It’s not the sex of the president necessarily that I’m wary of, since, if I voted in the first place, I’d vote for a solid libertarian lady much more readily than a normal state-loving dude. That’s possibility is not the in the cards this season, regardless. What I’m more concerned about are the aftereffects of a Clinton win, since women are more likely to vote for larger governments. Larger governments require more taxes, and since I’m the sole breadwinner in my family, that means potentially less money for my household. I don’t think I would necessarily pay directly for more taxes*—it’s much more likely that my employer will have to pay more taxes. That puts a lot of things at risk for me.
The “employer” part is important to remember for my situation, because every consumer pays taxes placed on corporations, in a corporatist economy. On paper, technically, businesses do pay taxes, but that cost always trickles down to the consumer, either through a higher price or a contracting of goods or services, ceteris paribus.
That the government will grow especially more under Clinton because of CLinton is only a remote possibility, and one that would be hard to measure. No one, especially political analysts, have a clue about how presidents will act throughout their 4-8 years in office, and in this case the opportunity of a female president acts as more of an encourager of big government rather than an actual implementer. American presidents are more figureheads than actual brokers of power like Congress.
As things are now, the government will grow as it always has the last hundred years or so no matter who the president is, because of the no-good very-bad idea of universal suffrage. Voting privileges by fee-simple land ownership is much less terrible idea, as I’ve posted about before. Giving votes to women qua women, instead of women qua land owners, was a bad idea because most traditionally women didn’t own land, so the long-term national interest was compromised by a new voting bloc with a high time preference. There’s no reason to believe poor, non-land owning voters are going to vote more “compassionately” than anyone else. They’re going to vote in their self interest just as anyone else would—see my first paragraph…I made sure to imply no pretenses towards. The poor aren’t going to vote with Rawlsian ignorance in mind any more than rich land owners would. Voting in any form of democracy is the genuine “war of all against all.”
EDIT: As I was hunting around for that research link above, re: women’s suffrage, I can across this very recent post: Reblog: Research find that as a group, only men pay tax. I’ve never heard of the blog before but if the study’s results weren’t so depressing (it’s just one study, but still…), I’d be laughing.
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Judgy Bitch often looks at things from a one-sided or, in my opinion, disingenuous perspective. Something’s off about her. But that gut reaction aside, her graphs are composed of New Zealand stats, not US stats. Granted, the US could quite easily become the welfare state that New Zealand is and these stats may be a reflection of what western countries are looking like, in general. But another side of this is that many women are married or co-habitating, and men are then passive recipients of the same tax benefits that women have. Neither men nor women are going it alone, really. They built civilization together, and together they are pulling it down. And for the record, single and/or childless people of both sexes complain that they are footing the tax bill for people who have children, even though we simply wouldn’t have any society at all without children. The welfare state is driven by greed, covetousness, and a childish notion of fairness.
“The welfare state is driven by greed, covetousness, and a childish notion of fairness.”
I memorized a quote a few years back relating to this:
“The nation-state is the greatest modern tragedy, gone unnoticed: it lashes together peoples who would otherwise have no natural, God-given connection or accountability with each other, either through kinship, contract, or free association. The sate pits the two parties against each other in a gladiator arena where the winner receives state favor and the loser receives state sentencing. In either case, both peoples’ fortunes are subject to the whimsies of a bureaucrat.”
I’ve punched Google in the face a thousand times trying to find out the source of that quote but I get nothing. I’m starting to think I actually wrote it but it seems too good to come from me.