EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Educated people can also sell their votes
Recently, the idea of limiting the right to vote in the democratic process based on minimum educational attainment has been developing in the Bulgarian public sphere. The idea is to interrupt the vicious practice of buying and selling votes before elections, especially in relation to one of the minorities in Bulgaria, which is not famous for its special educational achievements. Proponents of this idea believe that in this way only “worthy parties and individuals” will enter parliament, because supposedly there is no way that educated people can vote unreasonably or destructively. This text aims to refute this misconception, referring to the many inherent problems of democracy.
Democracy is soft socialism
First of all, we must clarify that beyond the sentimental and abstract language of the “will of the sovereign”, democracy is based on money and, above all, voting on how we will manage our common property - the state - and how large it will be. In addition, we must define what a destructive and unreasonable vote means. All policies that lead to the undermining of the economic position of one country compared to others in the world, and which accordingly create incentives for the migration of its population to other countries, are harmful and unreasonable. Most such policies revolve around the idea of overspending and the rising taxes that result from it. As in Greece and Venezuela. Unfortunately, the democratic system stimulates exactly this type of voting, and it is far from unreasonable for the voter himself, because voting is free, and the benefits are potentially much greater from an individual point of view, without a clear constitutional framework for the limits of democracy.
Educated doesn't necessarily mean fiscally conservative
From the theory of public choice we know that due to the different property status of citizens, each of them may have radically different interests and ideas about the role of the state in it. The poorer ones have an interest in voting for more state spending, from which they will be able to benefit, sometimes constructively, sometimes consumerly, which respectively have to be paid by the richer ones. This behavior is often observed even when taxes for the rich will have to be increased, which will hurt the career prospects of the poor, who are not necessarily owners of companies and capital.
Contrary to popular belief, poor is not always the same as ignorant and vice versa. Specifically, in Bulgaria there are many people with higher and higher education who work in unpromising sectors, for example because they are passionate about them, but this does not prevent them from complaining about their poor financial situation. These people would consider that a nobler cause than kebabs before the elections would be more secured government jobs for more people, because that is what they heard at universities from their Marxist professors that it was possible. We will not ruin our health at work - and we will have enough to live comfortably. What is wrong with that?
And we must not forget what proportion of the educated in Bulgaria are old university socialist-nostalgics who keep repeating to themselves, their children and grandchildren how “once upon a time it was better”, and supposedly we should take the worst things of “those days” to bring them back. These people vote en masse for the socialist party, which few adequate people would say is an example of a “decent party and individuals”.
And the rich can parasitize on the poor and ignorant
Another important element is that the disempowerment of a group of the population from its voice in the management of common property gives all the prerequisites for the people who vote to repress the disempowered group, because it continues to contribute to state property through its taxes, no matter how small they are. This cannot be a feature of any civilized society. People from the mentioned minority also pay taxes and among them there are quite a few entrepreneurs who lack an educational document.
And even if we exclude this argument, this is not the only way in which the educated, who are often much richer, can live off the backs of the poor. The educated could vote for politicians and policies that support high VAT, at the expense of direct taxes. Value-added tax is a highly regressive tax, because poor people are not able to save as much as the rich, and they do not have companies through which they can pass their large purchases, as our wealthier fellow citizens so often do, in order to get their tax back.
For democracy, you need to know your neighbor.
Democracy is a beautiful and good idea, but it can only work adequately in an environment where each voter knows personally the others who have the right to vote, and consciously accepts that their vote will affect him. This is the only pragmatic and objectively measurable approach to voting. This means that democracy is practically applicable without undesirable consequences only in small communities, where people know each other like the back of their teeth. In a large nation-state like Bulgaria, however, people seemingly agree that the opinion of their fellow citizens should weigh on them, based only on their language and names, but without actually knowing them. And that is why everyone is always dissatisfied with the results of the elections.
Solution? Clear constitutional frameworks
One way to blunt the bad effects of democracy is to pass constitutional amendments that spell out clearly and unambiguously what the state can take from its citizens. For example, the state cannot spend more than X% of GDP. But GDP is an imperfect measure in all its measurement methods, because there are ways for the government to manipulate the data depending on the position in the business cycle and thus push the national product higher in order to spend more.
A better way would be if government spending were recorded as a share of the amount of cash and liquid savings of citizens in banks. On the one hand, this would put government spending in the frame of the real factor determining the future economic prosperity of a nation - no investment can be made if it has not been set aside beforehand. On the other hand, however, this would stimulate citizens to be inventive and develop businesses with their money, exchanging it for machines and technologies that will actually make them richer, instead of lazily soaking it in banks for close to 0 interest rates.
