Wednesday 3 July 2013

We own ourselves and we own our own vote

The reason to have laws is to improve the political environment for everyone involved. Laws are rules which concern the range of permitted behaviours between people. They are designed to improve life and as such they are an objectively good thing. Since laws come only from the government then we can simply deduce that the government is an objectively good thing. Something is not supported in law if (when applied globally to everyone) it does not result in an improved society. A typical example of something which is rejected in law would be slavery (the ownership of people)... it is not possible (permissible) in law to own people because this clearly does not serve the wider public good. A second example of something which is not allowed would be (outright) landownership. Whilst this issue is perhaps more nuanced and complicated than the ownership of people we can still see how landownership might not be conducive to the public good. So both slavery and anti-Georgism are rejected in law. (So we cannot own people and we cannot own land.) A third such example of something that we cannot own would be the votes of another person. We can neither purchase or otherwise obtain the vote of another person since this is not helpful to the health of the society as a whole. This means that all (general) elections must be conducted in such a way that voters are able to vote for (or reject) whom they like without consideration to tactical concerns. If there is not proportional representation or something like it then their votes and their democratic privileges have been stolen by the governing elite. This is theft of the civic rights of the people. We cannot own the votes of another person and for that reason first-past-the-post is an invalid approach. We own ourselves and we own only our own vote which means that as a government we cannot implement fptp. It is good to have property rights and a system of laws and so it is good to have a government. First past the post is a threat to the government because it doesn't respect the right of the people to own their own vote. Since fptp is a threat to the government it is anarchistic and a bad thing. We own our own vote and so we can use only a fair and proportional voting system.

No comments:

Post a Comment