If Voting Changed Anything, They'd Abolish It
as Ken Livingstone famously entitled his autobiogrpahy.
Yet, bizarrely, in other news, Ken Livingstone stood for and was elected Mayor of London, twice. And changed some things.
There is a saying that if you don't vote, you have no right to complain. You know, I think that's phooey. Of course, you have the right to complain. After all, your taxes are paying for the political system.
I know that everybody in the Madmusings Community is very intelligent. Being highly intelligent, we can sometimes overlook the basics in pursuit of our loftier ideas.
What is Politics?
In my not so very humble opinion, it is the least worst system we have for arranging certain aspects of society.
Long long long ago, back in history, the idea of a Parliament emerged and evolved, when men - and it was always men - of status got together to advise the King. Or Queen - interesting counterpoint there. Skip forward to about the 18th or 19th century, roughly. These gentlemen of status figured that they could more easily influence the KingQueen, now evolved into the First Lord of the Treasury, if they formed semi-permanent alliances with each other.
Then they gave the vote, gradually, to nearly all men. And it was still men. And then to some women. And then to most women. And, finally, in 1969, to all adults. Big of them, don't you think.
'Give the vote?'. They realised they wanted it back. They realised that there were some very opposing views around. There were people, often not gentlemen of status. Often not gentlemen at all. Sometimes not even men, who had no interest in influencing the QueenKing First Lord of the Treasury (PM), but wanted to influence the influencers, or the people who picked the influencers. Television was invented. And that's how we got Party Politics.
The only other alternatives are tyranny or anarchy. Well, there are others, but I can't be arsed to go upstairs and blow the dust off Plato.
Anarchy would be attractive, if it wasn't for the peskiness of human nature. And economies of scale.
I'm just GC from the Block, and I quite like the idea that we get together communally to provide certain services that we couldn't really each provide for ourselves individually. Things like armies and streetlights and so on. They make me feel secure, and that is really important. But they cost money, which we grudgingly, but being mature rational adults, ultimately willingly, pay for in some sort of fair-ish way. We call that payment taxes. I don't suppose many people could cogently diasgree with the need for us communely paying some money for things like armies and street lights.
But then the debate starts at what else it is desirable or efficient to provide in this way. And that's where Party Politics come in, because broadly speaking different political parties disagree about what public services should be provided this way; to what extent; and how they should be managed. There is also an ideological background to this, but we're not being partisan today.
And we vote because wish to express our preferences about the previous paragraph. Not only that, we also want our preferred level to be the one that prevails.
Tomorrow, or sometime, we opine that My Vote is Worthless.
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