Suffer(age) the Little Children

Vox Day posted recently about female suffrage. Talking about “their votes are equally incompatible with the long-term national interest as the other classes of current non-voters”:

This can be done using a variety of metrics, including what Shelles describes as another possibility to the only way. Just to give one example, if the reason children are not permitted to vote is due to their limited time preferences, a comparison could be made between children’s time preferences, women’s time preferences, and men’s time preferences. If women’s time preferences were determined to be more akin to those of children than those of men, that would be a clear justification for denying the vote to them.

I won’t pretend to know the history of progressive suffrage but I can make a few armchair inferences. There was probably a reason why women and other demographics were denied the act of voting (it’s not a “right” at all—I’ll explain in a future post), and it’s not because of patriarchal oppression. What we call “patriarchy” was/is most likely just division of labor that developed to ensure survival and gene propagation for the tribe or family. Men were trained for outward, wilderness-facing labor since they seemed more suited for it, and women were trained for inward, domestic-facing labor since they seemed more suited for it. Leftoids/Marxists have an intense dislike of division of labor so it’s understandable why it doesn’t enter into their reasoning much, hence the oppression narrative enters.

But I think Vox gets it wrong here, if he is concerned about national long-term interests. A better metric would simply grant voting privileges to fee-simple property (real estate) owners. The reason for this is that long-term property ownership would be compatible with long-term time preferences, and would qualify as legitimate voterhood. Too, property owners would be far less likely to vote for something against their own interests, and thus owners’ habits would coincide with whole-nation interests.

I’m assuming that certain laws of human behavior apply here, since bad real estate ownership eventually leads to no ownership at all. In other words, a fool and his(her) money(land) are soon parted. If House of the Seven Gables and O’ Pioneers! are accurate descriptors of times past^*, there certainly would be legitimate female votership available, not to mention any anecdotal evidence of such a situation.

Final observation, which is point of the preceding blather: if long-term time preferences, demonstrated through fee-simple real estate ownership, are the gold standard for determining legitimate votership, it makes sense that some children could become legitimate voters. This seems absurd, since we know how children of a certain age are, and because we are raised with cultural and political standards that treat (I mean, we call them “minors”) with a strange manner of limbic, pre-civilizational a-humanity.

Instead of using bare age, a stable, mostly culturally, homogenized community left to itself would use a person’s raw cognitive ability to determine real ownership. This, I think, would generally work itself out; cultures have their own rites of passage into adulthood (none of this adolescence nonsense). It’s in a community’s best interest to confer adulthood on those that are ready, and today, what we consider “teenagers”—also known as “old children”—are biological, mental adults. The fact they are infantilized way past what is mandated skews the data. It’s not a perfect metric but it’s miles more accurate than using the sledgehammer of 18 years to nail everyone into adulthood by default. In the situation Vox outlines, using true real estate ownership, not the sex of the voter nor their age, is a more accurate metric for determining voterhood.

* This is something of a joke but they are in my mind since I recently read the latter and I’m nearly done with the former. Fictional narratives aside, the law of statistics basically demands female ownership of property as an demonstrable actuality.

EDIT: Addendum here.