There’s two things I missed this week that I would like to have linked to, but because I was frantically cleaning in anticipation of Bitter’s imepnding arrival, I had to cut back on my regular blog reading.
First, Tam has an excellent response to Uncle’s post on serial numbered parts.
Second, Kevin Baker has written a thought provoking piece on education, and how it’s creating more and more kids each generation that look to government to solve our problems. I agree, but think education is only one prong of the problem. The drift toward ever bigger government is also largely driven by the people opposing it having better things to do than get involved in government and fix it. I think there’s also a problem with the cultural notion that everyone has a civic duty to vote. I think that’s hogwash. We have no vested interest in people who have only a peripheral understanding of government and politics casting a ballot. Someone who doesn’t care enough to vote without being guilted into it by MTV, or some other activist group, probably ought not to be voting.
I still firmly believe that franchise should not be given automatically. US Citizens should enjoy every last benefit of being Americans minus the ability to vote or hold office. That should be earned.
Unfortunately, I cannot fathom a straightforward system that would fairly indicate those who had the country’s best interests at heart. Military service makes sense, but that’s not applicable to the entire populace. Tests of some sort work for me, but there’d be a strong possibility of tampering with the questions to exclude certain types of people.
But the “everybody should vote” thing is detrimental to our republic. Most people are too ignorant of the politicians and their views to accurately decide on the matters at hand. My god, look at Barack Hungry Hungry Hippo Obama and his cult following!
I think you might be missing an important point: the Founders never intended for everyone to have a vote, (they knew what happened when you had a real “democracy,” tyranny of the lowest common denominator) so they wanted to make sure that the people who had the franchise were educated. Thus the Aristotle quote at the beginning: “All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth” and the Madison quote at the end: “It is universally admitted that a well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”
So of course it was our education system that had to be destroyed in order to destroy the nation.
Sometimes you DO have to don the tinfoil hat.
Back when I used to listen to Neal Boortz regularly,he used to have this line of reasoning:
“If you go to a catholic school, you’ll learn that the Catholic religion is good. If you go to Hebrew school, you’ll learn that the Jewish religion is pretty cool. What do you learn when you go to a GOVERNMENT school?”