Step away from the voting booth!

If you haven't checked out American Thinker (see my blogroll), you ought to. It has become a must-read for in-depth thoughts on the topics of the day/week. One frequent contributer is a writer named Selwyn Duke. In his latest installment, Mr. Duke suggests what to many is unthinkable and states that it's not such a good idea for everyone to vote. I have always agreed with this sentiment, but in our Republic-cum-Democracy, to suggest that some people shouldn't vote is downright heresy. Mr. Duke made one observation that was particularly poignant. In speaking of the importance of having an educated populace in order for our electoral process to work properly, Duke says,

And one needn't be disenchanted with universal suffrage to agree. It's one thing to have one man, one vote; it's quite another to have one man, one obligation to vote. Yet we still hear that it's our "civic duty" to go to the polls. Well, no, actually, it's a civic duty to make ourselves worthy to do so.

In other words, getting an education and ensuring that you are informed about the issues of the day is much more important than just blindly going out there and voting because you have been told that it is your duty to do so. Duke later posits that it is educated people who are most likely to vote on their own accord anyway. It is the uneducated and indolent who have to be convinced by get-out-the-vote busy bodies to go down to their local polling place. If they have to be cajoled and plied with God-knows-what in order to get them to vote, do you really want people like that casting a vote in the first place?

Duke ends his essay with this final observation:

I won't hold my breath waiting for a good answer, but I will mention another irony. Liberals are completely taken with gun control; some of them even say that no one but the police should own firearms. Yet they believe that people too irresponsible to have their finger on the trigger should influence the choice of who will have his finger on the button.

Amen! Of course, being the absolutist that I pride myself in being, I would go even further. In my America, just being educated wouldn't be good enough if you wanted to exercise the right to vote. The finer details would have to be worked out of course, but I believe that anyone who is on the public dole - that is, receiving a subsistence check from the government - should be ineligible to vote. It is too much of a conflict of interest for those people to have the power to choose politicians who are simply promising to hand over more of the taxpayers' money to those who didn't earn it. That is one of the big reasons we are in the mess in which we currently find ourselves. When the United States was first starting out, the only people who could vote were white, male, property owners. Take out the white and the male qualifiers, and I am totally on board with that policy.

Of course, if that were our country's voting policy, where would the Democrats find anyone to vote for them?

Good Day to You, Sir