The State of Political Discourse in the U.S.
One day last week, a former Facebook "friend" of mine posted the notion that only people over the age of 50 should be allowed to vote. My initial thought was that folk over the age of 50 would be inclined to be concerned with protecting their Socialist Security more than anything else. I guess that my "friend" didn't like that, because he told me "eff you", and started going off on me about how I was just making "ASS-sumptions".
Anyway, I made that comment prior to looking at the link that he had provided in support of his supposition. The link was to a chart that broke down the 2012 U.S. voting results by age group. I didn't take time to verify this guy's math, but the chart purportedly showed that more younger people voted Democrat, and more of the older people voted Republican. Since my "friend" is a hard-core Republican, he therefore concluded that people under that age of 50 should not be allowed to vote.
But, talk about "ASS-sumptions"
There are a few flaws in this guy's logic. First, the 2012 election came down to a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The biggest issue in the 2012 election for "conservative" voters was the issue of "Obamacare", and how to get rid of it. So what did the Republican establishment do? They crammed Mitt Ronmey, the godfather of "Obamacare", down the throats of "conservative" voters. And indeed, if you look at Mitt Romney's history, track record, and how much he seemed to agree with Obama on everything during the debates, we can only conclude that Mitt Romney is as much of a war-monger and socialist as is Obama. So really, I find it amazing that Romney even got as many votes as he did.
The second flaw in this guy's argument is that he doesn't take into account the way that the GOP establishment alienated the more "libertarian" young folk by its shoddy treatment of Ron Paul. Putting the differences in "minarchists" and "anarchists" aside for a moment, we have to see that Ron Paul was really the only candidate in the 2012 Presidential race who came even close to actually understanding what real liberty is all about. He was a threat to the corrupt GOP establishment, and of course just couldn't be allowed to win.
The third flaw is simply that this guy makes the "ASS-sumption" that the chart that he referenced proves that most young voters are Democrats. It proves no such thing, considering that the chart didn't include any figures about Libertarian Party voters.
That which proves too much, proves nothing. . .
And indeed, that is the case here. Any kind of statistical analysis that doesn't cover ALL angles is invalid. The biggest angle that got neglected in this analysis is just the simple fact that there really isn't a lot of difference between the political philosophies of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.