Whoa now. You're describing the Founding Fathers. Let's not romanticize the educated OR the uneducated. That isn't the real issue here.
Exactly. Who can vote is not the real issue.
In today's culture, the wealthy and educated are in general in favor of the current status-quo, because they benefit from it.
In the Roman Republic, though the poor technically could vote, a variety of limitations existed that de-facto set the system largely in favor of the wealthy [you had to be physically present in the city of Rome to vote – so they could pile in wealthy Roman citizens from all over, but only those poor who actually lived in Rome voted; the wealthy had something like 12
tribas, whereas the poor had 4, and so forth]. Yet none of this prevented the Roman Republic from failing.
Most importantly, the purpose of government is not solely to secure property. It is to secure the
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Property is but a part of these.
But that is a moral stance, and it is of course impractical.
On a more practical reason, we need to remember that the socialists strive, politically, by creating groups of self-identification. The proletariat is not inherently anti-capitalist. It is when the proletariat (or the lumpen-proletariat) is persuaded that it should self-identify as a class, and that its interests are contrary to those of the capitalists, that it becomes anti-capitalist.
A very socialist professor of mine once remarked that the "problem" (I naturally view it as an advantage) of American culture is that workers in America don't identify themselves as 'proletariat' but as potential capitalists. As such – he claimed – they are less willing than Europeans to tolerate anti-capitalist measures, because they believe they might end up as capitalists tomorrow. You may remember Joe Wurzelbacher's [sp?] question for Obama as an example of this phenomenon.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how we should act if we are to defeat socialism. If we believe that certain classes of people, or races of people, or groups of people, are inherently anti-capitalist or anti-freedom, and forfeiting these groups to the socialist foe, we
let the socialist win.
Instead of vacillating about how poor people [or minorities] should not vote, the proper thing to do is come up with ways to remind poor people that overregulation harms them by driving up prices on goods and closing off entry into the market (and dozens of other ways). [There is an excellent book out there by Thomas Sowell, for instance, describing how market regulation harms poor Afrcan-Americans].
The various social groups are not cast in stone, nor are they property of a given political entity.
A 17-year-old young man can be a socialist, or he can be a libertarian.
A worker can see himself as an oppressed proletarian or as a potential capitalist.
The work is not to prevent him from voting, the work is to persuade him that our version of self-identification is one that fits him best.
If Democrats were capable of persuading certain social groups that they were their "natural" constituency, we can do it right back.
