And a couple of other things. We hashed over the idea of restrictions on voting here a while back without any real conclusions, although I still think that it ought to be at least a bit harder to vote than it is.

The DC Sniper



By all accounts, this lone gunman has nearly shut down the east coast. There is an air of panic, and the military is being asked to help find this man before he single-handedly causes a major depression.

That’s pure panic, of course. I’m working away from my desk so I have no way to go on line and no library: I don’t have real data to hand. Still, we can do some numeric analysis.

I assume there are about 50 million people in the affected target area, and that 2% or more are engaged in the kind of activities that put them at risk of being shot by the sniper. That means that at any given time, 1 million people will be shopping, out on parking lots, in school yards, at convenience stores, filling their automobiles, driving busses: doing things that expose them to the possibility that the sniper will get them. So far he has got no more than one a day (fewer, actually) so your chances of being shot when engaged in your normal activities are one in a million on any given day, or roughly 300 in a million for a year. That’s 0.0003. The US has about 50,000 traffic fatalities a year, in a population of about 250 million at risk, for a probability of about 0.0002 that you’ll be killed in a given year. In other words, if this guy is allowed to continue his activities unmolested from now on, he’s about as likely to get you if you live in his target area and take no precautions, as any citizen including you is likely to die in traffic. We find one of those risks acceptable, and not a threat to the economy. Why is the other?

Now I know, that’s a callous way to look at it, and I certainly don’t mean that we ought not be concerned, or doing all we can to catch this pathetic proper Charlie; my real point is that it’s pretty goofy to shut down the economy because of him.

And, in my judgment, the best way to catch this guy is to call on the militia: get lots of armed citizens out in shopping malls, at filling stations, on busses, anywhere he is likely to strike, so that if you hear a shot you can do more than look around for a pencil and paper to make notes on what you saw. Make permits to carry weapons available to anyone you don’t have reason to deny them to, which is to say established adult registered voters of the area with no criminal records. Do that and he won’t get his 300 for the year. And for that matter, you may cut down on the base murder rate for DC, Maryland, and Virginia, which I suspect is greater than 300 a year…

As to why resident voters, it ought to be obvious: if we believe in a republic, we believe in a republic, and if we trust people to vote we ought to trust them with weapons; if we wouldn’t trust them with weapons, what are we doing letting them vote?

Poll Taxes, Property, and Literacy

The original republic was not a democracy, even in theory: nearly every state had a property qualification for voting. It wasn’t a heavy property qualification: in one well known Virginia case it was satisfied by a “house” four feet by three feet by three feet high which was carried onto the lot by five men the night before the voter registered; but there was a property qualification.

That didn’t really vanish until the 1960’s. I recall when I registered to vote in the State of Washington these many years ago, I was a resident of the state because my parents were then residents of the Territory of Alaska (a complex arrangement which needn’t be of concern here); but although I could vote in all the political elections, not being a taxpayer I could not vote in property tax elections. Only taxpayers could vote in property tax elections. Taxation with representation indeed.

There also used to be poll taxes, although not in Washington. They were fairly common in the East and Old South: to register to vote you had to pay the modern equivalent of about Twenty Dollars a year (some poll tax districts had as high as the modern equivalent of about $100 a year, but those were rare). They also had literacy requirements: you had to demonstrate either school credentials or take a fairly simple literacy test. Now of course some states used these reasonable requirements in an unreasonable manner, enforcing them against blacks while seldom enforcing them against whites, and in some cases using them to deny blacks any chance of voting (a standard joke was that blacks got their writing test with wax paper and a ball point pen). The remedy for that, it seems to me, was attention to enforcement, not abolishing the requirements. Incidentally, many western states deliberately did not have literacy requirements, although a few of those did have poll taxes: you didn’t have to be able to read, but you did have to care enough to pay a couple of bucks.

We used to have restrictions on voting by felons, and by paupers: if you were a criminal, or were on the government dole and paid no taxes, you didn’t vote. That’s pretty well gone too. Yet one wonders if all this egalitarianism in voting is a good thing: if a person on the dole ought to be allowed to increase the dole; and if a person who doesn’t care enough about the vote to pay the cost of a package of cigarettes or a bottle of wine for the privilege really values it enough to be entrusted with it.

It’s all moot now, of course. We have no restrictions on voting: not residency, not paying taxes, not even proper identification seems to be required now. If voting is to be done, then everyone ought to take part in it. And the election arguments make less sense every year, so that they are now almost exclusively sound bites devoid of meaning. This is called democracy in action.

The result, of course, is that elections are decided by fund raising: the one who can afford the most repetitions of a meaningless slogan is likely the one who will win, and incumbents have enormous advantages over challengers. Incumbent safe seat politicians who can raise a lot of money establish fiefdoms and have other politicians as clients: you vote my way and I’ll see that money flows to your campaign war chest. Cross me and I’ll finance your opponent. This greatly increases their ability to raise campaign funds. That always did happen, but it’s a lot more prevalent now that rational debate is such a small factor in deciding elections.

If you establish a democracy, you will in due season reap the harvests of a democracy, said Disraeli. Some of those harvests are bitter indeed. And there never was a democracy that didn’t commit suicide, said the Framers. There are some now which have not perished; but they’re not very old. Even Switzerland had a civil war in 1875 or so.

There are several forms of democratic suicide. The worst end with a tyrant. The lucky ones end with a decent emperor. Of course that’s not assurance either: Aurelius was followed by his no good son, who was followed by a martinet killed by the Praetorians, who was followed by a man who bought the empire at auction from the Praetorians, who was followed by Septimius Severus. Severus, dying, told his sons “Stay together, pay the soldiers, and take no heed for the people.” They fought with each other and didn’t pay the soldiers…

But all that was generations from Caesar Augustus. Empires can be magnificent, and imperial citizens can be happy and proud. Herman Kahn thought Empire the natural state of mankind. He may have been right.

I do point out that a real republic would have no problem in dealing with the DC sniper. But that would require trusting the citizens to keep and bear arms, and that we dare not do. We would rather trust the expertise of the BATF and the FBI, whose competence no one can question. Relying on experts, rather than self-governing citizens, is a mark of empire. We have seen much of it in the past decades, so much so that a generation has grown up never knowing what self government is like. We shall see that trend continue.