[From article]
the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, which has a latitudinarian understanding of ethical behavior, has a perfectly awful idea. It is urging the City Council to consider ways of paying — starchier ethicists might call it bribing — people to vote.
Some ideas are so loopy that they could only be conceived by governments, which are insulated from marketplace competition that is a constant reminder of reality. And governments are generally confident that their constituents need to be improved by spending the constituents' money. The supposed problem for which the "pay the voters" idea purports to be a solution is this: Few Los Angeles residents are voting.
Especially alarming to those who choose to be alarmed is the fact that only 23.3 percent of those eligible to vote did so in last year's mayoral election.
[. . .]
Los Angeles is a one-party city in a one-party state. It is a state in which one power — organized labor, especially government employees' unions — is the dominant political force, no matter who is chosen to govern from a coterie of candidates representing faintly variant shades of progressivism.
[. . .]
One suggested measure to conquer nonvoters' lassitude is to create a special lottery and give everyone who shows up at the polls a chance to win, say, $100,000. Lotteries thrive on the irrational hopes of people not thinking clearly about probabilities, which is why governments love lotteries to raise funds. And why there would be nice symmetry in using a lottery to further decrease the reasonableness of our politics.
http://www.jewishworldreview.
Cashing in on voting
By George Will
Published Sept. 20, 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment