Lower the voting age to zero or raise it to infinity
In the United States, you can enlist in the military at age seventeen. You can drive and pay taxes on your income at sixteen. You can be tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison at age eleven. But you can't vote until you're eighteen. If kids are the future, they should have a say in it!
While historically, most adults have opposed lowering the voting age on the grounds that "children" are not mature enough to vote, since Trump and Obama, it's been impossible to say that with a straight face.
America has shown the way forward by ending (mostly) race and gender discrimination in voting. Now it's time to end age discrimination too!
I say if you're old enough to fill out a voter registration form on your own, you're old enough to vote!
Of course, understanding what government is requires this to be put into context. Because government is an illegitimate, unethical institution, no one has a RIGHT to vote, but since governments hide behind that for their legitimacy, it should be attacked. Unless you are voting in a voluntary situation like a company or community organization, voting for a ballot measure to reduce the violence of government, or voting for someone to abolish an office, voting is an attempt to choose someone else's leaders for them.
The fact that government says you magically get a new set of rights on your eighteenth birthday that you didn't have the day before reveals the arbitrary nature of rights when defined by government. When I was a kid, I really resented age discrimination and I promised myself that when I crossed that line, I wouldn't forget the people still on the other side.
This isn't just a matter of principle, but as with most of the times we apply our principles, we find positive outcomes. Young people tend to vote libertarian more than old people. In other words, the older that Americans get, the more likely they are to vote for the old parties instead of voting Libertarian. It's as if the older they get, the less they care about the future! "Screw it! It's never worked before, but I'll just vote Republican/Democrat again!" Kids have way more skin in the game for the long run, and allowing the youth to be involved in politics without withholding their rights for arbitrary reasons will only accelerate the demise of the coercive state.
Government violates the non-aggression principle. We were consigned to slavery when our parents abandoned us to the state under a social security number. Then they try to confuse us by giving us the vote while giving nobody the option to opt out of their "club".
Aside from asserting sovereignty under the legal name fraud, the option that I've been working on is through technical disintermediation as a software dev. I lived through the protests of the 60's. This time it's different.
Vary accurate @ziodsoft although I did not live through the sixties. There is a movement by the state to take over parental rights so they may uniformly enforce more of the rights they have under the social security administration, IRS and believe it or not, USDA. That is why this post interest me. The only way to be able to take away parental rights is for the youth of a nation to become independent of the family unit by their own accord. I talked about this in a live radio show in 2011 in relation to some of the current events that were going on at that time in New Mexico. At first glance it seems the youth is ready for the independence the state desires. With statistics showing the next three generations showing the lowest birth rates in US history the time is prime for such an event to occur. Just my personal thoughts of course.
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"When I was a kid, I really resented age discrimination and I promised myself that when I crossed that line, I wouldn't forget the people still on the other side."
I apologize for ignoring your post, but this. Literally made the same promise.
The right to vote for children above 16 years of age should be given.
America has shown the way forward by ending race.
I think making real the democracy the elites claim us to be might be the first step toward a better world. Until things are what they say, people will not even be looking at reality.
Always come with the best
What we really need to do is teach actual politics to children.
Kids should be wiping the floors with these neo-liberal professors. Instead, the children are filled with order-following indoctrination that we need a strong leader. And so, you have to vote for that strong leader.
But really, all of these ages are meaningless. All of the arguments come down to, ulterior motives. We want cannon fodder before they become wise enough to say no, we are not charging those cannons. We want kids to drive so we don't have to drive them. We want kids not to vote, because they will vote differently then we want them to.
I like your idea in the middle, end the coercive state all together. I say teach your children to ignore the "laws" of the state & work ferverantly to expose their illegitimacy & have others break out of their indoctrination. Another component is to build alternitives that make the states "functions" obsolete.
DO NOT VOTE, it only encourages them.