Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, thinks “weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay,” is a good system. Drop “income” out of that and he’s right!
The problem is, like many others who have reached a level of wealth in the billions, he sees everything as a business venture. But government is not a business, it’s a mechanism for providing services.
I’d like to suggest that proportional voting is a good idea, but the basis for weighting votes should be the amount of burden a taxpayer absorbs in running it. The “all taxes suck” right wing propaganda think tanks love to point out that for the average Canadian “tax freedom day” falls somewhere near the middle of the year, so let’s use that as a baseline.
While people who earn less than the average pay less income taxes, they pay a disproportionately large amount of tax when you consider that “all taxes combined, hidden or otherwise” version that the anti-tax people tout. For an example, let’s take someone who buys 2,000 litres of gas over the course of a year at an average $1.50/l. That’s $3,000 spent on gas. The anti-tax people happily point out that half or more of that is hidden taxes, so we’ll call that $1,500 in taxes for the year. For someone who makes $150,000 a year, that’s 1% of gross income. For someone making just $50,000 it’s 3%. Even at higher marginal income tax rates, “tax freedom day” can come a lot earlier in the year if you’re a high income earner. The propaganda pushers try to convince average people that they’re being hosed, but their agenda is more money for the wealthy, fewer services for those who need them.
Let’s look at that “level of tax you pay” not in absolute dollars, but rather in the percentage of your total tax load compared to income. Let’s give that “average” Canadian 50 votes to work with, then more to the people who pay more, less to those who pay less. In this scenario, we’ll use Tobias’ salary from 2024: 205.5 million. If he can demonstrate that his total tax load for the year was in the range of $155 million, he can have his 50 votes too, but I’m willing to wager that all he’d get is a few votes—at best. Maybe we round up so he gets at least one.
Your say in how the government is formed should be proportional to how much you have to bear on a percentage basis, not an absolute dollar value. Letting the people who depend on the services the government provide have a bigger say in who runs it sounds like a darn fine idea to me. I’m willing to bet most people would be a lot happier with the results. Not Tobias though. He can go cry on a super yacht or something.
For most of my life, the rest of the world has viewed the US Democratic Party as centre-right on the global political scale, “Left” only in that they’re left of the Republican Party. From here, the Democrats seem pretty much unchanged (and thus less relevant). Meanwhile, the Republicans seem to have devolved from hard right globalists to proto-fascist nationalists. It is hard to see how anything good can come from this.
It also seems that a good number of Republican voters aren’t particularly comfortable with this shift. Unfortunately for the majority of American voters, party affiliation ranks up there with religious affiliation. A disturbing number of folks seem to vote not on the policy platform of their candidates, but instead on who their daddy’s daddy’s daddy voted for. A generational Republican voting for a Democrat is so radical that it’s on par with announcing they’d converted to Islam. This despite the obvious fact that the Republican party of more than a century ago has virtually nothing in common with the current incarnation.
For all it’s innumerable and increasingly obvious flaws1 there is still one mechanism for Republican voters to correct course and save the country from collapse: oust the Trump sycophants in the primaries! That’s it. Show up for the primaries, make sure the candidate that goes into an election under the Republican banner has the gumption to stand up to the wannabe fascist. Then you can vote for your daddy’s party and be true to your politico-religious traditions. Congress regains the ability to stop a President who thinks he’s a King from running roughshod over democracy, and irrational policies that harm your community while benefiting his buddies get stopped in their tracks. This is how the American system was designed but it is up to voters to ensure that the checks and balances inherent in the system actually work. Y’all might even stand a chance of returning the party to a place where calling it the Grand Old Party or the Party of Law and Order isn’t a sad, pathetic joke.
As an extra bonus, you can prevent (or at least delay) the collapse of the American Empire. So get out there and ensure that the Republican candidate is someone who says they’ll work for you, and not subjugate your interest to the whims of some deranged old fool in the Oval Office!
1. Party-affiliated judges for one. Give me a frigging break, that’s just so obviously dumb. And Sheriffs too? WHAT??
Right, so TFP, unbelievably back in the White House, threatened Canada with a swath of tariffs, and Canada responded with a plan to implement a swath of “eff off, eh?” tariffs in response. Eventually this resulted in a conversation between TFP and our Prime Minister where we agreed to do all of the things we were going to do anyway in exchange for a 30-day reprieve. Cool.
Except we also agreed to appoint a Fentanyl Czar, which admittedly is new. I mean it’s really new, because as far as I know we haven’t done the Czar-theatre thing in the past. Because, well, because it’s theatre. But now we have to, to buy favour with the idiot-in-chief. And I’m guessing we’ve only got 30 days to do it.
That’s not really enough time to use the current US model, which would be to find a sycophant who has been publicly pro-fentanyl, drag them up in some kind of confirmation-hearing theatre and ask them pointed questions where they lie and say now they’re as anti-Fentanyl as anti-Fentanyl can be.
No, we need to use a tried and true Canadian method. A lottery. We’ve got a well-oiled lottery apparatus here. I’m confident that we can set up the Fentanyl Czar Lottery in no time. We’ll sell tickets at ten bucks a pop, and then a few days before that 30-day “reprieve” runs out, select someone at random, give them the title, and pay their salary from the funds raised.
As we recover from yet another mass killing we hear a lot of smart people saying that the rise of hate is driven by a fear of loss of power. But they don’t clearly identify where that fear comes from.
At the same time, even though we might not be aware of it most of us already know where it comes from on a visceral level. We worry about our debt load, about what kind of world our children and grandchildren will grow up in, about the environment, about our jobs, our pensions, and ironically about the rise of hate.
Humans are a competitive species. Our political systems are a gossamer barrier between modern civilization and tribalism. It’s far too easy to transfer our anxieties into an identification of some “other” that we can blame for our worries. It is a dangerously small step from resentment to hatred, and from there to violence.
What few seem to notice, or at least to explicitly identify, is the correlation between the confidence of the middle class and the strength of social liberalism. If most people think the future will be bright and there will be more than enough prosperity to go around, suddenly we’re a lot less concerned about differences in race, religion, gender, and so on.
It is a cruel irony that this social conservatism has a affinity for autocratic politicians, precisely the type that are going to ensure that the wealth gap increases. The real way to alleviate social anxiety is to vote for a party that will actually work to redistribute wealth. Instead of gravitating towards populists the anxious middle class should be gravitating to socialism.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d assert that the Illuminati (or whoever) are manipulating society to achieve this result, but I just can’t see that. I think it’s just our base human nature. We all have a responsibility to fight these instincts, for nothing good can come from the alternative.
I’m getting really tired of online petitions that act like omnibus bills. The title says “Stop X” and I happen to think “Stop X” is a darn fine idea, but then you get to the actual text and it’s “Stop X, Build more Y, Change Z, and unionize everyone”.
That’s one less signature for “Stop X”, right there. We hate it when legislators pull this crap, maybe you should consider not doing the same thing in your petitions. Stick to a single issue.
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