Renters of the World, Unite!

Per  ThinkProgress by way of Jonathan Chait, Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips said on the Tea Party Nation hosted radio program:

"The Founding Fathers originally said, they put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote. It wasn’t you were just a citizen and you got to vote. Some of the restrictions, you know, you obviously would not think about today. But one of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community. If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners."

It's hard to know how to respond to this sort of thinking other than to simply laugh.  At the risk of taking this seriously, though, a couple of points are worth mentioning:

1.  I assume that Phillips is referring to real property, e.g., land, houses, condos, buildings, etc.  But plenty of people don't own their own residence but do own substantial amounts of stocks, mutual funds, Treasury bonds, etc.  (Ownership of a New York City cooperative apartment presents its own complication.)  Would that be sufficient to satisfy Phillips that these people have a "vested stake" in the community?  Back in my college days (early 1970's), I had a Political Science 101 professor who told us that there would be no revolution in this country because so many of the citizens here were invested in stocks and, therefore, had a vested interest in the stability of the system.

2.  How much property ownership would be enough to satisfy Phillips?  Will it matter how much your mortgage is?

3.  I think Phillips has this backward.  Poor people, who generally don't own real property, are much more vested in the community that wealthy people are.  Poor people can't really go anywhere else; they can't pick up and move to Paris or South America, or even Canada.  They are stuck here as citizens and residents, for better or worse.   On the other hand, a very wealthy person with homes in the U.S., the Bahamas and the South of France can relocate outside the U.S. at any time.  Arguably, those people are less vested in this country because of their ability to reside elsewhere.  Perhaps we should flip Phillips' approach and deny voting rights to the super-wealthy.

4.  The poor are also much more dependent upon government entitlement programs (Medicaid, Social Security, etc.) than are the wealthy, and in this sense they are much more invested in the country. 

By the way, I heard Mark Levin raise this same issue about 18 months or 2 years ago, shortly after Obama's election, so I don't think Phillips is simply an outlier on this point.  I wonder what Sarah Palin thinks of this?