Good morning Tom,

I tried to avoid the cheap shot by pointing out that lack of enthusiasm for democracy among conservatives has genuine ideological roots, and that it's not inherently (though often used as) cover for prejudice and racism etc.

What I'm getting at on the subject of the evils of restricting the vote is this: You, stereotypically as a conservative, dismiss people who disagree with you as stupid and uninformed. If you had the power to create a test for intelligence and knowledge, you would inevitably slant it to select people who agree with you. You'd define intelligence and knowledge in conservative terms. That may be a seductive proposition, but you're guaranteed to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Plurality and, dare I say it, diversity, represent the core strength of America.

They say that two heads are better than one, and many heads must be even better. If you achieve ideological homogeneity, you effectively have just one head doing all the thinking for the country. The very essence of a free society is disagreement and debate, out of which, in theory, will emerge a higher quality of thinking, one more likely to have considered all the angles.

If the NY or LA Times, Washington Post, or CNN are being put forward as balanced, informative sources of news and political opinions,

Not at all; just the opposite: They're as biased as the Republican Party's house propaganda organ, the Wall Street Journal. Any attempt to define "informed" must necessarily be ideologically biased.

You illustrated what I meant by "gerrymander by demographics" with the two examples of selecting a subset of the population given the right to vote, based on some characteristic that can be measured in demographic terms: Military service, and money. Each one has an internal logic, of sorts, but each one selects for a relatively narrow outlook and value system, to the exclusion of all others.

Making military service the criteria selects for physical characteristics. By that criteria, Stephen Hawkings would be denied the vote, as would people with flaws such as bad vision or asthma that disqualify them for military service. What do any of those things have to do with good citizenship?

Money has to be the narrowest criteria of all: The idiot-savant skill to accumulate big piles of it. Bill Gates may be undeniably intelligent in the narrow realm of computers, but do you consider him a wise man? Would you trust him with a million times the political power of the average person? What about the people who jumped into the dot-com stock frenzy and got lucky? And what about the majority who were unlucky? How does their luck translate into the wisdom required of citizens in a democracy? What can you say about a person who inherits money? Should the right to vote be a hereditary one? In which case, unless you're a Lamarckian, what competency are you measuring, beyond the fertility of the parents?

The point is, the guys who pay the bills should have a little more say in things.

Why? Does a stock-market idiot savant bring more knowledge and wisdom to the table than an underpaid teacher or scientist? If our society rewarded intelligence and wisdom proportionately with money, you might have a point. But that's not how things work. Money is the reward for the gift of making it, nothing more.

Fortunes rise and fall often for reasons beyond the control of an individual, further disconnecting wealth from competency. Is somebody who, last week, was the CEO of a dot-com, but this week is collecting unemployment because the VC defunded and "liquified" his business, instantly incompetent to vote? What changed in the individual? When the stock market tanks and individual investments are wiped out, does that mean anything more than bad economic weather?

A couple of posts back I asked the question "What do you get when you implement the economic theories of Adam Smith within a republican form of government?". You didn't answer it directly, but you're answering it indirectly in your views on wealth as a measure of the competency to vote. The answer is, an oligarchy. One dollar, one vote. That's a very anti-democratic system, and it's not the system described in the Constitution.

Which brings me back to my basic thesis: Despite wrapping themselves in the flag and tradition, conservatives, in fact, have problems with our present form of government, and would like to dilute, if not abolish outright, its democratic aspects. It's all about money, and those who have lots of it would, naturally, like to make money the basis of political power; and, just as naturally, argue that money is an inherent and meaningful measure of worth. That's too obviously a narrow and self-serving viewpoint.

I'm surprised you didn't catch the reference to "$300-600"--that's the amount of the bribes we're receiving as Bush makes good on his promise to send us checks from the Treasury if a majority voted for him. I've never seen a more blatant and cynical attempt to buy votes. And now, as many predicted, the surplus is drying up, and this year's installment bribe is very likely the last anybody will see of it. But it served its purpose in getting Bush elected, didn't it?

What makes you think Bill Gates gets only one vote? His effective political power is very much greater, by virtue of the fact that he can hire armies of lobbyists and pass out piles of bribe money thinly disguised as campaign contributions. You don't seriously expect me to believe that you're unaware of the political power of money?

--Robert