Kathleen wisely asks for confirmation:
Sooo, clarify for me, Mr. VD. Do you think women should or should not be allowed to vote? I normally have outstanding sarcasm detection, but your facetiousness baffles even me at times.
I first must congratulate Kathleen on her good sense, as the combination of my straight-faced sarcasm and iconoclastic idiosyncracies has caused more than one individual to embarrass himself by leaping to a demonstrably erroneous conclusion.
I do not think women should be allowed to vote. I do not consider voting to be a human right. I do not believe in democracy, but as a positive half-measure, I am open to direct democracy in the place of the utter fraud that is representative democracy.
I further assert that I can prove Kathleen does not believe that voting is a human right nor does she believe in democracy, even though she almost surely thinks she does. In the unlikely event that she happens to prefer freedom to security, it is highly probable that I could even convince Kathleen that women should not be allowed to vote.
This post from 2004 expresses my opinion on the matter, which can be summarized as placing a priority on individual freedom, not voting or democracy.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 70% of men favored smaller government, but only 48% of women believed the same way. So men are far more likely to view big government as part of the problem, not the solution.
PJ O’Rourke once said: “Advocating the expansion of central government is a crime against humanity!” It’s pretty clear to me that one of the most destructive forces in our society has been women’s suffrage. Women consistently and reliably turn towards government as a solution for perceived problems, which creates more intractable problems, which then is used to justify more government intervention. This process is unlikely to stop until the entire edifice collapses of its own weight.
It’s too bad that the concept of the states as laboratories of democracy has been abandoned, because I’d love to see the difference between two neighboring states, one of which permitted women to vote and the other that did not. It would be particularly interesting to see in which state women would prefer to live. I suspect the answer might surprise a lot of people.
A past discussion of this issue can be found here.