Lotte Noer - Denmarks very own libertarian heroine

The Danish libertarian community is in a buzz right now because Lotte Noer has “resigned” from all of her positions i the Danish governing liberal party - Venstre. This under lots of media coverage. What was her crime? Basically to open up the debate on people on so called “transfer pay” (the unemployed etc).

The liberal party is traditionally the closest Denmark has to a Libertarian party. You would have thought that they would welcome this kind of debate. Well apparently not this close to election. The real crime was to suggest that people on “transfer pay” be denied the right to vote.

This might sound horrible, however the Danish constitution already mentions this.:

(1) Any Danish subject who is permanently domiciled in the Realm, and who has the age qualification for suffrage as provided for in sub-section

(2) of this section shall have the right to vote at Folketing elections, provided that he has not been declared incapable of conducting his own affairs. It shall be laid down by statute to what extent conviction and public assistance amounting to poor relief within the meaning of the law shall entail disfranchisement.

The big question I guess is one of political correctness. If you know Danish read her article here: To Stress for the Capital If I find the time I will translate it.

The article starts with an incident in McDonalds at Copenhagens central trainstation, where the two gentlemen next to her were talking about how the poor McDonalds workers had to stress themselves for capital. Lotte goes on about how this is symptomatic of a whole group of Danes who have never worked and never have any plans of working. Funniest than anything are the comments by various legions of appalled lefties calling her such things as a social dawrinist and a youthful egocentric.

One of her ideas to fix this is as mentioned above to use the constitutions provisions to take away the vote from people incapable of handling their own affairs. To understand why the constitution allows this we need to think back to a time, when governments were small and rampant political correctness was unknown.

The basic idea is that voters shouldn’t be able to vote money out of other peoples pockets and into theirs. Many people say this is one of the great flaws of democracies, where they in many ways become giant cleptocracies. I’ve written about this before in Pitfalls of Philanthropy

So is Lotte right? I am certainly in agreement. I think we should take it one step further and add people receiving any kind of subsidy from the state including farmers and civil servants. What you definitely should be able to do anyway is to have an open debate about it without muzzling senior members of your party.

This is in many ways turning into a battle between the traditional libertarian members of the party and the current management (known as the custodians of the social democracy). It is a shame really that they don’t use this opportunity to make some changes in Denmark, they definitely have the mandate to do so.