The franchise should be contingent on paying taxes

I'm really starting to like Tom Perkins.

A while back he observed in a letter to the Wall Street Journal that the persecution of the rich is not unlike the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis:

I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany['s war] on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

Now Mr Perkins has proposed that having the ability to vote (the franchise) should be made contingent on paying taxes:

Interviewer Adam Lashinsky: What is your 60-second idea to change the world?
Perkins: I got it. And it's going to make you more angry than my letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Lashinsky: I highly doubt it, but let's hear it.
Perkins: You're not ready. Thomas Jefferson, at the beginning of this country, thought that to vote you had to be a landowner. Now that didn't last very long and the vote was given to everyone. But, the basic idea was you had to be a taxpayer, or a person of property, to vote. That went by the board. Margaret Thatcher tried to change that in England, in what came to be called a "poll tax." The idea was that every single citizen of the UK had to pay something in taxes, even if they got it back in subsidies elsewhere. And if you didn't pay something in taxes, you didn't vote. And she was thrown under the bus by her own party for trying to push that through. So, the Tom Perkins system is: you don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes. But, what I really think is: it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that? [emphasis added]
Audience: ... laughter ...
Lashinsky: You're right that I don't agree with you. You're wrong that I'm angry. I would point out to you that the flaw in your argument is that since everybody pays sales tax and anyone who drives a car pays taxes for that, we're right back where we started ...
Perkins: But not income tax.
Lashinsky: Or property tax.

The audience greeted Mr Perkins' proposal with laughter, which is just another indication of how far gone the political discussion in the US is. The idea that there should be some kind of wealth qualification for the franchise has been so thoroughly slandered and vilified by Progressives that the proposal that we should return to what was perceived by statesmen to be the normal state of affairs at the Founding is thought to be preposterous, unthinkable, heresy.

The key part of Mr Perkins discussion is his comparison to how things work with the corporation. Obviously, Mr Perkins' observations stem from his experience as a venture capitalist. I have often made the same comparison myself. My way of thinking also stems from my experience with startups and as a member of a Limited Liability Company (an LLC, similar to a corporation) with several other individuals.

In an LLC, the various shareholders or members contribute assets to the company and usually receive in return voting rights proportional to the value of the assets they contribute. Their share in any profits or losses generated by the LLC is also usually proportional to the value of the assets they contribute. For example, an LLC might be set up as follows:

• you have 10 members
• 2 of those members contribute all the assets
• the 2 members who contributed all the assets get all the profits
• the 2 members who contributed all the assets get all the votes
• decisions, including those about the rules of the LLC, are decided by a majority vote

Now, imagine a different arrangement. Imagine if the voting rights were not proportional to the value of the contributions. For example, imagine if the LLC were set up with the following rules:

• you have 10 members
• 2 of those members contribute all the assets
• the 2 members who contributed all the assets get all the profits
• each member gets one vote
• decisions, including those about the rules of the LLC, are decided by a majority vote

Very rapidly the 8 members who received no profits would vote to change this arrangement to the following:

• you have 10 members
• 2 of those members contribute all the assets
• the 8 members who contributed no assets get all the profits
• each member gets one vote
• decisions, including those about the rules of the LLC, are decided by a majority vote

Intuition tells me that most people, when presented with such a scenario, would judge that the 8 members who had contributed no assets had treated the 2 members who had contributed all the assets unfairly. But, this scenario is a very good general description of how affairs have progressed in modern democracies over the last 200 years. In the beginning, the time of Thomas Jefferson, there was a property qualification on the franchise. When this was removed, the great unwashed hoards got the vote and quickly realized that they could use the vote to transfer the assets of the wealthy to themselves.

This is exactly the point I made in my Thesis 8:

We have reached the terminal stage of democracy. Modern democracy is nothing more than a form of legalized theft, a system whereby the unproductive many, who have fewer assets, use the mechanism of universal suffrage (instead of, say, arms) to redistribute the wealth of the productive few, who have greater assets, to themselves.

Anyone who has held stock options in Silicon Valley recognizes the basic fairness of Mr Perkins' proposal: What you get out of a startup and the amount of control you exercise over that startup should be proportional to the value you have invested in that startup. Engineers who hold stock options would scream bloody murder if the benefits of their stock options were suddenly transferred to someone else. But, they seem to have no problem with supporting the modern Progressive state in which those without assets are allowed to vote to transfer the assets of others to themselves.