Right to vote

When the building is on fire, you don't call for friends or bypassers, you want the firefighters.
When you are victim of a crime, you don't go to plumber or professor, you want the police or detectives.
When your roof is leaking you dont go to shopkeepers nor to violin players, you want a building/roof specialist kind of person.
And when you are sick you usually tend to go to a medical doctor and wouldn't seek the help of an economist or mathematician, right?

And in all those cases, you dont ask various peple nearby for their vote on what to do. Imagine if police detectives were to start discussing with all near passerbys how to solve the crime. Or better, on how to carry the reanimation procedure on the victim. Sounds like a joke?

Change of subjects. Kasparov versus The World. The World was an Internet free-for-all who voted on their moves. Check this out: it was clear from a look at the voting results that, although the World Team was managing to pick theoretically correct moves, many rank amateurs were voting as well. Demonstrably bad moves were garnering a significant percentage of the votes; even worse, on move 12, about 2.4% of the voters chose illegal moves which didn't get the World Team out of check! (MSN declined to release the raw vote totals, but apparently over five thousand people were voting on each move.) Third, the World Team was not coordinating well with itself on the bulletin board. Typical posts were of the form, "My suggested move is brilliant, and if you don't vote for it, you are an idiot!". Much more energy was being spent on flame wars than on analysis.

Doesn't it remind you of something?

Why is it that when it comes to politics, we dont distinguish between people's backgrounds and experience? It is a fact that majority fells victim to PRs aka marketing, and for them nice catch-phrases and candidate good looks are more important then the details of their political programme. After all, who has the time to dive into those boring brochures, not to mention understand all economic and sociologic terms in them - not to mention looking for older ones, seeing if the politician and his party have kept their old promises and such?

So the bottom line is we show more responsibility when it comes to almost everything - except politics, which in the ends deals only with such trivial matters as allocation of national resources, collecting taxes, creating and enforcing laws...

Here is my solution: equal right to vote is not the best solution. People are NOT equale. Let's face it, some are plain dumb, others are brilliant, and many are specialist at their field and hobbies but complete lamers at others. For now, we have no choice but to elect representatives - politicians. But in the future, when we will be able to decide ourselves by e-voting, and the caste of politicans goes to the rubber heap to rest alongsides nobles, aristocrats and such, before each vote the voter should be subject to a test determining his qualifications to vote on that matter.

Good will is not good enough, check your local road to hell for more info. If you want to have a say about something, make sure you know what you are speaking. Speach is silver, silence is gold, and just being able to say 'yes' or 'no' proves only that you can make some coherent sounds - but not that you now anything else.

Intelligence is a responsibilty. Wisdom is earned. And if some people just don't give a damn about them, I say they have no right to vote on my fate. Keep that in mind.