Parent proxy voting for children is in the news and it's gone viral!

On Ross Douthat's podcast, Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn proposed giving 20-somethings extra votes, rather than parents, because “young people — not people who are raising families — will have the best insight into the interests of children” and “Part of our goal as a society is trying to make sure that children aren’t the hostages of their parents." Douthat responded: "I think that’s daft. I think it’s absurd to imagine that a 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do." And a meme was born!

It happens that THE leading article on this subject -- "Give Parents the Vote" -- was written by Rationally Based’s very own Joshua Kleinfeld! So in this episode, Josh and co-hosts Kathryn Johnson and Ilan Wurman examine the proposal that parents should be able to vote on behalf of their minor children — and why the Left wants to give that power to anyone BUT parents.

Some highlights:

• Children are nearly a QUARTER of the citizenry, and parents and children together are nearly half of the citizenry — but have just 19% of the vote. Adults without children are just over half the citizenry but have about THREE-QUARTERS of the vote. The result is policies — like COVID school closures, debt-financed entitlements, and more — that systematically shortchange the young.
• Children ALREADY count for apportionment: they determine each state’s seats in Congress, electoral votes for the President, and the drawing of legislative districts. But because they can’t vote and their parents can’t vote for them, their voting power is simply redistributed to all the adults in their districts. The most powerful voter in America is a childless adult in a district with plenty of children.
• Parent proxy voting is purely a matter of state law. Any state could independently adopt it tomorrow for both federal and state elections without violating the Constitution or any federal statute. It is also feasible. And it is consistent with the role parents have in every other context — defending their children’s interests in contexts from the schools to hospitals to courtrooms.
• The world-historic fall in the birth rate means that, for the first time in American history, most adults are not parents. The collapse in the birth rate has made the political divergence between parents and the childless newly consequential. Arguably there is NO other intervention that would have more far-reaching effects on American politics than giving parents the vote.

This is the rational — and based — discussion of who should speak for the next generation that you won’t hear anywhere else.

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