Whenever we make progress, it’s always long overdue. We look back at things like slavery or denying women the vote and they seem like parts of the same stubborn, self serving blindness. From where we stand now, reading history feels like watching a small group of crotchety old men who just can’t get with the program as they’re nagged and shoved forward into a future that can see more than their obnoxious little coven. But of all the problems with inclusiveness we’ve cured to date, property requirements for voting has to be the stickiest one.
Back in my day hating life was awesome!
Let me preface this by saying not only do I own no real estate, I barely own more than the keys that type these words. Nobody has trouble seeing what’s wrong about a world where only the narrow minority of property owners vote. It draws a clear line between haves and have nots and makes sure that line isn’t going anywhere. In a world like that being poor means being a second class citizen, a pure subject to be ruled over by those who want their lawns mowed and their sheep sheared. It’s such a transparent bit of snobbery that most of us look back and wonder what took these old bastards so long to get rid of it.
But a quick look at things from the perspective of people who were trying to set up a permanent democracy, makes this rule a little more difficult to paint as nothing but the turned up noses of a bunch of lace curtain nerds. One of the most progressive conversations that we have in the modern world is about money in politics. The idea that we need to do something permanent and dramatic that puts a hard wall in front of the influence that pure money can have on our elections is a tear that bleeds down the center of modern democracies all over the world. We tend to see this as a very modern conversation, as though all the high falutin talk about liberty in the old times was really just more boys club rhetoric and that the project of permanently protecting the vote as an equalizing social force is one that we’ve only recently summoned the bravery to mention to the world of business.
But the tension between money and politics was on the founders minds very directly when they tacked a property requirement onto voting. The very simple question: “What stops rich people from buying votes?” Is one that we’ve never come up with a very good answer to. The way the founders saw it, voting is something that can only happen between equals. If we create an incentive scheme in which votes are worth less than the dollars necessary to buy a winning amount of them, then democracy goes down the tubes. Property ownership was seen as the cap needed to make sure that didn’t happen. As long as people owned land, they’d have enough of a social buy-in to make voting in their own interest worth more than what it would have cost any rich guy to buy enough of their votes. Property requirements for voting were a free market control designed to keep democratic sentiments in the driver’s seat of society. The way they saw it, we were never going to get rich by the vote, if the rich had the voters by the balls.
Try yelling out “Geoffrey!” and seeing how many of their heads turn. How do you think the Geoffreys will be voting? Obediently I trust.
It goes without saying that everyone deserves the right to vote. But what also goes without saying is that rich people will buy votes unless something stops them, and if that thing isn’t voters themselves, then democracy has a big problem. It seems like we’re stuck between opposites here. On the one hand, voting that’s purely a game of owners, effectively turns owners of land into owners of people, who can vote away any set of protections the peons who work their land might want for themselves. On the other hand there’s a glaring need to put something permanent in the hands of every voter that makes voting look like a better idea than selling out. What I’d like to suggest here is that this problem bleeds out of the tear in the soul of democracy that we see in our cities everyday.
Homelessness is a huge problem that we’re failing to figure out at an unforgivable snail’s pace. We’re talking about an internal refugee crisis involving hundreds of thousands of people nation wide. Those people have every bit as much of a right to vote as anyone else, but how can we realistically expect them to? What should they vote for exactly, the system that kicked them out of it? Their total lack of property and their either total inability to vote or total lack of interest in voting are basically the same issue. So then while the founders may have approached the relationship between property and voting from the opposite direction, it doesn’t seem like we can say that no such relationship exists. We’d also be hard pressed to deny that this relationship needs to be brought under control in a deliberate, architectural way to make sure that democracy stays a more powerful form of discourse than economics.
600,000 votes is enough to tip an election. We’ve been having some trouble with those lately.
In Santa Rosa it looks like this. They’re only homeless because we make this illegal.
Plenty of solutions to homelssness are kicked around, but this is a little like kicking around a dozen recipes for scrambled eggs. There’s one thing that’s going to stop homelessness. Homes. Countless government organizations, think tanks and policy institutes are on the same page about this in a way that makes the consensus on global warming look like a fuzzy picture of the Loch Ness monster. Housing first is the strategy that’s going to work. If we put the idea of a permanent social safety net of housing up against the very real set of problems the founders identified around the economics of vote buying, then what we get is a solution that confronts that problem without sticking its nose in the air. Instead of having a place to live making you eligible to vote, being eligible to vote means you’ll have a place to live.
Our votes are only as strong as the places we cast them from, and if our homes can always be pulled away from us, then we’re always going to be two moves behind whatever choices show up on our ballots. Voting is something that happens among equals. That’s what citizenship is about, it’s what rights mean; that there’s a basic level of dignity that can’t be taken away from people without collapsing the democratic formula. Taking away someone’s right to a trial doesn’t just damage their rights, it makes the whole of society into a dangerously unjust place, where people can be plucked off the street and locked away. In the same way, homelessness is a way of using economics to convict people of crime who haven’t done anything but run out of money. Taking away someone’s ability to live legally in their own city is the same thing as taking their citizenship away. When it’s illegal to sleep, to sit or be anywhere, that person has lost the right to be in their own country without breaking any laws. Their ability to vote themselves a better state effectively disappears. Where do their ballots go? How could they possibly stay informed?
My point is that universal basic income and a social safety net of permanent housing are the way we address the very real set of conditions the founders identified as a threat to voting as an institution. If the vote is meant to be an equalizer, but the least advantaged become permanent refugees with no stake in the society that needs repairing, then that equalizing effect can never happen. They found a real problem, but proposed a limited solution. We’ve come a long way, and now it’s time for us to come full circle.
“In Stockton, California, 125 residents got $500 per month, no strings attached, for two years.After a year, full-time employment among them had increased, and depression and anxiety had decreased.”
–From Business Insider in 2021. We can work smarter and not harder.
Princess Fantastic 