Yeah, that’s true, but I can live with it. Indirect enrichment from the Federal Government tends to favor those already connected to the system, so even if they couldn’t vote, they’d still exert a large amount of influence.

OTOH, there are millions of people in America who get more in benefits than they pay in, and are therefore inclined to vote themselves *even more*. Likewise, there are those right near the middle who would be encouraged to stay on the independent side by something like this.

I’m not claiming this is a magic bullet solution. There will always be rent seeking and influence peddling so long as there are rents to seek and influence to peddle. What this does is very directly cuts off people whose vote would be captured by their dependence on the federal government since they have a fundamental interest in using the ballot box to enlarge the size of government.

That sounds good but how do you determine what benefits they get from it. Some benefits are pretty indirect. Do you only count it if you get a check directly from the gov’t? How about laws/regulations that keep out competitors but help you, but no direct money was tied to it (licensing, etc.). There was a benefit from the law that can’t be determined very easily. You could go on and on about these indirect benefits or non-cash benefits making it very difficult for your idea to work.

I know, some people will cry racism and discrimination, but there’s a fundamental conflict of interest in being a dependent on the federal government and voting for representatives of the people who aren’t.

If a said family wanted to vote, and only one or two (the parent’s, assumingly) could do the voting, being that they owned the property of the house (again, hypothetically), the parents or heads of the property might engage in more political dialouge concerning “who to vote for this year’, instead of the somewhat cold & distant (as well as vacuous) nature politics sometimes has in households today.

Yup, things would’ve been different. Too bad if they instilled that today, gov’t would be buying up more land & make voting illegal by way of not owning land: once again, blaming the victim for gov’t own coercive acts.