| > Why is it that preventing the old from voting is "bigotry", whilst preventing the young from voting is merely an act prudence? There are lots of laws that restrict certain rights and privileges to adults only, and for fairly sensible reasons. No one wants to be governed by children. Maybe you want to lower the age of adulthood, and maybe that's possible, but it's something we'd need to do across the board. There's also the troubling idea that you'd be taking the franchise away from people who already have it, rather than simply not extending it to people who do have it. Finally, why would allowing people to participate in the democratic system at age 13 make them take an active interest in politics when allowing people to participate in the democratic system at age 18 does not? The root problem is that young people don't really have vested interests yet. They don't have jobs, or property, or children they're sending to school. When the 26th Amendment was passed, they did have the vested interest of not being drafted, I'll give you that, but that went away. Extending the vote to people who have even fewer vested interests won't have the desired effect. I actually think that lowering the age of majority across the board to around 16 would be a good idea. You'd have to do it sensibly, though. So at age 16, compulsory education is over and you begin two years of national service, but you also immediately get voting and other rights. I can see something like that working. > Net knowledge growth rate usually decreases significantly with age. You'll likely accumulate more knowledge between now and when you're 75, but certainly not three times more[0]. I was taking that into account, though. I'll probably know two and a half times more by the time I'm 50 ;) |