equal rights, is not to prevent outsiders from voting, but to grant voting rights based on needs. Someone facing starvation should get a sizable wad of votes every time an issue of food tariffs, bio-fuels, or genetically modified crops comes up. If you live under a violent dictator, you should have a significant number of votes to spend on America's immigration policy. And this is not really something that should be in question -- unless you have a very odd idea of human rights.

If that's not enough for you, consider the possibility of making this sort of voting system a new world standard -- which is to say, that Americans would be able to vote on China's economic policy, or Mexico's drug war. And if they don't allow this, they are clearly abusing basic human rights, and should receive appropriate consequences for being so evil.

The (Almost) Free Market Wins Again

Today I came across an article about some guy who wants to get money out of politics. Up until I read this article, I had thought that I was against politicians receiving donations to their campaigns or otherwise being 'bribed' by lobbyists. But there is one key sentence in the aforementioned article that changed my mind: "if you get the influence of money out of politics, we will get people who will actually vote on their conscience."

I do not like the conscience of the average politician. They tend to be overly religious, under-educated in economics and all harder sciences, and completely ignorant of many other fields. We feel safe in saying that they would vote their conscience, but most of us, I think, would feel less certain in the claim that they would vote reasonably, or logically, or even sanely.

So if removing money doesn't obviously improve the quality of our politicians, we should take a look at the other side of the equation. What does money do for us? Well, you could write entire books on the subject, but basically, money votes for the benefit of large, stable, and successful organizations. Since these organizations have so much money, we can assume that they are 'good' for the economy, in that they have moved a lot of utility around and have a vested interest in things remaining is a state conductive to moving even more in the future.

Money may also vote for Ponzi schemes and accounting fraud and forms of money that are too abstract for their own good, so it is good that we carefully inspect the lobbyists. But the majority of money is going to be trying its darnest to support a stable and growing industry; whatever you may think of large corporations, they are an excellent backbone to build a growing economy around, and a growing economy is good for just about any agenda you may have, unless you are a hardcore hippy or are waiting for the rapture.

In many cases money does resist the optimal outcome, simply because money is under our control and we are immensely sub-optimal. For example, most people do not like factory farms, BUT are unwilling to pay for more ethically raised meat. Every major (and minor) producer of meat would be happy to raise organic free-range locally-produced highly-educated and not-killed-until-a-ripe-old-age meat, as long as we pay for it. If we want ethically-raised animals, that just gives something concrete for meat producers to advertise and charge for. Meat producers love concrete things to charge for! This goes for every company, of every sort. A recent concrete example is the auto industry, which was bullish on SUVs and Hummers not too long ago, and is now happy to find that customers are willing to pay good prices for good gas mileage. (There were, after all, only so many more model years that it would have been feasible to come out with bigger cars, but gas mileage can improve for decades yet! And shipping costs are lower.)

The lobbying these companies do is largely a negotiation with other interest groups to determine the rate of change in federal regulations and funding. Large companies are not big fans of making changes that are not requested by their customers, and it is worth some money to them to keep their options open.

Of course, there are other considerations, such as setting tax rates and levels of protectionism in which we do want to be balanced; if every lobbyist has equal entry into the bribe market, these issues would be self-solving. Sadly, the US (in a prolonged fit of insanity) strongly discourages lobbying by foreign companies, and has slapdash methods of discouraging lobbying by other foreign interest groups. For reasons unclear, the main lobbyists for a reasonable distribution of taxes are our elected officials... ...and the less said about that the better.

If we ever decide that conscience should be our guide, the logical thing to do is to aid specialists in that field to lobby better -- perhaps by giving them a lot of money. Of course, that goes right back to the original problem, as most Americans do not choose 'conscience experts' that I trust.

Socialized stuff.

A surprising number of people are complaining about the possibility of socialized medicine. Most of these same people are not concerned about other socialized (state run and funded) education, road maintenance, postal services, or military protection. These systems may be justified because they work so well (you may insert a sarcastic tone or not, as you see fit), but there is one area where everyone seems to agree that the government just can't do anything right: tax collection. 

These days most companies don't do their own collections. If someone owes you money, you might try sending out a letter or two, but then you turn to a collection agency and forget about the matter. In serious cases you might turn the matter over to the court system. Why should the United States government be any different? Few private sectors are as well developed as the financial sector, and there are already hundreds of businesses (banks and investment firms, for example) that calculate taxes for their customers as a matter of course, plus an entire tax preparation industry devoted to helping citizens and businesses determine what they owe. Isn't it just common sense to have those businesses that spend so much time calculating taxes go ahead and collect them too? 

The government can shut down its costly Internal Revenue Service; some of its budget will have to go to paying the private companies for their tax gathering services, but the odds are that the majority of the profit for these companies will come from the same place it does now -- from customers who are willing to pay more for better service. As competition emerges and we are no longer tied to one single money-gathering service, the ease of paying taxes will improve, and we will all be happier. 

Once we've desocialized the IRS, we can contract out things like printing money and insuring the banks. We will be able to get better interest rates if we are willing to bank at riskier banks (those that have a smaller reserve), or choose to exchange our money for that that of a printer that has chosen to keep their printing run small, and therefor limiting inflation. The current system of socialized money is extremely limiting, and robs us of many choices that as Americans we should expect. 

Maybe once we get over the disgusting socialism of our monetary system, we might want to look at our government, which is not only moderated and funded by the government, but is elected by the populace as a whole -- the very epitome of a socialist system. An plutocracy would be much more American.

Yet another thing for the government to do.

"Should Formal Schooling Be Delayed Until Age Seven?"

"Children should not start formal schooling until the age of seven, bringing the UK in line with many EU countries including Norway, an influential Labour MP has claimed."
--The Telegraph.CO.UK

Of course, they are right. Children should not start school until age seven. But they've missed the important point. Children in English speaking countries don't reach first grade until they've been in school for AT LEAST two years. In other words, children in a school in America or the UK or Canada or Australia will not be able to read and write as well as a first grader in Finland, despite having (at least) two extra years of schooling. This needs to be fixed before we can cut off those first two years.

This delay in education is caused because we have a more complicated writing system. German children do not have to deal with silent e's or k's, in Spain vowels say their names, and in Italy you don't have to worry whether a C is making a /s/ or a /k/ sound. English has one of the most complex phonetic writing systems in the world, and it shows.

Researchers looking at first-year students in 13 European countries found that English was the worst in terms of learnability. English speaking students (in both the UK and America) start school at a much earlier age (60 months vs. 82-91 months in the rest of Europe), but don't catch up to other countries until those other countries have sat about doing nothing for two years and then had first grade. So much for slow and steady wins the race.

"The task of learning to read a deep [complex] orthography generates a much wider variation in rate of initial progress than does the task of learning to read in a shallow [simple] orthography. Scores which reflect the normal variation in Portuguese, French, Danish and English fall within the disability range in the shallow orthographies. In English... the normal range falls close to the non-reader range. Appreciable numbers of English and Danish children remain unable to read after several months in school although a few make rapid progress and read within the normal range for the shallow orthographies."

"The most striking feature is the relative delay in achievement of efficient reading of familiar words by the English-speaking sample. ... The results suggest that a reading age in excess of 7 years is needed before performance converges on the levels which are typical for the first year of learning in the majority of European orthographies."

Seymour, P., Aro, M., & Erskine, J. (2003) Foundation literacy acquisition in European orthographies British Journal of Psychology, 94. 143-174.

Now, it's important to be clear here. We are not talking about bad schools, teachers, parents, or students. We are talking very specifically about a language that takes three years to do what most languages do in one year. It is the language's fault. The language holds back students so much that what we consider normal other countries consider retarded (although they are generally too nice to say anything). English speaking countries have higher rates of dyslexia and learning disabilities because even a small problem in reading comprehension can turn our moronic writing system into an incomprehensible mess.

I've written before about school and spelling reform, and how it would cost nothing and benefit everyone (in the entire world, now that English is becoming a global language) except the older generation who would actually have to get up off their brainstems and do the reform.

In brief, the change to a phonetic writing system would be essentially free: once the government mandated that they were going to use a given system and required its use as soon as materials were available, they can sit back and let the free market do the rest. Some wise publisher will come out with first grade primers in the approved format, and they will have suddenly cornered the market on first grade textbooks in every public school in America. Others will follow suit. First grade teachers will have to learn the new system, but only at the first grade level. I think they can handle it. Second grade teachers will have a year to study up before they have to teach the new system. High school teachers, who will have the most to learn, will have a decade to study before they have to master the new system (they could get a medical degree in that time, and learning the new system would be easier than third grade was -- that's the whole point). Meanwhile, it would be only a few years before publishers started coming out with books written in the new system for new readers. This will cost them a little, but it won't cost taxpayers anything. And keep in mind this isn't a cost we have to mandate. Publishers publish what sells. If all new readers were learning Klingon in school, by god, they'd publish in Klingon! The free market is a great and powerful tool that will do all our work for us.

The end result would be fewer children in special ed., fewer children receiving after-school tutoring, and fewer children requiring SLP services. This would be true not just in grades 1-3, but through highschool; when they say that simplified spelling reduces dyslexia rates and leaning disorders, they mean that across the board. We would have less people with problems throughout their lifespans.

Another result could be, if we like, to drop off the first two years of schooling, at no penalty.

If anyone bothers to comment on this post with questions I will be happy to write about the issues of cultural loss, dialects, and other issues resulting from making a phonetic alphabet and rewriting books into a new orthography. But if you think a bit you should be able to solve these issues yourself; none of them are unsurmountable, and the benefits far outweigh any costs.