I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.
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Notes -
This whole subject reminds me that I’ve long thought it would be a good change for the president to be appointed by state legislatures on a weighted majority-of-majorities basis, with a weighting system based on census data. So much of the issues with American politics are because congress has zero accountability to the states’ governments themselves, only to individual voters to some extent.
In general, direct elections to the federal level could be done away with as much as possible. It’s inefficient and confusing for people not only to elect 3+ levels of representative but then to do so in multiple forms (eg bicameral states, and congress itself for both senators and reps).
Recentering more politics around the states makes state politics more important and means that any president with a more radical plan is likely to be supported by a large ground-up movement in state houses across the country, instead of Trump being a one man band whose movement largely begins and ends with him.
Congratulations you've accidentally reinvented the electoral college.
Sure, and I think that was a better system. But even the originalists don’t seem to want to restore core aspects of American democracy like limiting the vote to property owners. $500,000 would be a good starting point.
Most counties already have records of owner occupiers of houses based on the tax system. It’s not that hard to restrict the franchise to people with provable residence and property, and it in general shows a degree of future orientation, good decision making, maturity, etc.
More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.
I think people forget that democracy is a technology that improves upon what came previously -- violence. Instead of fighting and some dying, we can just count the fighters on each side and declare a probable winner without bloodshed. If the counting is a proxy for potential fighting power, whom should be counted? Men (because men do almost all the fighting) and landowners (because non-landowners have no incentive to stay and fight). Women's suffrage was a turning point in the republic, because it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth.
It only changes the incentive structure up to a point, though. Places where I've rented I haven't hesitated to bitch about every problem because it's the landlord's responsibility to fix and not mine. For example, years ago I rented an apartment that had a powder room downstairs and a full bath upstairs. One day the toilet in the powder room wouldn't stop running, and my cursory examination of the internal mechanism revealed no obvious malfunction that I could easily remedy. So I shut the water off at the valve, called the landlady, and insisted she fix it. She sent her husband over and I showed him the problem, and he had a plumber come out to give an estimate. I have no idea how much the repair cost, but it was evidently enough for the husband to try to talk me out of getting the work done. He didn't see what the problem was since there was a perfectly operational bathroom upstairs. Realistically, he was right — I rarely used the downstairs bathroom to begin with, being forced to go upstairs in times when I otherwise would have used the powder room was only a trifling inconvenience, and I would have paid the same amount for the place if it hadn't come with a powder room to begin with. Nonetheless, I insisted that he get it fixed. He ended up redoing the whole powder room because he had evidently planned on doing that when I moved out but decided that if he was sending a guy in there he might as well get everything done now if I didn't mind. If that had been my house I probably just would have shut the water off and procrastinated fixing it until it was convenient for me.
This is a relatively minor example, but with homeowners these little decisions compound more than you'd think. When I was looking to buy I noticed that there was almost a direct correlation between how long someone had owned a house and how much work needed to be done. For instance, there were several houses I looked at that were built in the '60s and being sold by the original owners or their families after these owners either passed away or went into assisted living. Almost all of them hadn't been updated since the '60s, except for essential stuff like heating and plumbing (and often this was only barely good enough; one house I was told that the only problem with the roof was that there was a leak in '96 but they patched it an it hadn't leaked since. This was in 2016 so even if the roof was relatively new in '96 it would have been due for a replacement soon, and I doubt the roof was new when it started leaking). If a homeowner only plans on leaving in a coffin, it's hard to convince them that they need to spend large sums of their already limited incomes on purely cosmetic upgrades, like new kitchens, bathrooms, flooring, etc. In other words, they're more concerned with keeping the dwelling habitable than in enhancing the value of the property.
I didn't literally mean the apartment you live in. I meant the neighborhood/city/region/state/country (I was purposefully vague about the scope).
You're talking about things that affect you. Of course you care about the condition of your literal apartment when you can force the landlord to fix it free of charge. But people passing through generally aren't lobbying for long-term infrastructure improvements of the town.
I don't know if that's necessarily true, though. Places like New York City have a lot of long-term renters. On the other side of the coin, a lot of the poorest ghettos have long-term renters who won't leave the neighborhood unless rising prices force them out. Conversely, it's trendy on the east coast for outdoorsy types to move out west for a few years just to see what it's like. Sure, some of these people rent, and some of them stay long-term, but a surprisingly large number of them buy houses and sell them a few years later. When interest rates were low anyone with the cash on hand would buy, and a lot of people made out like bandits when they sold a few years later and bought less expensive houses back east with cash.
The other thing is that most people aren't particularly engaged politically, regardless of whether they buy or rent. When was the last time you attended a meeting of your local government? Unlike watching C-Span you can actually address the board, and they might take your opinion into consideration. They also almost always happen in the evening, except maybe in big cities with full-time politicians. I've attended several over the years for various reasons. They're only ever busy if there's some controversial item on the agenda, and even then it's rarely busier than a busy voting precinct. On an average night, there's usually only one or two spectators.
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Sure, it leads to rent seeking.
Indeed. We in the big cities vote ourselves the provincials wealth by limiting housing construction. Very good for me personally but hardly good for the economy overall.
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What stops the enfranchised elite from voting themselves other people's wealth (e.g. enclosure)?
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I hear this and it's such a strange concept to me. I live in an expensive west coast city. The people I know with close ties and care about the place are locals who, for the most part, have parents who own houses because they got into the market so long ago, and they can't imagine ever being able to afford to buy instead of renting. The people who own houses are either the aforementioned older generation or the people who moved here for high-paying jobs and can actually afford to buy into the market, but will happily hop off to some other city if the opportunity presents itself because the cost of owning a home just isn't a big deal to them. Obviously, I'm generalizing and a lot of people fall into neither group, but those two are very common in my experience and make me quite suspicious of claims that "landowner" is a remotely good proxy for "cares about the local government".
If you own a home, you can sell it, but the price you get is (to a first-order approximation) the prosperity of the surrounding area. A renter just picks up and leaves and gets nothing no mater how well or poorly the area is doing.
Data beats theory. Unless you’ve observed otherwise yourself, @token_progressive is the only one providing (anec)data here
Then I'll say the opposite as @token_progressive: In my experience, a) the homeowners I know explicitly state that they plan to stay in their house for a long time b) the renters I know explicitly state that part of the reason why they wouldn't take a mortgage to own a home is because they don't want to be tied to one place and finally c) the homeowners I know, even if they end up selling their house, do in fact stay mostly in one place and are very invested into a tight-knit community there while d) the renters do in fact end up travelling somewhere else very often. Mind you that I very clearly belong to the second category.
But I'm not living in an ultra-expensive large american city, merely in a moderately expensive middle size city.
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