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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (144068)	10/27/2018 8:49:28 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217828

But the state still has the ability to tax. And who votes for the state - only landowners , sadly not I do not think only landowners is a solution... That comes back to folks in charge by simple dumb luck ... That has been a problem throughout history.. A great contributor to the fall of empires... Maybe Heinlein's proposition in Starship Troopers where the franchise was earned.. Rich alone was not enough... Voting and science fiction almost inevitably brings up Robert Heinlein’s novel “Starship Troopers.” In that novel, the voting franchise was limited to “veterans”. A “veteran” was not necessarily someone who had been a soldier, but rather someone who had volunteered for a two-year stint in “Federal Service”. Whether a soldier or not, these service jobs were apparently all fairly hazardous. Only after retiring from federal service could you vote or hold public office. The book focuses mostly on the soldiers, so both fans and critics tend to look on the rule as “only combat veterans get to vote,” even though the book made it clear there were non-military paths. The argument for this was that the responsibility of voting should be reserved for those who have demonstrated an understanding of individual sacrifice for the greater good, i.e. voting is not about getting something for myself but about getting something for everybody else. Whether or not Heinlein himself felt that the voting franchise should be so restricted, the book makes a fairly passionate argument for it. Critics have often equated this with fascism or military dictatorship. The 1997 movie of the same name was perhaps the greatest critique along those lines as it showed the Terran leaders as being active-duty military officers wearing remarkably Nazi-like uniforms. The movie also varied from the book in enough other ways that I don’t consider it to be a valid representation of Heinlein’s original argument on restricting the franchise to those who have already served. (The director has stated that he read only the first few chapters of the book.)