Organization Poll on the KCLUG Forums

[Leo Mauler]

--- "James R. Sissel" <JimSissel at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > > We all have a constitutional right to 
> > > complain but no constitutional duty to vote.
> >
> > As I understand it, there is a fine imposed 
> > on Australians who don't show up to 
> > participate in national elections.
> >
> > I am in favor of instituting such a system 
> > in the u.s.
> 
> anyone taking money from the government (employee,
> welfare, social security)

Include car drivers (free highways, free roads) and
content producers too (practically infinite length
copyrights with almost no chance of anything going
public domain means content producers are essentially
getting a free service from the government).  Don't
forget that most corporations are getting corporate
government welfare which partly pays for their
employee salaries.  All farmers are getting
"government welfare" (and corporate farms as well, see
above) in the form of farm subsidies and other forms
of farm assistance.

FHA loans are becoming popular again thanks to the
sub-prime mistakes of the private sector, but don't
worry, the private sector financial firms that bet and
lost on sub-prime mortgages are getting huge amounts
of government bail-out money which they will in turn
give to their investors (making the investors
dependent on government money too).

Sports teams are only making money because of
government money flowing into their coffers.  Paris
Hilton and other billionaires get a decent sized chunk
of their family money from government subsidized
below-market grazing fees on public lands.  Prison
guards are working in facilities built and financed
with government welfare.  Autoworkers are paid by
corporations which receive huge amounts of government
largesse.

Software patents keep software megacorporations on top
long after they've stopped being innovative, making
software patents a form of corporate welfare.  So you
can add the employees of IBM, Novell, Sun, and many
other companies supporting and extending Linux to the
list of "people who shouldn't be allowed to vote"
because they benefit from free government services
that essentially give them money at taxpayers'
expense.  Which means that Linux thrives today largely
on the basis of government funded megacorporations. 
Add all the Linux workers to the list of "people who
shouldn't be allowed to vote" (all the people who
benefit from Microsoft's corporate welfare go without
saying).

U.S. Government money goes so many places that if we
cut out "everyone who receives money from the
government" from the voting rolls, there would be no
one on the voting rolls.

> can't vote.  It's a conflict of interest.

It's a fact of life.  The private sector abandoned the
so-called "free market" a long time ago in favor of
corporate welfare.  Representatives are elected to
Congress and state assemblies with the implied point
that they will make every effort to hand several times
back to corporations what the corporations handed them
in campaign contributions, to keep those campaign
contributions flowing.


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