[rayiner]

The article criticizes “taking us back to the 19th century,” but ironically dropping property qualifications for voting was an innovation of the Jacksonian era of the 1820s-1850s. There is a tendency to all efforts to generalize the franchise together, but that’s illogical. Just because race and sex are illegitimate qualifiers for voting doesn’t mean that all qualifiers for voting are necessarily illegitimate. Are we asserting that psychological science has taught us nothing in 200 years relevant to our evaluation of whether someone who can't hold down a job at a grocery store should be steering democracy to the same degree as a doctor or scientist? (And note this is an argument against interest here, since I belong to what’s clearly now the dumber party.)

[rainsford]

The fundamental problem is that almost any qualifiers you add that dictate voting rights gives those with voting rights a powerful incentive to run the country according to their own interests while ensuring those qualifiers continue to only apply to their in-group.

Would I rather live in a country run by scientists than deadbeats? Probably. But that's based on the idea that we live in a reasonably free society with social mobility where the difference between scientist and deadbeat is at least partially down to intelligence and work ethic. Hand all the power to the "scientists" though and it's not obvious that distinction would continue to be true past a few generations, because later generations of "scientist" didn't come up through the same free and equal society. I buy that the first generation of all-powerful scientists legitimately will want to turn the grocery store bagger into a future scientist. History suggests later generations will have no such interest.