[lit-ideas] Re: Paying taxes for months on end
- From: Judy Evans <judithevans001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 28 May 2005 15:06:29 +0100
Saturday, May 28, 2005, 2:13:21 PM, Phil Enns wrote:
JE> "I 'have the power to' vote and I have the right to vote."
> The two are semantically equivalent. That is, one's right to vote is
> nothing more than the recognition by government that one can act to> vote.
I suppose this is my fault: I should have explained what I meant by
"power to vote", I didn't because it would have taken too long. I
haven't got the time to do it properly at the moment, so let me simply say that
there are people who have the right to vote (in that they belong to
the category of people entitled to vote and are listed on the
electoral register) who are unable to vote for reasons of physical
disability combined with social isolation etc..
That is
PE>the recognition by government that one can act to vote.
is a "recognition by government" that one belongs to the category of
persons who are legally entitled to vote by reason of their
citizenship (etc.) *and* their listing on an official register. It
says nothing about any physical or logistic barriers to one's
exercising that right albeit in practice, governments do take steps
(local polling stations, ramps at their entrance, postal voting
provisions) aimed at enabling those who might otherwise be unable to
vote.
("Ability/capability", you may say, is not "power". But
"ability/capability" is "power" in my other examples, too; simply,
they are less complex.)
But perhaps it is not my fault. Shouldn't I have assumed you'd know
I meant something like that?
You haven't mentioned by other examples. Why? I realised too late that
one -- the supermarket one -- was badly flawedm but the "neighbours"
example seems to me to hold.
Incidentally, if
PE> one's right to vote is
PE> nothing more than the recognition by government that one can act to
PE> vote.
(and I think it may be) would we say that blacks who failed biased literacy
tests in Southern counties had no right to vote? I think we can agree
that they had no power to vote.
What about blacks who were registered
to vote but prevented from voting by harassment? Might we say they
had a right to vote but lacked the power to vote?
--
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