The ultimate goal of a kleptocracy

[thewayne]

"The Founding Fathers...put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote. It wasn't you were just a citizen and got to vote...One of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you're a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community."
-- Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips

"The Tom Perkins system is: You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes... But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars, you get a million votes."
-- Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tom Perkins

Perkins is quite an amusing guy. There's one weakness to his argument, though: corporations like GE don't pay taxes. Lots of big corps cook their books via off-shore entities that they don't pay taxes at all. So even in Tom's world, they wouldn't get a vote under their current business practices.

So in Tom's world, we'd actually have corps paying a lot more tax. That would be interesting.

Comments

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

And once the rabble can no longer vote, the landowners can make up aristocratic titles for themselves.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Why is Monty Python and the Holy Grail's 'Constitutional Peasant' going through my head? ;-)

My wife and I were discussing this yesterday as we went for a walk. It's basically the ultimate extension of the Citizens United ruling, I've heard it said that it will require a constitutional amendment to overturn that.