Month: May 2019

There’s a lot of talk suddenly, all throughout the Western world, of lowering the voting age. But I think we should raise it.

I’m not one of these people who moans about not enough people voting. I think too many people vote–way too many. (And some of them too often, too–but that’s another issue.) Public policy is serious business, demanding sober thought. I realize that sentence has just launched me, as from a catapult, out of the mainstream. But these days the mainstream is almost always the wrong place to be.

A reason often given for allowing 16-year-olds to vote is to get ’em into the voting booth in a hurry so they can vote to shore up the Climate Change mob. The fact that it’s so easy to recruit teens to this sham cause is a very strong argument for not letting them vote, not ever.

Here’s the truth. If you’ve only been on this earth for 16 years, no matter what your natural gifts and talents, you simply haven’t been here long enough to acquire the amount of knowledge and experience it takes to be a responsible voter. It doesn’t occur to you, for instance, that our glorious leaders who scare us with tales of rising sea levels are out there buying beachfront palaces–which they do because they know the sea levels are going nowhere, and they don’t themselves believe a single word of the fraud they’re selling us. Ditto their private jets, their limousines, their lavish banquets at Davos. They don’t believe a word of it.

Nor do teens have the experience to pick up on certain things that, to older folks, stick out like sore thumbs: like when a left-wing UN “expert” lets it slip that only communism or socialism can **Save The Planet!** from global warming. Even better, communism with a world government behind it! That sets off our radar. But teens haven’t yet lived long enough to have that equipment.

Even without lowering the voting age, far too many alleged adults base their votes on misinformation (which they were either too lazy or too busy to check up on), lies told to them by politicians and nooze media, irrational passions and personal prejudices, profoundly silly “reasons” (like identity politics), misdirected anger, or the kind of pure whimsy, totally un-serious and irresponsible, that inspires votes for hopeless third-party candidates.

Raising the voting age to 50 would be a good start, although it wouldn’t solve the problem of foolish people casting foolish votes. So we ought to start talking sense about what kind of restrictions ought to be put on voting, and see if we can find ones that work.