Eligible to Vote

I was reading today's post by Pearls over at My Modern Country Home, and some thoughts came up. She states that she does not agree with the guy in the video about having forced service. Well Good! Because neither do I. However, in her comments section, someone happened to mention Israel and how compulsory service works there. I'm going to leave this here and you can go over to her blog and read the comments there, but it did bring up some memories of a book I have discussed in the past... Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein.

In the book, military service is not mandatory. Heck, they will try to discourage their citizens, but if the citizen really wants to serve, they will not turn anyone away. If you serve, you become a Citizen and you can then vote and run for public office. If you don't serve, you are not a second class citizen or anything, you just don't get a vote. In the book, there are non-Citizens that have so much money that they could buy just about anything. Signing up to serve means you are signing up for a 2 year tour of duty. The theory behind this being that you put the active ones in charge of the people who just don't care enough.

Now, I am not advocating that we move to this system. But you know, it would remove from the voting pool those who don't care enough to do their own research on political candidates. Hmmm... and looking at America today, there would be a definite shrinking of the voting pool. No, no. "We the People" doesn't exclude lazy, ill-informed, non-"politically oriented" people.

But it would be interesting, wouldn't it?