RANDOM MORNING THOUGHTS : RAISE VOTING AGE TO 30, CIVIL SERVANTS CANNOT VOTE - COOL "WILD HORSE" IDEAS

I received the following yesterday from a Malay friend (you have to state the race) who is a CEO and types up stuff while he is being driven to work. He drives a Bentley which is super smooth - which makes it easy to type I suppose. Yo bro!  Lets see what he said:

Random Morning Thoughts - Unpopular Opinion

OTW to office. A thought about the right to vote. I think there must be strict requirements for the right to vote:

1. Minimum age is 30. You need a reasonable amount of life experiences to be a "reasonable" thinking adult. A job, losing jobs, possibly family responsibility, failures, etc. 30 is a good number to have had some sense of accountability, responsibility, life's hardships and its realities.

2. A Taxpayer. You must be paying taxes. Voting means electing legislatures to spend taxpayers money. If you have no skin in the game you have no right to decide on the people who are going to spend money that you did not contribute. Everything about ANY legislation relates to expenditure in one way or another. No exceptions.

3. Civil Servants and Government Linked Company (GLC) employees should be banned from voting. Because they effectively do not pay taxes. Their salaries are paid by taxpayer funds hence so are the taxes they "paid". GLCs are monopolies that originate from taxpayer funding. Same same. You do not ask your employee how much money you should allocate or spend to renovate your house.

4. A voter must pass a minimum citizenship civics course (the type a US naturalised citizen must take). You must understand basic Federal constitution and the civic duties of a citizen.

My Comments :

Well I dont think these thoughts are all that unpopular. That idea to lower the voting age to 18 was a silly idea that was not well thought at all.  It was thought up by a 25 year old unemployed kid who actually qualified for almost all the "disqualifications" mentioned above.

The question is why did the grown up adults around him at that time allow that silly idea to be pushed through Parliament? The answer is obvious : the grown ups too were dunggus. Now you are finding out that the Undi 18 have voted for the lebai fellows.  And some of the MUDA fellows lost their deposits. What a joke. 

But getting back to my friend's Random Morning Thoughts yesterday there is more behind his lament. The voter profile in our country is quite dismal.

The Chinese folks are pretty savvy in figuring out what they want. I dont agree fully with how they go about sorting out what they want but without a doubt the Chinese people discuss things in quite some depth about what is good for them. I agree with the process of how they discuss things. Plus the Chinese press does plenty analysis of what is going on in the country.

The Chinese people have the largest stake in the country. They still run the country's economy and they are the export engine for Malaysia. The Chinese have the greatest amount of money, wealth and their own sweat and tears invested in this country. 

I would listen to them very carefully. The old saying was "What is good for business is good for America". Likewise what is good for business is good for the Chinese. What is good for the Chinese is good for business. What is good for the Chinese is good for everyone else. (What is good for America may not be good for everyone else).

Like everyone else in Malaysia the Chinese are "victims" of our circumstances. Basically we are like rats shoved into a tiny cage. Rats of different colours with more or less of this colour than another etc. 

But these are cool rats. (Correction : WE are cool rats). Despite being in a cage we have learnt to vote - the democratic process. And we are peaceful. Now we just need to break out of that silly cage. The cage is not even a real cage. It is an imaginary cage - we have caged ourselves inside our minds.

Language, RACE, RELIGION but no particular ideology.  The first three can be summed up as the THREE STUPIDITIES.  Perhaps that is what the country is missing - a workable ideology. We dont have a modern, progressive, workable ideology. 

I have one - MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS, both literally and figuratively. 

Start and manage your own business and then "mind your own business".

I digress. Then we have the Malay voters and the Indian voters. It was either RM50 or a tin of Milo. Now maybe RM100. That still sums up a sizeable number of both. 

But the Malays are becoming more savvy now. So are the Indians. But not quick enough. 

The Indians are not a single block. Indians are actually made up of different "races".  They speak different languages.  They have different religions. They have different "geographies". Island folks are different from mainland folks.  

Maybe because of that everyone wants short term benefits only. Especially the older generation. Because their clock is ticking - time is short. Exacty like what the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew said. So they make short term plans, they support short term gains and vote for short sighted politicians.  This is called the short-cut route. Along this short cut route everyone gets short changed. And you also become easy prey for 'divide and rule'.

So we need better informed voters. Lets talk more, lets read more and lets discuss more. That is the only way. Keep the channels open.

The crooks will go the other way : lets talk less, lets read less, lets discuss less. Lets send the radio car. Lets go after the big mouths. Lets shut them up. 

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.