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I thought the obvious message would be to make military service never compulsury, and drop income tax. Age of consent is always going to be prickly - a sixteen year old boy having sex with his fifteen year old girlfriend could be charged with statutory rape (I think...) People are made to have sex, over and over agains, until they have offspring. This requires little intelligence. Age of consent and voting are seperate issues. Dying for your country, and politics are another matter. If the age of adulthood was sixteen, but there was no draft eleigibility, and there was vountary voting, I don't see too many sixteen year olds flocking to polling booths, unless they reflect their parents vote (let's assume both conservative and ALP families have roughly the same amount of kids), pay a substantial amount of tax - e.g "whizz kids" who are financial geniuses. Not many of them. Or gtenuinely feel informed. As so do many readers of the SMH. Whose veiws on education and economics I spurn. Lowering the voting age will be, in fact, rather benign if we had voluntary voting. But in our compulsury voting system, most sixteen year olds do not want to cough up the fifty dollars, so the question is will another mob of uninformed, uncaring voters change the electoral results for the beterment or detriment of Australia? If it is a victimless crime, then why not remove it? The reason would be, (not to remove it) that they could do it to somone else less forgiving. Hmm, there's nothing hardline about free banking - just that I question why in our Government Controlled RBA, there isn't zero inflation targeting, given how successful the inflation band has been since it was implemented, or at least recently. And most people have no idea how "unliberalised" our market economy is. The system of responsibility you propose has merit. I like it. Anyway, we know kids are great - you can teach them to hate the things you hate - or you can make someione else responsible for them. I like the idea of proportional responsibility, because, if you have kids, they are your responsiblility, plain and simple.
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