What if current military servicemembers and honorably discharged veterans were given two votes for having/having had “skin in the game” as the saying goes?
I’d agree to this in a heartbeat! I’m one of those who believe military service should be a pre-requisite to even run for the office of President.
I've never considered that. To be honest, though, I'm not sure I like the idea of anyone getting two votes. But I certainly would bend the rules for the military in other ways. How so? Even if they weren't taxpayers or property owners, they would ALWAYS be allowed to vote -- even in retirement (as opposed to the dependent class, which would always be denied a vote).
Like our hypotheticals will actually happen... lol
So under such a system, what’s to stop the POTUS from nominally enlisting any large group of people he wants, “assigning” them to whatever job or welfare they already have, and thus granting them two votes for the cost of claiming that they are now military members?
Sci-fi author Robert Heinlein once "imagineered" a society in which only active-duty and retired military could vote, in his novella Starship Troopers.
The problem with a Spartiate society is numbers, specifically family-formation and reproduction. The Spartiates declined in numbers all through the fifth and fourth centuries; by the end of the latter they'd been subjugated by Philip of Macedon and Alexander. But even before that, they'd been decimated on the battlefields of the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars and were no longer able to maintain their numbers.
They tried for a while to supplement and "get by" with mercenaries, auxiliaries, and allies, but in the end the basic problem of numbers was fatal.
Had they successfully recruited aliens by offering them citizenship, at some point the Spartiate body would no longer have been Spartan, and the city-state's culture would have died, such as it was.
Population decline also hurt the Roman Empire. In Caesar's time, most Roman soldiers were citizens and colonists (i.e. descendants of Romans living in "colony" towns like Aquileia). A hundred years later, Italian troops in the army were being outnumbered by Spaniards, Syrians, and others. By the third century, British, Pannonian, and Illyrian troops were the flower of the army, and a century and a half later, it was German immigrants and a few Dalmatian and Illyrian formations propping up what had become a cavalry army of cataphracts (the precursors of medieval knights) from "everywhere"; and Huns began to appear in elite guard formations, because when Huns fought, they always fought to the death and were incorruptible in garrison.
Meanwhile, the old recruiting grounds of the Roman army were being defaced by the appearance of the mutili, young men who, with their families' help, cut off thumbs or toes so they could not serve in the army. That was the length to which Italians, Gallo-Romans, and Spanish Romans would go, to avoid service.