In the modern west it is seen as a sign of backwardness if a country does not have universal suffrage for all adults. As a clear stakeholder in the state, why are those below the arbitrary age of eighteen disenfranchised, clearly subjected to the status of second-class citizenship?
That they don’t pay taxes; that they don’t work; that they are dependents—the same can be said for many who currently enjoy the right to vote. In fact, whatever the reason given, it can usually be shown to be empty, for most turn on the question of competency.
That they are insufficiently educated about the issues—it is on this basis that those under the age of eighteen, no matter their knowledge of the pertinent issues, are generally excluded from voting, denied political voice in the maintenance and protection of their rights. And yet, no test or proof of political competency is required for someone over the, again, arbitrary age of eighteen to cast a ballot. In fact, attempts to institute such tests would doubtlessly be struck down immediately as unconstitutional.
As scholars such as Bryan Caplan, Jason Brennan, and Ilya Somin have shown, in study after study the average voter has proven more often than not to be worse than a coin flip in correctly deciding between policy prescriptions on basic questions regarding monetary, tax, or regulatory policy, as well as foreign affairs. For example, in his book The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies George Mason economist Bryan Caplan shows that the average voter regularly favors mercantilist, protectionist policies—replete with tariffs and subsidies for major industrial and agricultural industries – as opposed to free trade. While in his book Against Democracy, Georgetown political scientist Jason Brennan notes, “I could write an entire book just documenting how little voters know.”
He then proceeds to list the following:
- In the 2010 midterm presidential election…Only 39 percent of voters knew that defense was the largest category of discretionary spending in the federal budget.
- During election years, most citizens cannot identify any congressional candidates in their district.
- Immediately before the 2004 presidential election, almost 70 percent of US citizens were unaware that Congress had added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, though this was a giant increase to the federal budget and the largest new entitlement program since President Lyndon Johnson began the War on Poverty.
- Americans vastly overestimate how much money is spent on foreign aid, and so many of them mistakenly believe we can significantly reduce the budget deficit by cutting foreign aid.
- In 1964, only a minority of citizens knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO…the organization created to oppose the Soviet Union.
- Forty percent of Americans do not know whom the United States fought in World War II
- During the 2000 US presidential election…[only] slightly more than half of all Americans knew Al Gore was more liberal than Bush….[and] only 37 percent knew that federal spending on the poor had increased or that crime had decreased in the 1990s.
- Over a quarter of Americans don’t even know which country the United States fought in the Revolutionary War.
- Less than a third know that Karl Marx’s communist slogan “To each according to his abilities, from each according to his needs” is not in the Constitution.
- Even though many Americans in 1992 knew that unemployment had risen under George H. W. Bush, the majority of Americans were unable to estimate the unemployment rate within 5 percentage points of the actual figure. When asked to guess what the unemployment rate was, the majority of voters guessed it was twice as high as the actual rate.
Brennan goes on for several pages more, before finally dropping the matter—though not for having exhausted the well of voter ignorance. As Ilya Somin notes in Democracy and Political Ignorance: “The sheer depth of most individual voters’ ignorance is shocking to many observers not familiar with the research.” According to Somin, approximately 35 percent of voters are “know-nothings.”
To make matters worse, there is voluminous and growing literature that shows that voters aren’t just ignorant but are irrational. As the work of social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt and Sarah Rose Cavanagh has shown, people are naturally “tribalistic” and their moral reasoning is “Mostly just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments…[they have] already made.” Noting such research, Bryan Caplan proposes that voters are being rationally irrational—your vote counting for so little, being educated about issues being so arduous, and it being so much more fun to just cheer for your team and bash the other side, it is rational for voters to be irrational about politics.
Brennan refers to such voters as “Hooligans…the rabid sports fans of politics. They have strong and largely fixed worldviews…They tend to seek out information that confirms their preexisting opinions, but ignore, evade, and reject out of hand evidence that contradicts or disconfirms their preexisting opinions…They tend to despise people who disagree with them, holding that people with alternative worldviews are stupid, evil, selfish, or at best, deeply misguided. Most regular voters, active political participants, activists, registered party members, and politicians are hooligans.”
But minors would perhaps be systemically worse than the average adult – depending on how one defines “worse”—but even if it were true, which doesn’t seem likely given the sheer weight of evidence in the works listed above, it wouldn’t be likely to matter. As Claudio Lopez-Guerra has pointed out, by the time of the election everyone knows that it is only going to be a Republican or a Democrat who wins anyway. So, either the minor casts his or her vote for the Republican or Democrat that everyone else is going to vote for or casts it for someone who cannot win. If we can assume a fairly even distribution of random/ignorant votes allotted to both the Republicans and Democrats—that one side will not systemically receive more random/ignorant votes than the other—then minors can be reasonably argued to have no real impact on an election. Certainly not enough to justify taking away the right of an individual to political participation, particularly as the weight of any single vote is vanishingly small.
For they are, in fact, almost all being taxed without representation to varying degrees. Apart from inheritance, property, or capital gains taxes that can be levied against the estate of a minor, there is the inescapable tax of inflation, which results from careless government policy choices. By the time the average person has turned that magical age of eighteen, all the property they have amassed to that point—most likely taking the form of gifts from parents or relatives over the years—has been greatly depreciated in value by virtue of inflation. Even this seeming triviality can be no small thing to a person just starting off on her own. As anyone who has ever shopped for popular vintage toys from their childhood knows, they can be very expensive. For example, my own all-metal Tonka Trucks, original Fischer Price toys, and Gameboy Color fetched over $500 dollars when I sold them at eighteen—adjusted for inflation since my having received them, I received dollars equivalent to only about half of their 1990 value.
This being the case, that by the standards of universal suffrage minors are being unjustly taxed without representation, at the very least their parent should be granted an additional vote in their stead. In the same way that a minor if they inherited a large trust would see a legal guardian appointed to care for its proper management until they came of age, so too it would seem appropriate that the management of their political estate until the time of their adulthood be granted to a guardian to manage as well. That their elders should speak for them is not an argument I like, as it amounts in most cases to no more than an argument from authority. However, given our present unjust situation it would be preferable.
At a mere seven years old my son kindly informed his younger brother, age four, that it is foolish to wish that candy were free—for if it were then no one would make it and the candy market would collapse—thus making him, I would argue, at least as potentially politically competent as half the American electorate at present.
