AIBU to think if you're a net negative in tax you shouldn't be able to vote?

TLDR words have actual meanings. If everything is reduced to “luck”, it’s not surprising that nihilism extends to language as well. Redefining words has been a well known and deliberate tactic in communist movements, particularly in Marxist Leninist traditions. If you treat definitions as arbitrary, there’s nothing left to learn and no way to fail, which conveniently supports wealth redistribution and state intervention if that's what you want.

Where you are born is definitely considered luck! Of course someone with a profound disability (for example) is lucky if they are born somewhere with a good medical system and some state support for people unable to work. My cousin has a rare genetic disorder and is now in his early 50s and would never have survived his infancy in many countries. Why wouldn't this be luck - are you suggesting some sort of karma style thing where he deserved to be born here?

I detest how ‘luck’ is used to devalue hard earned financial stability or success, yet somehow it’s never considered ‘luck’ to live in a country with a welfare state.

Such nihilism @TheCompactPussycat , this appeal to “luck”. Love, loyalty, and obligation come before abstract ideas of justice. Calling inheritance “luck” is pure cope, a way of avoiding the biological reality of financial, genetic, and emotional inheritance, and the obligations that flow from it, whether to pass it on or not to (in the case of negative patterns). It’s used to shift responsibility and duty away from families and towards the state. That’s the real argument being made. There's an element of luck in all lives but it isn't luck who your parents are, nor the family of origin. Those are the results of decisions of a group, by people bound together.

The idea that birth is “luck” only works if children are interchangeable units. In reality, they’re the biological and cultural continuation of countless generations. The biological reality is simple. Children receive what their parents can provide because that is how families work. The idea that the family we’re born into, our talents and our parents are merely a matter of luck collapses under even basic scrutiny. A child born into a stable, educated, disciplined family is not the beneficiary of chance, but of accumulated choices and pressures stretching back decades or centuries in a generational struggle for survival and meaning. The child deserves it in the same way the parent deserves it, because it’s a torch passed on, a duty and an obligation.

You could no more swap them at birth than an IKEA manual could produce an 18th century Chippendale cabinet. The word “luck” is being used to make a moral argument that children don’t deserve what their parents give them. Parents have every right to invest in their children and to decide that their children deserve it. That does not give anyone else the right to redistribute it or write it off. If, like me, you didn’t have parents who could do that, then yes, that’s hard luck in the sense you should get over it and get on with it. But it doesn’t create a moral claim over the investments other parents make in their children’s education and upbringing.

If you want to operate in reality rather than a beautiful lie, you need to accept that outcomes are unequal and often shaped by circumstance. Treating outcomes as unjust leads to central planning, which requires coercion and destroys freedom and responsibility.

As Roger Scruton put it, calling it “luck” turns gratitude into resentment, obligation into entitlement, and families into obstacles to fairness. That framing invites the state to step in, and that is cruel to children and cruel to people, because it teaches them that nothing is owed, nothing is earned, and nothing really means anything.

The argument reminds me of the ending of Withnail and I. It’s all luck, right? Nothing means anything, right?

“I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

So to wrap up this rant. Wealth and debt are generational. Individual choices and external events clearly matter, but starting points are heavily shaped by what is passed down, assets and liabilities included. Each generation has a duty to do better, give better, and leave something stronger behind.

The “luck” argument is a dead-end. It's nihilism and cope dressed up as fairness by intellectuals driven by a will to power over the state, who consistently appeal to those on the fringes, not to solve their problems, but to legitimise intervention on their behalf.

So far the poll on this post...
->180 votes from people who understand that.
-> 634 votes from people who think the state is coming to save them.

Such nihilism @TheCompactPussycat , this appeal to “luck”. Love, loyalty, and obligation come before abstract ideas of justice. Calling inheritance “luck” is pure cope, a way of avoiding the biological reality of financial, genetic, and emotional inheritance, and the obligations that flow from it, whether to pass it on or not to (in the case of negative patterns). It’s used to shift responsibility and duty away from families and towards the state. That’s the real argument being made. There's an element of luck in all lives but it isn't luck who your parents are, nor the family of origin. Those are the results of decisions of a group, by people bound together.

The idea that birth is “luck” only works if children are interchangeable units. In reality, they’re the biological and cultural continuation of countless generations. The biological reality is simple. Children receive what their parents can provide because that is how families work. The idea that the family we’re born into, our talents and our parents are merely a matter of luck collapses under even basic scrutiny. A child born into a stable, educated, disciplined family is not the beneficiary of chance, but of accumulated choices and pressures stretching back decades or centuries in a generational struggle for survival and meaning. The child deserves it in the same way the parent deserves it, because it’s a torch passed on, a duty and an obligation.

You could no more swap them at birth than an IKEA manual could produce an 18th century Chippendale cabinet. The word “luck” is being used to make a moral argument that children don’t deserve what their parents give them. Parents have every right to invest in their children and to decide that their children deserve it. That does not give anyone else the right to redistribute it or write it off. If, like me, you didn’t have parents who could do that, then yes, that’s hard luck in the sense you should get over it and get on with it. But it doesn’t create a moral claim over the investments other parents make in their children’s education and upbringing.

If you want to operate in reality rather than a beautiful lie, you need to accept that outcomes are unequal and often shaped by circumstance. Treating outcomes as unjust leads to central planning, which requires coercion and destroys freedom and responsibility.

As Roger Scruton put it, calling it “luck” turns gratitude into resentment, obligation into entitlement, and families into obstacles to fairness. That framing invites the state to step in, and that is cruel to children and cruel to people, because it teaches them that nothing is owed, nothing is earned, and nothing really means anything.

The argument reminds me of the ending of Withnail and I. It’s all luck, right? Nothing means anything, right?

“I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilential congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

So to wrap up this rant. Wealth and debt are generational. Individual choices and external events clearly matter, but starting points are heavily shaped by what is passed down, assets and liabilities included. Each generation has a duty to do better, give better, and leave something stronger behind.

The “luck” argument is a dead-end. It's nihilism and cope dressed up as fairness by intellectuals driven by a will to power over the state, who consistently appeal to those on the fringes, not to solve their problems, but to legitimise intervention on their behalf.

So far the poll on this post...
->180 votes from people who understand that.
-> 634 votes from people who think the state is coming to save them.

Just not true at all, maybe it's a geography thing. DH and I, all our friends are pretty much higher tax payers nobody would agree with your statement.

I agree completely, @ThingsAreNotWhatTheyWere - the basis for the whole thread is that people’s value is solely based on how much tax they pay, and that only people who contribute financially to the State have any right to any say in government - and I find that abhorrent. Every human being has value.

People fought long and hard to extend voting rights to ordinary people, because decent people know that pretty much everyone deserves to have a say in the government that makes the policies which shape their lives. I say pretty much everyone because I know that people in prison do not get to vote whilst serving their sentence, and I have no real problem with this.

Oh FFS - how can anyone get upset over a theoretical intellectual debate that is never going to happen in reality. We are simply not going to go back to the 1700s where voting rights were restricted to men owning land, along with rotten boroughs etc and if you get upset or triggered by this then a) you need to get over yourself b) theoretical intellectual debates are clearly not for you and c) please don't cancel culture prevent the rest of us from being able to discuss whatever we wish provided it doesn't incite hate or violence on others (simply being offended doesn't count!).

Lastly if the disabled are genuinely worried about their rights and support being eroded then they should be more worried about the current democratic process creating a fiscal collapse whereby a democratically elected Government's powers and decisions are removed and overridden by institutions such as the IMF or European Central Bank.

Have a look at what happened to Greece:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis

Pros: Very low or no taxes
Cons: Living in a religious autocracy that uses slave labour and where women have fewer rights than men

It may be a theoretical discussion (by an extremely ignorant, right-wing and goady OP), but it could still be upsetting to people in the groups that he has said should not be allowed to vote because they aren't net contributors, e.g. people with disabilities.

The only people who don’t see the size and direction of travel of the welfare state as excessive or problematic tend to be those who don’t contribute to it (to the op's original point) or those who assume their lifestyle choices should be underwritten by other taxpayers. Higher earners are not the same as the rich.

If your standards are low enough, almost anything looks 'ok' when you compare it to the worst possible alternative.

Some people don’t realise how much high tax rate payers pay in tax. I saw a payslip recently, 50K in tax over the last year! Seriously looking to move to the middle east!

FFS - it's a theoretical discussion.

It's full on cancel culture that we can't have a theoretical discussion in case someone gets offended or triggered.

Dh & i earn 6 figures each and pay loads of tax.

DC got really sick as a baby. Loads of time in intensive care. Will have cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds. now on regular medication that costs the nhs thousands a year.

Ive broken a foot & two fingers, had a c section and a complicated "natural" delivery.

Do we lose our vote because Dc and i got sick & used up all our "goodwill"