Jesse Kline: Give 16-year-olds the vote? Only if you want never-ending socialism
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This week, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that his Labour government will introduce legislation to enfranchise 16- and 17-year-olds before the next general election in the summer of 2029.
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Starmer justified the move by arguing that, 'It's really important that 16- and 17-year-olds have the vote, because they are old enough to go out to work. They are old enough to pay taxes, so pay in.
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'And I think if you pay in, you should have the opportunity to say what you want your money spent on, which way the government should go.'
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There's a certain logic to this argument, and I will admit to wrestling with the fact that 16-year-old me and 44-year-old me likely have very different opinions on this subject.
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But the fact remains that although people as young as 16 may be able to enter the workforce and pay taxes (even if many of them don't), there are a lot of things they're legally prevented from doing, such as entering into contracts, getting married, buying alcohol and, in many jurisdictions, joining the military and getting a full driver's licence.
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So if you think a 16-year-old is capable of making decisions affecting the fate of the country, and perhaps even the course of world history, fine. But then why wouldn't they be old enough to buy a bottle of Scotch, or drive without restrictions, or marry someone several years older than them?
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It's because society has set the age of 18 (or 19 in some Canadian provinces) as the cutoff point for when people become adults capable of making their own decisions in the eyes of the law.
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There's no doubt that this is an arbitrary number. Perhaps it should be 14 given that, throughout much of history, people that young were given adult responsibilities. Or maybe it should be closer to 30, around the time when the human brain stops developing.
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Regardless, we need to come up with some number to legally differentiate the age at which parents are no longer responsible for their children and young adults are responsible for their own actions.
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Yet given that England and Wales raised the age at which people can legally marry from 16 to 18 just two years ago, it seems odd that the country now wants to give new freedoms to people who just had other rights stripped away — not to mention the fact that the age at which people can legally run for office will remain at 18.
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