If children were given the vote
Posted: October 21st, 2016, 1:53 pm
To understand the folly of allowing grown children, aka women, to vote, it is useful to do a thought experiment about what would happen if actual children could vote.
Since children have a very limited ability to get things on their own initiative, their primary focus is to get stuff from adults. They generally do this by ingratiating themselves with adults, but if they could vote it would be much easier to just vote themselves stuff through the system. This tendency makes them an easy constituency to buy off. Adults would still run things at the top level, but would bolster their own position by pandering to children. Say a politician were to offer adults something - say extended unemployment insurance. Some would support that, but others, figuring that they would be paying for it, would oppose it. However, if a politician offered children free ice creams, pretty much all of them would vote for that. Therefore it would be in the interests if politicians to not care about their adult constituents and instead rob and marginalize them on behalf of children.
Hence you would get all kinds of crazy laws like free candy, bedtime redefined as a form of abuse, imprisonment for failing to buy your daughter a pony for Christmas etc. The children would become arrogant spoiled brats, as they would no longer need to be useful and agreeable to their adult benefactors to get stuff. Ultimately the society would be bankrupted under the weight of benefits to children or foreign adults would come in and take over, as the children would be unable to stop them and native adults would be so marginalized or viscerally disgusted with the situation that they wouldn’t do anything either. If would do no good to argue with the children that the policies they were voting for would ruin society, because being children they would only be focused on having their immediate desires sated and absolving themselves of the consequences of their own bad behavior. Even if they agreed with you, they would not relinquish their freebies until it was much too late.
Replace the words “children” and “adults” in the above with “women” and “men” and this is pretty much what we have now.
Since children have a very limited ability to get things on their own initiative, their primary focus is to get stuff from adults. They generally do this by ingratiating themselves with adults, but if they could vote it would be much easier to just vote themselves stuff through the system. This tendency makes them an easy constituency to buy off. Adults would still run things at the top level, but would bolster their own position by pandering to children. Say a politician were to offer adults something - say extended unemployment insurance. Some would support that, but others, figuring that they would be paying for it, would oppose it. However, if a politician offered children free ice creams, pretty much all of them would vote for that. Therefore it would be in the interests if politicians to not care about their adult constituents and instead rob and marginalize them on behalf of children.
Hence you would get all kinds of crazy laws like free candy, bedtime redefined as a form of abuse, imprisonment for failing to buy your daughter a pony for Christmas etc. The children would become arrogant spoiled brats, as they would no longer need to be useful and agreeable to their adult benefactors to get stuff. Ultimately the society would be bankrupted under the weight of benefits to children or foreign adults would come in and take over, as the children would be unable to stop them and native adults would be so marginalized or viscerally disgusted with the situation that they wouldn’t do anything either. If would do no good to argue with the children that the policies they were voting for would ruin society, because being children they would only be focused on having their immediate desires sated and absolving themselves of the consequences of their own bad behavior. Even if they agreed with you, they would not relinquish their freebies until it was much too late.
Replace the words “children” and “adults” in the above with “women” and “men” and this is pretty much what we have now.