Service provides Citizenship

For the record I do not subscribe to Mr Heinleins views.

That short introduction out of the way lets talk starship troopers. No, oddly enough not the Oscar nominated film, nor its similarly fantastic sequels.

Instead the book is what interests me, specifially an idea that has been floating around on these forums rather a lot as of late,(its the one in the title if you hadn't already guessed) and I wanted to have a considered talk on it.

The title is meant to demonstrate one of the most important parts of Heinleins book, which is essentially that those who contribute to someone in a society are given a vote, whereas those who don't contribute, don't vote. Its a very persuasive idea, but I find that there are a number of problems with it.

For starters the problem I have is that the definition of "service" can easily be turned around to mean "Anything my main group of supporters do", for instance if a general of some repute but minimal scruples ends up becoming president and then started whittling away at those who he considered had not "contributed", such as road painters, bureacrats and other people from the civil sphere, leaving only the army to constantly re-elect him over and over.

Another problem is the arts, whilst I know that some are likely to come in and start raging about how the arts aren't worth anything it does become a problem to demonstrate "worth" or "service" through artistry, look at the problems of painters dying and then their work gets famous, such people would never get the chance to contribute even IF their work is considered good.

Anyway, I leave this up to those who support it to find good answers and hope that we can have a civilised debate on the merits of this idea. Tea and Coffee making facilities are provided, and there is a trouser press in your rooms.

edited 24th Jun '11 4:48:48 AM by JosefBugman

Having recently reread the book I found myself struggling with the philosophy behind the system promoted in it.

Civil work and optional military service, fine. Extremely hazardous civil work and military service? Not so much (it seemed like people were shunted into becoming groundpounding grunts all too easily). The book seemed overly keen on would-be citizens putting their lives in harm's way. I also found it overly condescending that dissenters against the system are considered a non-issue in-universe, because anyone politically motivated enough who wanted to reform the system would have joined up, and this magically means that everyone else is simply a passive complainer. Yeah, sorry Heinlein, I don't think I can swallow that.

All that said, I am hesitant to dismiss the concept altogether. Earning your vote and earning the right to stand for public office through civil service does sound quite appealing because there's far too much apathy and self-interest in democratic politics.

edited 24th Jun '11 4:55:52 AM by pagad

With cannon shot and gun blast smash the alien. With laser beam and searing plasma scatter the alien to the stars.

I would be fine with having everyone do one year of civil or military service. That was basically what we had before they stopped the compulsory military/civil service, and even though I personally benefited from its end I still feel kind of bad over not having done it. It was a good idea.

But it must not be something people can opt out, so to say, nor something that is linked to the right to vote or be elected — otherwise, you'll just end up creating an underclass, and this tends to be a Very Bad Idea.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I would have every person fresh out of secondary education at 16 either do citizen's service, or do military service. Nothing too big. Maybe give the kids a few quid at the end of two or three days of work. Both promote team building... etc.

Votes for contribution? Nah. We should let mothers (or legal guardians of children) have 1.5 votes until their kids are 16. Why? The 0.5 vote represents the vote of their child. For many policies in effect today, will affect those children later in life. And of course, no-one is insane enough to have a multitude of kids for extra voting power, so we'd limit it to 0.5 votes, anyway, regardless of family size.

People who don't contribute? I'd rather have the entire population above 16 have the vote, than a select few.

Well I think I'd have to mostly disagree with the concept, regardless of what the "service" is because I think suffrage should be universal. If the predominate problem is that people are perhaps not well educated enough, informed enough or in Heinlein's thought not dedicated to the country enough, then the problem to me is your education system not the fact that suffrage is universal.

The difference in mentality about rejecting prerequisites for citizenship is that policies are then always designed to improve the ability of the population to make informed votes. So I think suffrage should be universal, you could have mandatory service requirements as a citizen (I prefer non-military in almost all cases so that it improves rather than damages your economy, also preferably during high school where youth don't need to be employed anyway) and that we should monitor the level of "informed" voting in various ways (perhaps hold those political tests that others think should be a requirement before voting and instead use it as a measure to see how well your population votes).

I disagree, because the premise is wrong. The reason people have a vote is not because they contribute, but because their government inevitably impacts upon them.

If you deny a person a vote, then the government is not legitimate.

I actually oppose many of the standards used for voter discrimination today, but that would go into rather more detail than is needed.

I agree with the concept, but one of the issues with the book is the perspective it is written in and the lack of detail on Heinleins universe as a whole.

Heinlein mentioned that anybody can get a job that qualifies as service, such as the example he gave of someone who was blind, deaf, dumb, and crippled sorting things in a box by touch all day. Essentially it's a service not needed that is being provided to accommodate somebody who wants citizenship. He mentions garbage collectors, and a few other examples.

Starship Troopers, however, is very deliberately told from the perspective of Rico. The reason it doesn't go into further detail about other forms of service is because those other forms are of no concern to Rico, even if they are of interest to the reader. Now given, it can be assumed that the people who want to become citizens are usually of the patriotic mold, and patriotism and the military often go hand in hand, thus the military is the most popular avenue of citizenship.

One of these concepts is sacrifice. You want to do a job that doesn't qualify as service, but you want citizenship. Then your sacrifice is doing a less than ideal job so you have the permanent right to vote as a citizen. You want to be a businessman and also want to vote? Your sacrifice is that instead of doing what you wanted to do off the bat, you picked up trash for a few years before gaining citizenship and going on to pursue the career you wanted from the beginning. The sacrifice of the people going through the military route is being put in harms way, and it is not subtle or hidden that serving in the military as a route to citizenship is purposely made to look shitty during peacetime(The recruiter with the fake amputations) and made to look attractive during wartime(posters and slogans).

I think the major issue with the concept Heinlein outlined is simply the lack of information that we have on how his system of government worked, since the Starship Troopers universe is limited to the first person scope of what Rico himself cares to talk about and what he experiences. Rico is a soldier, and being in the mobile infantry is the entire scope of his life. It's who he is, and everything else is just background noise to him. Because of this we don't really get a chance to see exactly how well the rest of the system of government actually works.

What, no. Give that vote to the child. My parents views =/= my views. I'd have voted "Yes" in the AV referendum, they voted no.

Also: why the mother?

Well if there isn't that much info can someone come up with a decent situation in which it might work?

OFC I will then start picking holes in it, but I am curious as to how people think this sort of situation COULD work.

^

Well the way it developed over the course of time for Starship Troopers made sense. After the big war a bunch of soldiers who were responsible for protecting a commune decided that since they were the ones ensuring the survival of said commune, that they were the ones in charge. They made it so that only veterans of the great war could vote, but eventually those veterans started to age and die over time, so they made it so all soldiers could vote. Eventually this led to the concept of all government service, from the most local level to the highest echelons, qualified for citizenship.

They were a pretty wise bunch to be honest, they eventually decided that you weren't allowed to vote if you were still in the military, even if you had done your time. If you took the military path to citizenship then you had to be done with the service to vote. It makes sense not to let the people still in the military vote to go to war or not, but on the other hand part of me ponders if that is a mistake, making the people that war effects the most not have a voice regarding such..

No? I wanted Yes, so I got my grandma to be my voter.

Edit: The 0.5 votes go to children over the age of 11.

edited 24th Jun '11 9:31:15 AM by Inhopelessguy

Sorry, I meant an overall system of it to work and continue working.

Horrible idea. Apart from the fact that there are far too many ways that it could be abused to manipulate who actually attains citizenship, and is therefore impractical, I disagree with the principle. Creating a second class of people who haven't "proved" themselves yet is awful. There should not be any rights that aren't inherrant to a person anyway.

Am I a good man or a bad man?

I'm concerned that restricting suffrage in any way will just give you a lopsided community that slides itself into constantly restricting that power more and more. That, or you have preferential treatment.

On top of this...

I just don't think that because a businessman delayed opening his business venture by x years to pick up trash is actually useful to me in any way, or makes a better citizen. The idealism around sacrifice sounds great and all but in practice, what does it really accomplish? I don't think you can find a statistical measure backing the concept that people who "sacrificed" more voluntarily in today's society are any better citizens than those who did not. People should be streamlined into their dream jobs as fast as possible to make the most efficient use of labour in your country.

I don't think it's a very useful idea - the problem with voting is that people have very little incentive to do research and think things carefully through on national elections - their vote has very little weight overall, so they may as well just vote based on some very superficial criteria, like vague group affiliation or who doesn't look like a loser or who is black etc. They have no reason to put in the effort of detecting whether a candidate is full of shit (like the greek government that cooked the books).

Left-wingers will just believe the right-wing candidate is full of shit (and can find plenty of supporting evidence if they look for it), right-wingers will believe the left-wing candidate is full of shit, greens and libertarians and other loons will think both candidates are full of shit and equally bad, and people who don't care about politics won't even vote.

I don't think slighlty restricting the range of people who vote will do much to improve things. It may improve things a bit by giving a slight incentive for people to not be parasites, by giving them a symbolic and mostly useless power. It may slightly decrease the tendency to vote for more welfare, but apart from that, I don't expect it to change much.

What might be slightly better would be to have a small five-item quiz on each candidate's positions (on predefined issues like healthcare, crime, immigration, international issues, monetary policy, employment, welfare, etc.) and each voter must answer a quizz on those when he casts his vote. If he gets more than one answer wrong, his vote doesn't count. That way, 1) elections would be determined by people who pay attention to issues, improving the quality of average politicians, and 2) more people would pay attention to issues, so politicians would be under more scrutiny to see how they held their promises.

Or hey, a simpler alternative: When voting, voters are given paper slips representing the position of candidates on various issues, but the name of each candidate is not given, so they *have* to read through the issues and see which list seems the best.

Point that somewhere else, or I'll reengage the harmonic tachyon modulator.

I'm afraid that the suggested quiz would be prone to abuse.

If you want to make a voluntary education program, fine, but selective voting is just too risky.

And positions is even worse, too much misrepresentation possible there.

edited 24th Jun '11 1:42:47 PM by blueharp

Sure it would be "prone to abuse", but then, most systems are someway or another, and usually find a way to prevent it. The question should be, despite the potential for abuse (assuming reasonable steps are taken against it), would it be better or worse than what we have now? I think it'd at least be worth trying locally, it's a bit of a compromise between direct democracy and representative democracy.

Point that somewhere else, or I'll reengage the harmonic tachyon modulator.

Yeah, it'd be nice to have something that would ensure people actually know what they're talking about before they vote, but any system of restrictions is vulnerable to collapsing into "only people I like can vote" when applied by corrupt politicians.

Yes, it is worse to be selective in whose votes you count than it is to take the consequences of being universal in voting. There's more than enough history to show that.

The politicians do not even have to be corrupt, just misguided in their honesty.

If there was a computer system I could trust, I think your quiz was better served as being the vote itself. Then the political parties publicly post their own answers and your vote is given to the political party that most closely matches your choices. And then you do instant run-off voting so you have no wasted votes.

Like say, you go to a designated voting booth, you put in your vote, it spits out a piece of paper with a random alphanumeric identification code so you can later look it up online to see what the recorded answers are. Nobody knows your alphanumeric identifier so it is anonymous if you choose to remain so, otherwise you have the official paper slip to reveal yourself or you can give it to a trusted third party who then goes "SOMEONE CHANGED THE ANSWERS!". (The paper slip also has your answers on it.) Everyone is encouraged to double check the answers and you can download all the answers and run a vote count yourself. It costs the same amount of paper as elections today (in Canada, not the crazy giant voting sheets in USA).

edited 24th Jun '11 5:37:39 PM by breadloaf

Breadloaf's system would not be bad, but I'd still be wary of it; sometimes you want to vote against a politician because they're a douchbag, not necessarily because they disagree with you.

Heinlein's system would be awful. It's not a democracy at all, it's an oligarchy; it's just a very broad oligarchy. The point of having universal suffrage is not that the people are universally wise, it's so the government can't step on anyone.

I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1

^

The other problem with what we have now though is that people who put nothing into the system are able to vote, we would probably disagree, but I see that as a problem.

People aren't given a vote based on contribution, but on being impacted.

The contribution thing is last century's ideas.

Voting is as much about being subject to the system as it is about contributing to it. This apparent trend toward "you must contribute (definition of "contribute" to be arbitrarily determined by the people in power) to be considered worthy to take part in the government" is frankly disturbing. Very disturbing.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Actually, the Evil Doctor's test made a whole lot of sense with a few tweaks.

You only need to know the answers of the candidate of your choice. Five issues of the candidate's choosing. At the very least, you should know what the dude you're voting for plans to do.

You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.