Suffrage and Tax Reform Amendment

S.A.T.R.A.

(Suffrage and Tax Reform Amendment)

Proposes:

An amendment to the U.S. Constitution by which:

In federal elections an American citizen should wield at the polls as many votes as he and his dependents are collectively years old, a number diminishable commensurately by the proportion of his income that derives from government employment or assistance – his federal tax liability (in place of the income tax) to consist in some legislatively fixed dollar amount per vote (say, $20.00/per vote in 2008 dollars), due and payable whether or not he casts his votes, his franchise exercisable whether or not he has yet paid his tax – (any unpaid tax to count as ‘government assistance’).

Because:

In a democracy the perennial political question ‘who should rule?’ implies the question ‘who should vote?’. Time’s ‘honor’ is dismissible when a manifestly inequitable ‘time-honored’ relic like ‘one man one vote’ comes under consideration. A citizen with five dependents has a significantly greater stake in society than another with only one. Why should the interests of one, in such a case, be allowed to neutralize the interests of five? Numbers matter in reality, and they ought to matter at the polling place, even as population matters to proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Children ought not to be left unrepresented against forces whose interest in them cannot be considered as any more than secondary to, or might even be suspected of being opposed to and subversive of, their parents’ or guardians’ interest in them.

Comparably, ‘one man one vote’ prescribes that the younger, by nature ever approaching the greater sensibility and wisdom of the elder, should suddenly and unnaturally be made the equal of his elder at his eighteenth birthday, his elder’s natural primacy and seniority suddenly and unnaturally dismissed from between them. A self-supporting 18-year old is undeserving of a voting power equal to that of his self-supporting 60-year old grandfather; nature pleads that he should enjoy the power of 18 votes, whereas his grandfather should enjoy the power of 60.

Thus a combination of the natural desserts of numbers and age yields the first clause in the proposed amendment.

Economically unproductive persons – that is to say publicly dependent persons – including government employees – deserve no power to counter the electoral will of the economically productive upon whose tax payments they depend for their positions and support. (In their favor, on the other hand, as the just beneficiaries of taxes paid, morally speaking, they owe no taxes at all). The public sector is on trial and up for judgment in an election; its creatures ought to have no power to maintain their positions against the will of a private sector whose definitive ‘freedom’ is at stake, after all, in all of its relations with a covetous and overbearing ‘public’. No ‘public’ no country, but no ‘private’ no freedom. Implicitly, as the public sector is allowed to grow and to produce more and more of its own creatures ever voting its interest, ‘elections’ cease to have meaning; ‘government’ conquers at last; the ‘public’ extinguishes the ‘private’, and individual free enterprise with it.

‘Those who pay should have the say’, but those who have the say should pay. ‘No taxation without representation’, but again, no representation without taxation. Why should the tax required of the tax-payer reflect anything other than the relative power that he enjoys as a voter at the polls? (Government has no natural right to tax anything except that which equally taxes it! No one’s ‘income’ taxes the government! But let an inviolable ‘wall of separation’ also be instituted between private money and the pursuit of public office, that no one’s private fortune should be allowed ever again to sway an election. Let public funding, and public media outlets, suffice all candidates. And let the institution of a national sales tax supply any shortfall of revenue introduced by an abolition of the income tax).

The ’spirit of leveling’ by which American democracy ever increasingly insults nature’s hierarchies has only nature’s eventual backlash to which to look forward, unless it submits to a saving correction. Notwithstanding the emergent American insurgency against common sense, there are common-sense bounds beyond which the ‘extension of the suffrage’ passes from effrontery to outrage.

S. A. T. R. A., P.O. Box 124, Catasauqua, PA 18032 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SuffrageReform/