Fun fact: the only nation with a maximum voting age is the Holy See. They had some problems with senile cardinals making a few really wacky calls in papal elections, some centuries ago! The max is 80yo.
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That sounds nice and all but the way you use “I’d rather” seems to indicate you think I’ve advocated for setting standards and the ends of the bell curve which is obviously not the case.
Use, actual science, facts, and evidence to determine what the mean age for majority should be at set all age based prohibitions according to those findings.
You think the averages and bell curves will yield a singular date of rationality for all practical purposes?
Okay, we have very different opinion on that assumption.
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Fundamentally I disagree with the concept that all rights and permissions should happen at a single age. In practice all attempts at other systems have ended up horribly inconsistent and unfair, and a bright line starts looking real good. What we need is a good Schelling point. Collectively we’ve somehow landed on 18 or 21, not sure when or how that happened. In the olden days it might have been ~12/puberty/menarch. Biologically I might argue for 25, and cite prefrontal cortex development research, but I don’t really want to live in that world until a whole lot of other things change first (I do think it’s interesting that the car rental companies have long since figured out that cutoff for maturation). I’d guess 18-21 is a compromise - if we won’t expend the effort to choose the right age for each right or privilege, choose one in the middle for everything.
RE: schools - no, most schools will continue to deny that students have rights of any kind. Ironically, many will in practice continue to deny that students have minds.
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The only significant thing that will happen by lowering the voting age to 16 is that the turnout rate will look even worse. Teens may be liberal on certain issues, but also more inclined to believe meritocratic just-so stories, because that’s mainly what we feed teens to convince them to show up for school. For that reason, I think the actual yield of those teen votes would be an ideological wash.
Further, there’s a hidden danger of having teens prove their right to franchise by taking a civics class or passing this or that test; it turns the right to vote into something that has to be earned, and there’s nothing to stop someone from suggesting that everybody should have to pass some arbitrary test in order to retain their vote.
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To Quote the Movie Wild In The Streets, “14 or Fight” IIRC they created psychedelic concentration camps for anyone over 30. Shelly winters tripping behind the barbed wire was worth the price of admission
Don’t think a 16 year old has enough “life experience” to vote? Put her up against twenty 78-year-olds and let’s see who figures out which stories in their Facebook feed are real first.
LOL.
We have an entire country that can’t decide what is real. Is Trump’s inauguration the biggest? Did Hillary steal the nom from Bernie? Obama says our elections are unassailable. Now they’re not?
We don’t even have a yardstick to measure anymore.
As far as life experience, I had a discussion with a 16 year old a while back. I told them they were going to have their heart broken many times by other people. They insisted that they would see it coming and it would never happen. A month later…
oof ouch owie
We are looting this generation of kids who will have to live with the horrible choices we’re making.
They’re also benefiting. They get to play Smash because Wakanda is being stripped of Vibranium, and I doubt they’d head that off because those problems aren’t theirs. Teens show an amazing ability to be completely selfless and the most self-centered beings that exist. I think it’d probably average out on the self-interested side.
Expanding democracy is the only solution to the right’s attack on democracy.
Any “only solution” is not the only solution.
I’d argue that more education is the answer, but then we have Texas fucking up textbooks. Fighting corruption then. Oh wait, the most corrupt are the ones who make the laws to discourage it. Hit the streets, burn the system down. Whoops. A nation of overzealous force will break you and your efforts will be washed away with outrage over a youtube star.
Fuck it. Let animals vote. Books. Corn. Tea leaves. Prime numbers. Random cloud cover. Babies. Dead babies. Hundred sided dies. Anything goes. Who cares? The people that vote now got us here. Let’s do this.
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I think it’s a good idea but for the near term I think it’s best to get more younger people 18 and up to vote (registered and informed as to their rights in their respect localities). This year looks to be already galvanizing a generation (it’s unfortunate it had to be done through the death of 17 people).
Well in the sense that any money that you earn as a minor LEGALLY BELONGS to your parents.
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I think it’s important to understand what question we are asking. It seems to me the question is at what age is a person capable of making an informed and rational decision while understanding the long term impacts of that decision. Such a metric, in my view, is exactly what we need to set an age for sex, smoking, gun ownership, marriage, drinking, driving, etc etc Using that metric I would indeed say that there can be a singular age at which the average person can be considered an adult.
edit to add: let me put it to you this way - if a person at 18 can be tried, sentenced, and jailed as an adult, how can we justify not treating them as an adult in all things?
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I think it’s just that the goal of public policy isn’t to conform to a rational standard, it’s to achieve public good. Having sex, getting married, drinking, driving and voting are different things. If we determined the driving age based on empirical evidence about safe driving and we determined the age of sexual consent based on research about harms of having sex too young, there’s no reason to think we’d come up with the same number.
I started letting my toddlers play with lego when they stopped putting toys in their mouths, but I won’t let them use the oven until they are older. Different things are different.
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Yet when I was about 16 I remember being pissed off at New Labour rewriting clause IV of the Labour Party constitution. I missed out on voting in the 1997 General election by a few months but my views had not significantly changed in those two years (I would have begrudgingly voted Labour, if you want to know). I was Bennite until my mid 20s when, because of things that had happened to me, I swung further to the left.
When I was 10 I not only knew that Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, but Neil Kinnock was the Labour leader of the opposition and Paddy Ashdown was leader of the newly merged Liberal Democrats. I had a fair idea of what the three main parties in the UK and the Scottish National Party stood for even if I hadn’t read their manifestos.
But maybe I was just weird.
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The Youths™ currently skew significantly more liberal/progressive than other age groups.
The farther into being an adult I get, the more convinced I am that there isn’t one. This country has a weird and plainly unfounded obsession with age as an indicator of wisdom (look no further than our current dottering septuagenarian). Despite the minimum age requirement for president being just 35, there’s never been anyone younger than 42 elected to that office (T. Roosevelt, 1901), and fully 79% of the 44 presidents (counting Grover Cleveland as a single entity) were at least 50 when inaugurated. The median age of the Senate was 62 in 2013, more than twice the minimum requirement of 30. Only 5% of the current House of Representatives is younger than 40, and no one is younger than 30 (you only have to be 25 to serve there). By contrast, consider this list:
(It’s also disputed whether Hamilton was 21 or 19 at the time)
I agree that there’s a certain amount of development and maturation that’s needed before someone is responsible enough to vote. However, I’m not sure age is a terribly salient means of calculating that. 16-year-olds couldn’t vote in 2016, and look how well that went. Of all the dangerous, reckless, and irresponsible things a teenager can do, legally or not, voting doesn’t strike me as terribly high up on the charts. Or at least, no higher on the chart than it is for anyone else who’s already legally allowed to vote.
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Isn’t this the same forum where I read a near-constant stream of solid opinions that people under 18 cannot be held responsible for their criminal acts as they are not fully mature and cannot understand the consequences of their actions and should not be punished as an adult?
There is no science or even magic in the decision to make any given age the arbitrary “You are now a mature adult, go forth and vote and such”.
I’d favor no one votes who cannot pass the citizenship test required of aliens wanting to become Americans. Let anyone over the age of say twelve take the test at most once every four years and if they pass they can vote until the next cycle.
Make the test solid in such a way as to eliminate anyone’s subjective judgement to avoid the excesses of the past where similar things were used to exclude on the basis of race. No essays or anything subject to interpretation,
This is precisely why a single age based not on nebulous things like “too young” but rather when the person is capable of making and understanding the repercussions of a choice is a better metric.
And honestly, how can we defend treating someone like an adult for things like being sentenced life in prison while telling them they are too young to vote or drink? Either the state sees you and an adult or it doesn’t. Mucking about with different ages of majority for different activities is wildly unjust.
What public good is served by jailing a 17 year old person as an adult for life behind bars but telling them they aren’t adult enough to buy a beer?
Well none, but that’s because there’s no public good served by the former. Google tells me the youngest people to be sentenced as an adult in the US was 12. That’s not an argument in favour of getting 12-year-olds served at the bar, it’s just a terrible, stupid thing that happened.
And I think it’s worthwhile remembering that many of these laws don’t actually restrict people under 18 at all. Drinking age doesn’t make it illegal for you to drink when you are 12, it makes it illegal for adults to serve you drinks when you are 12. Voting and driving are rights acquire at a certain age, criminal penalties reflect a responsibility you acquire at a certain age, and age of consent and drinking age are obligations that we all share towards people under a certain age.
If you take age of consent in Canada the law strikes a balance between: protecting children from sexual harm, not criminalizing normal teenage sexuality, and recognizing that there are more determinants of vulnerability than age alone. The result is an age of consent of 16, but with a 5 year close-in-age exemption for 14 and 15 year olds, and a separate law that you can be charged with if you have sex with someone under 18 when you have a position or trust or authority.
There are places you could be criminally charged with rape for having sex with your 17-year-old boyfriend/girlfriend on your 18th birthday. That’s an example of a really dumb consequence of having a single age at which you draw a line and say “adults past here”.
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That simply does not follow. The fact that there is no public good being served by treating a child as an adult is not because having a common age of majority fails to serve the public good but rather because we lack one. If one where in place, such things could not take place.
It’s really more of a really dumb consequence of the state being involved in criminalizing basic biological imperatives than an argument against a common age of majority. As with the 12 year old being tried as an adult, this again is not an argument against a common age of majority and more of an argument for it. If it was set at 18 like military service, that child would have been treated appropriately.
I would assume that this would be done through a constitutional amendment, as it was when the voting age was dropped to 18.
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I stand corrected, thank you.
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I’m confused, are you suggesting there shouldn’t be any laws about adults having sex with minors?
I don’t see the relationship between driving age, drinking age, age of consent, age for military service, voting age, etc. Will you have to also be the age of majority to babysit? What about child labour laws, no more 15-year-olds getting jobs? Will I be charged risk a charge of negligence for leaving a 16-year-old unattended at the park the same way I would if I did the so to a 4-month-old? There are tons of different things that happen at different ages. The only connect between age of military service, drinking age and voting age is that we grew up in societies that happen to do them around the same time. There’s no reason for that and no reason they should be the same.
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