--- "James R. Sissel" [email protected] wrote:

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We all have a constitutional right to complain but no constitutional duty to vote.

As I understand it, there is a fine imposed on Australians who don't show up to participate in national elections.

I am in favor of instituting such a system in the u.s.

anyone taking money from the government (employee, welfare, social security)

Include car drivers (free highways, free roads) and content producers too (practically infinite length copyrights with almost no chance of anything going public domain means content producers are essentially getting a free service from the government). Don't forget that most corporations are getting corporate government welfare which partly pays for their employee salaries. All farmers are getting "government welfare" (and corporate farms as well, see above) in the form of farm subsidies and other forms of farm assistance.

FHA loans are becoming popular again thanks to the sub-prime mistakes of the private sector, but don't worry, the private sector financial firms that bet and lost on sub-prime mortgages are getting huge amounts of government bail-out money which they will in turn give to their investors (making the investors dependent on government money too).

Sports teams are only making money because of government money flowing into their coffers. Paris Hilton and other billionaires get a decent sized chunk of their family money from government subsidized below-market grazing fees on public lands. Prison guards are working in facilities built and financed with government welfare. Autoworkers are paid by corporations which receive huge amounts of government largesse.

Software patents keep software megacorporations on top long after they've stopped being innovative, making software patents a form of corporate welfare. So you can add the employees of IBM, Novell, Sun, and many other companies supporting and extending Linux to the list of "people who shouldn't be allowed to vote" because they benefit from free government services that essentially give them money at taxpayers' expense. Which means that Linux thrives today largely on the basis of government funded megacorporations. Add all the Linux workers to the list of "people who shouldn't be allowed to vote" (all the people who benefit from Microsoft's corporate welfare go without saying).

U.S. Government money goes so many places that if we cut out "everyone who receives money from the government" from the voting rolls, there would be no one on the voting rolls.

can't vote. It's a conflict of interest.

It's a fact of life. The private sector abandoned the so-called "free market" a long time ago in favor of corporate welfare. Representatives are elected to Congress and state assemblies with the implied point that they will make every effort to hand several times back to corporations what the corporations handed them in campaign contributions, to keep those campaign contributions flowing.

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