Why We Should be Cat People

Michigan Capitol Confidential ^ | 4/24/2011 | Kathy Hoekstra

[flowerplough]

Math challenged? usually not, but occasionally a careless reader. female and black support, your quoted numbers are. hadn’t noticed the “female and” before. My mistake. Your mistake is to believe your numbers would be useful. They would be if we elected our presidents on straight national percentage, but our state-by-state electoral college skews the system and makes some votes literally worth more than others. Regional population densities, ethnic distributions, whatnot?

And speaking of skewing the system, you’re making your noise about ‘08. ‘08 ain’t the question. Lott says that without the women’s vote, Republicans would have swept every presidential race but one between 1968 and 2004. Lott also tells us that “state governments started expanding the first year after women voted and continued growing until within 11 years real per capita spending had more than doubled. The increase in government spending and revenue started immediately after women started voting.” Coulter was joking, pipe-dreaming her outrageousness, but Heinlein put it down more sternly:

“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’

‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”

And you’re right, 9Year, to point out the idiocy of attempting to take back female suffrage, or any particular minority group’s franchise. Constitutional rules say we hafta let all vote, and we do, and that’ll most likely kill us, in the long run. As the republic degenerates into a democracy, there’s no way out but down, eh?