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"Power," as Massachusetts statesman Daniel Webster pointed out in the Commonwealth's 1820 Constitutional Convention, "naturally and necessarily follows property." Virginia's Benjamin Watkins Leigh echoed the sentiment that same year when he declared that power and property could be separated, but not divorced. Either those with property would seize power, or those with power would seize property.

So, what has this got to do with voting?

The issue in the Constitutional Conventions of 1820 was whether to extend the voting franchise to white males over the age of 21 who did not own property - meaning income generating property, or capital. Both Webster and Leigh opposed the change in the Constitution, believing that political power without economic power was either an illusion or a recipe for disaster.

A number of political commentators with a libertarian mindset, starting as early as Alexis de Tocqueville and his "Memoir on Pauperism" accurately predicted that if people without property could vote, they would, on the whole, vote to take away property from those who had it, for the ultimate benefit of those who did not have it.

By and large, this prediction has been proven accurate. Private property - the basis (according to Locke and Sydney) of a sound political order, has been systematically eroded as the proportion of the population without effective or direct ownership of a meaningful capital stake has declined. Virtually no country in the world has failed to implement nearly all of Marx and Engels "Ten Point Plan" in "The Communist Manifesto" for the destruction of property and the collapse of the capitalist system, especially the progressive income tax, a tax designed specifically to redistribute wealth from those who have to those who do not.

Should we thus embrace capitalism with all its flaws? Defining "capitalism" as a system in which a few people own the means of production and everyone else works for wages - no. What we need is a system that duplicates what Abraham Lincoln accomplished with the 1862 Homestead Act to distribute an equitable share of land to as many people as possible. Extending the same concept to industrial and other assets (thereby avoiding the injustice of redistributing land from Native Americans for the benefit of settlers from Europe), and limiting it to newly-created wealth-producing assets (thereby leaving the currently wealthy secure in their accumulations), has the potential to extend economic democracy to support political democracy; such a "capital homestead" would, logically, empower the owner with a political vote.

If participating in capital homesteading were truly democratic - that is, every citizen had equal access to the means of becoming an owner, as George Mason stated as a basic right in the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 12 June 1776 - then it would make sense that parents could have as many votes as they had dependent children ... if and only if each of those children had direct ownership of a capital homestead. They would thus be property owners, and entitled to the political power that is inherent in ownership, if only to protect that property. Since parents have the duty to exercise rights on behalf of dependent children, they would vote on behalf of the children, except in individual cases where a court had determined that a dependent child was competent to exercise his or her own franchise before reaching majority.

Without widespread ownership of the means of production, however, what you'd see is exactly what you'd expect: people having children just to gain more political power, instead of letting families decide for themselves how big they should be.

Learn more about this author, Michael Greaney.
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