An Uninformed Electorate
The Bear on Nov 17 2008 at 9:30 am | Filed under: Culture, Election 08’
If we learned one basic lesson from this past election, the majority of the voters do not understand the issues.
Many of the pundits on the internet and even the McCain Campaign delivered a warning that this country is headed towards becoming a Socialist State. This message fell on deaf ears because very few voters understand what Socialism is and you can attribute that lack of knowledge directly to our public school education system.
Last week I published two articles regarding this problem of voter education and in the first Wynton Hall asked a room full of college students who the father of capitalism was. Only one student was even able to venture a guess and he said …Karl Marx!
The reason Sen. McCain’s socialism charges didn’t stick is precisely because socialism means little to voters who don’t know what the term even means.
In the second article William J. Watkins in a recent op-ed states…
Recent polls show that three times as many Americans of voting age can name two of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs (77 percent) as can name two U.S. Supreme Court Justices (24 percent). The statistics are only somewhat better when one asks them to name the Three Stooges (73 percent) versus the three branches of the federal government (42 percent).
No one says such ignorance is a good thing, but mass voter registration drives, such as those organized by Rock the Vote and BotherVoting.org, compound the trouble by ensuring that more ill-informed and intellectually lazy citizens will have a say in how the rest of us are governed, laments Independent Institute Adjunct Fellow William J. Watkins in a recent op-ed.
“If Rock the Vote and Bothervoting.org really wanted to contribute to solving the problems facing our country, they would focus less on numbers and more on knowledge,” writes Watkins. “Unfortunately, the registration movement teaches citizens that an uneducated vote is better than no vote at all. Such a lesson is pernicious and could have lasting effects on the electorate.”
The Bottom Line – All this lends credence to the proverb … “That the Masses are Asses”.
Related
Socialism refers to a broad array of doctrines or political movements that envisage a socio-economic system in which the ownership of industry and the distribution of wealth are determined by the state or by agents of the state or the collective. In its most general sense, socialism seeks the co-prosperity and common cause of all people.
Socialism developed as a political ideology in the nineteenth century as a reaction to industrial injustice, labor exploitation, and unemployment in Europe. For Karl Marx, who helped establish and define the social democratic, societal problems were rooted in an economic system which relied on the private ownership of property, and led to wealth remaining in the hands of a few and at the cost of the laborers who were the source of wealth. Marx advocated a revolution of the working class which would lead to collective ownership of the means of production (property and capital). This control, according to Marx’s successors, may be either direct, exercised through popular collectives such as workers’ councils, or it may be indirect, exercised on behalf of the people by the state.
Currently, there is a diverse array of ideas that have been referred to as “socialist,” from forms of “market socialism,” which advocate achieving economic justice through taxation and redistribution through state welfare programs to the hardcore communists who advocate total state control of all property and the economy, to a unique Asian and unclear variant known as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
“Socialism” has often been used as a slogan by unscrupulous leaders seeking political power. They prey on the frustration and sense of injustice of low-paid or unemployed people. Both the National Socialism in Germany under Hitler and the Soviet-style developed by Lenin and his successors became totalitarian states that denied personal freedom to citizens. These totalitarian political systems had no checks and balances on power, which human civilization has learned is necessary to control the human tendency to take more than one produces.
As an economic system, the command economy failed because it treated people as parts of a giant machine and placed production goals above consumer needs. It failed to view citizens as individuals whose happiness comes through the free pursuit and fulfillment of personal desires. People are unmotivated when they are asked to give whatever the state requests and to accept whatever the state decides to give. Further, no centralized system of rational distribution of goods and services can account for individual stages of growth, or biological or intellectual differences. As such, a command economy cannot possibly provide true economic justice. By the mid-1980s, both Russia and China gave up on their experiments with a command economy. Today, some socialists propose selective nationalization of key industries within the framework of mixed economies. Others advocate “market socialism” in which social control of economy rests on a framework of market economics and private property.
One Response to “An Uninformed Electorate”
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Two main problems.
One, the voters get to vote welfare for themselves without paying taxes. Therefore, wouldn’t the fairest tax system have each person, regardless of productive capability, or the utilization rate of that capability, paying the exact same tax? Make every toll the same, don’t tax people on what they produce, since taxing production is counter-productive.
Two, there are natural monopolies. For instance, let anyone who wants to generate power in any way they want, then sell it to a national grid. No company could handle the contract (if they could, they would be a monopoly and they could strangle us); piecing it out doesn’t, in this case, insure competition, but cronyism; and there’s no profit in delivery, since it can’t be repackaged and sold, except by small utility companies that should remain in free enterprise’s hands. So, you buy at the market rate from everyone who produces a kilowatt, you sell to the local power companies, all at the same rate, and the spread maintains the infrastructure that CAN’T be different because of multiple companies running it, or you’d have incompatability built into it to ensure competition.
It would seem that both lead to socialism, unless restrained by a Constitution, unfettered by stare decisis.