TLDR: Universal suffrage has a structural flaw: votes are free to cast, but the promises they buy are billed to someone else. As Tytler (probably apocryphally) observed, the public will always eventually vote for the politicians who give them stuff. Zimbabwe ran that experiment in fast forward, “one man, one vote” delivered Mugabe, 89.7 sextillion percent inflation, a dead currency, and the banana republic Smith predicted to the letter. My argument: it's time we stopped treating "one adult, one vote" as the final, unrevisable form of democracy and considered tying the franchise to net contribution: mechanically, transparently, for everyone. The bill for our slower version of the same experiment is now showing up in the bond market. That's part two