October 31, 2011

Should small children be allowed to vote?

Jonathan Last is puzzled by Matthew Yglesias's call for letting small children, such as seven-year-olds, vote.

Yglesias’s goal is just to hasten the demographic transition to Chicago-style one party Democratic rule by giving Hispanics more votes now. He's impatient that the Democrats have to wait until the anchor babies grow up. 

Personally, instead of the Democrats fostering mass immigration by fertile but uneducated illegal immigrants so they can win elections, I think it would be better all-around just to let the Democrats copy names off tombstones and register them to vote, like in Chicago. Why go through all the needless trouble of electing a new people (as Brecht said) when you can just have a democracy of the dead (as Chesterton might have said if he were a Chicago alderman)?

37 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, liberals wanted to do this in Germany a long time ago. Old news, Matty boy.

Remember, this kid's a GENIUS!

Anonymous said...

You really have a hard-on for Mathew, don't you? You're like the 'Truth' of his comment sections.

Anonymous said...

Steve > Truth > Whiskey > Yglesias < 7 year old

Anonymous said...

Steve's haunting of Matt's comment section is actually smart marketing. It exposes more intellectually adventurous liberals to his ideas and gets some of them to check out this blog.

Anonymous said...

I liked Yglesia's point about how 7 year olds should organize themselves into a voting bloc. This sort of razor sharp intellect and keen insight is why Yglesias makes the big bucks. I think we could all learn something here.

Jehu said...

Beware citizens. Should you die within Chicago city limits, you will be forever cursed to rise from your grave every election day to vote straight ticket Democrat.

Doug1 said...

I have a hard on against him too.

He's a full up big time lefty liar.

Anonymous said...

Better idea. Let's strip Matt Yglesias of his right to vote.

Anonymous said...

I guess liberals will also say that year olds should be allowed to have sex and smoke pot too.... but no one can own a gun or say racist things....

anony-mouse said...

The Demeny argument sounds fair. (In Ancient Rome, Augustus put a tax on bachelors).

While letting children vote would help Hispanics specifically, it would also proportionally help social conservative/religious Americans generally.

One of the great advantages the US has over all other major developed countries is that it has a replacement fertility rate.

Why not reward those who make that happen?

Anonymous said...

If small children could vote, Hannah Montana would be president. But could she be worse than Bush II, Obummer, or Palin?

Anonymous said...

If the Mississippi personhood referendum passes, then maybe fetuses could get the vote to swing things back towards the GOP.

Anonymous said...

I doubt this would actually help Democrats.

Hispanic voters have pretty anemic turnout as it is. Do you really think they're going to drag all the kids to the polling place?

Only devoted partisans would want to bother with it. It would be Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and hardcore evangelicals who would take advantage of it.

Semi-employed White Guy said...

Could children do any worse than the "adults" who elected an affirmative action-driven, teleprompter-reading, Marxist, empty suit with no executive experience from the most corrupt city in the country to the highest executive office in the land?

your granny said...

Children should be seen in cute, though not overly expensive, outfits and not heard!

Anonymous said...

@ Semi-employed White Guy

Do you even know what a Marxist is?

The Anti-Gnostic said...

This sort of razor sharp intellect and keen insight is why Yglesias makes the big bucks.

How much does Yglesias make, and how long will his gig last? Serious question.

Remember local news anchors? Local news reporters? Before this correction is over I bet they're eating dog food.

Anonymous said...

"Steve > Truth > Whiskey > Yglesias < 7 year old"

It's funny because it's true.

Anonymous said...

I wonder if you've noticed something, Mr. Sailer. Halloween tends to shake people up. Suddenly, the demographic change is visible. Two-thirds of the trick-or-treaters at my door this year are nonwhite and I live in Oregon.

Got Leftist? said...

If you control the MSM, educational system and all major forms of entertainment from TV to movies to video games the way far leftist do why not enfranchise the least experienced, least independent and least critical thinking part of the population?

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 8:04, if you live in an upper middle class neighborhood with decent streetlights, flat terrain, and sidewalks in a major metropolitan area, you will be overrun on Halloween by black and Hispanic kids whose parents drove them there to collect candy. A lot of them are well into their teens, surly, and not even in costume...which is kind of a pathetic way for a teen to spend an evening, actually.

Plok said...

Meet them halfway by letting any body who can pass a difficult civics exam that shows an understanding of the issues and candidates vote. I probably won't like who young smart kids vote for, but it might help them discover which end is up years later.

Anonymous said...

"I wonder if you've noticed something, Mr. Sailer. Halloween tends to shake people up. Suddenly, the demographic change is visible. Two-thirds of the trick-or-treaters at my door this year are nonwhite and I live in Oregon."

You need to move to a nicer neighborhood.

The income documentation requirements now required on home loans apparently priced out the black and Hispanic kids that used to come by to my house. All white kids.

Inkraven said...

"let any American citizen vote in any American election he or she wants to."

So, according to this obviously potted-up hippie, I [or anyone] should be allowed to travel to another state and vote when they elect a new governor? Nebraskans, after all, are underrepresented in California.

Or maybe I should be able to head up to NYC and cast a vote for mayor?

Maybe this all just a preface to allowing people from other countries free access to US voting booths. Oh wait...

Mark said...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/census-the-new-us-neighborhood-defined-by-diversity-as-all-white-enclaves-vanish/2011/09/14/gIQA5QAuSM_story.html

Wonderful.

Anonymous said...

"One of the great advantages the US has over all other major developed countries is that it has a replacement fertility rate.

Why not reward those who make that happen?"

A. They are replacing us with morons

B. We can't even employ the people we have, so why on earth would we want more? Spain has among the lowest fertility rates in the world and one of the highest unemployment rates among young people

Elli said...

How about giving married men, not on the dole, an extra vote for each child? They have a stake in the future.

Anonymous said...

In the future, tribalized ethnic/ideological enclaves will have some chieftain "speak for the community", just like in the Gulf state where a Bedouin's take on "democratic reforms" was: "You may as well let our Shaikh cast our vote for us. We all will vote the same way."

Marlowe said...

My response to Mr Chesterton (when in dialog with his ghost) was always to affirm that any dead man could exercise his vote should he turn up at a polling station.

Wido Incognitus said...

Yglesias, even if the seven year olds who would motivate themselves to vote would be informed and intelligent (which I also doubt) enough to vote in a useful way, other seven year olds could be organized by a pied piper.

Anyway, it was Steve's trolling on Yglesias (who, it must be said, is really one of the more sober American liberals) that led me to sites like this.

Q said...

One of the great advantages the US has over all other major developed countries is that it has a replacement fertility rate.


Remind me again - how is that a great advantage? I think it's a safe bet that Japan has a greater probability of still existing a hundred years from now than the US does.

Anonymous said...

Demeny voting would certainly help Mitt Romney.

Anonymous said...

So, can't we just surrender already? Can't we, as you suggest, tell the dems they can have the country (dead voters, imaginary voters, WHATEVER), forever, if they evict all the immigrants (and their kids) since 65, all the illegals (and their kids)?

Because I'm good with that. Truly.

Londoner said...

Matty's blog (these spurts of stupidity notwithstanding - "let's let in 160 million poor people" was another classic) is phenomenally boring. He seems to churn out short, colourless pieces about this and that which say *nothing* of substance just to prove what an intellectual renaissance man he is (he isn't). Seems that DC "youth" didn't knock any sense into him after all.

The way he restricted his comments to facebook logins to make sure no one could laugh at him anonymously is, well, laughable.

Londoner said...

Every ballot paper should include a short but reasonably rigorous 10-question IQ test. The vote should be weighted according to how the voter scores on the test.

Anonymous said...

I guess liberals will also say that year olds should be allowed to have sex and smoke pot too.... but no one can own a gun or say racist things....

I guess statists will always say that adults never have the right to smoke pot, own a gun, or say racist things.

Anonymous said...

"Yglesias’s goal is just to hasten the demographic transition to Chicago-style one party Democratic rule by giving Hispanics more votes now."

"One man, one vote" is a crock. The wealthy certainly don't buy into that notion when it comes to running their corporations, where some shareholders (those who own more stock) have more of a vote than those who own less. For that matter, many corporations even have different classes of shares, often to allow the founder(s) and their heirs to retain control long after they've sold off a majority stake - the Ford family, for example.

Yglesias can have his "children's vote" when I get extra votes for being literate, politically informed, a military veteran, not being a welfare mooch, not having a criminal record, and for not being descended from recent immigrants. An equity style voting system would be far better than the joke we have now. Perhaps every adult should be allowed to vote, but not all of us deserve an equal say.