Right to vote is something that must be sacred
VERY few things are sacred in politics, although the right to vote should be one of them.
The more votes cast, the better the democratic system should work, but it’s only one vote per person – unlike the suggestion from Donald Trump: ‘Let them send it in and let them go vote, and if their system’s as good as they say it is, then obviously they won’t be able to vote.’ This is either criminal or should be.
Given his concerns about the validity of postal voting, he should not be asking people to put it to the test. Testing a system by trying to break it is a proper approach when testing the strength of a metal beam, but testing which snakes are poisonous by letting them bite you isn’t advised, and it is quite possible his poisonous rhetoric might come back to bite him in the election.
Trust the electoral system; after all, it elected you last time and that wasn’t a mistake. Or was it? DENNIS FITZGERALD,
Melbourne, Australia.
Trump not to blame
DENNIS Fitzgerald (Letters, yesterday) is critical of Trump going to Kenosha on his campaign trail because it’s a place of ‘mourning’.
Kenosha is more a city in ruin because of rioting and arson rather than a peaceful constituency. This terror was not of Trump’s making, and to infer that he, as president of the US, should not go there gives credence to anarchy – the acceptable Democratic Party version, perhaps. ROBERT SULLIVAN,
Bantry, Co. Cork.
Pension problems
ECONOMIST Jim Power (Mail, Monday) does the State a great service by highlighting an approaching crisis which has been enthusiastically ignored by economists, politicians and media.
The great question posed, which demands an urgent answer, is how pensions are to be paid in the future. Mr Power, and those colleagues who dared mention the problem at all, suggest we may have to work substantially longer into old age to create funds necessary to provide for increasing numbers and extending longevity. Such an approach would indicate a serious misunderstanding of technological advance and the enormous change wrought on economic activity, especially in areas of work elimination by digital communication, automation and robotics. Such development will warrant much earlier retirement, perhaps in people’s early 60s or late 50s, to conserve sufficient work so that employment at adequate levels can be sustained.
Retirement income of the future will be paid from current Government expenditure, as with practically all current State retirement remuneration. Pensions are not determined by how long or how hard people work. They are dependent on the amount of wealth generated and available to pay retirement income. The good news is that more wealth can be generated in this new technological era than at any other time of human existence; more than enough to pay substantially increasing numbers of adequate pensions from earlier retirement.
The fly in the ointment, however, is that the enormous wealth created is usurped and hoarded by increasing numbers of mammoth corporations, who claim exclusive ownership of sources of such wealth, and many of whom use enormous power and influence to avoid payment of adequate taxation to sustain the society that facilitated their phenomenal growth, and consume the gadgetry and services from which they make and hoard obscene profit.
Henry Ford, by raising workers’ pay by more than 100% in 1914, created the consumer society by turning employees into customers. His gesture is being reversed at the moment as the present trend, aided by the genius of technology, is to hoard wealth, excluding increasing numbers of employees from adequate income.
Unless combined government action confronts and restrains these mammoth corporations, and makes them pay their way, stable society will collapse, democracy will disintegrate and extreme politics will generate so much hostility and chaos that civilization itself might perish.
PÁDRAIC NEARY, Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo.