I took the Delta shuttle to Boston over the weekend. This gave me the opportunity to pick over Delta's rack of complimentary Beltway-wonk magazines as if I were a mover or shaker; alas, wonk magazines are awfully dull for the most part, and these were somewhat dated.

But I did grab a November American Spectator, just for the horror of it. It didn't let me down. There, on pages 42 and 43, was a column by Tom Bethell, a senior Spec editor. I'm sorry the Spec doesn't put Bethell's columns on the Web, because this one's kind of a jaw-dropper: Basically, Bethell thinks the world has too much damn democracy and lets too many people vote -- women, for instance, and poor people. Horrible things happen as a result:

The trouble with so many women (not all I hasten to add, but probably a majority) is that they think the function of government is to “help” whole classes of people. They tend to lack the civic virtue of impartiality -- the key quality required of a good judge. They resemble nothing so much as umpires who have decided that a better role for umpires would be to help the losing team. (How many women umpires do we see in football or baseball?) Let’s face it, votes for women means votes for liberals. If women were disenfranchised, America would become politically much more conservative overnight.

It’s probably true that both England and the United States were best governed in the early stages of democracy when the franchise was restricted. With the masses admitted into the polling booths, government immediately began to undertake tasks inappropriate to its mission -- providing for health-care and education, for example.

I did find one Bethell column online with a similar point of view, from 1997. The arguments haven't changed much:

The recipient classes--yes, including farmers and businesspeople who receive subsidies--should be disenfranchised, and the vote restricted to taxpayers. To register, voters must produce a Social Security card, a picture ID, and a copy of last year's tax returns. We must restore the old understanding that voters are officeholders. Voting is not a right but an official act. No representation without taxation.

Remember, folks, The American Spectator isn't that far out on the fringe. Not that long ago, it was instrumental in nearly bringing down a president. Emmett Tyrrell's still there; ex-Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Bob Bartley is a "senior editorial advisor"; among Bethell's fellow senior editors are the quite mainstream John Fund, Michael Ledeen, and Ben Stein. The lead story in the November issue is by Laurie Mylroie, who shares office space at the American Enterprise Institute with Richard Perle and David Frum and all manner of respectable folk. The magazine is published by Alfred Regnery, who also publishes lots of best-selling books. If what Bethell is saying is beyond the pale, then the pale is only a few baby steps to the left of it.

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I also picked up an issue of Blueprint, the magazine of the Democrat Leadership Council. Yeah, yeah, those people -- I know. But wait -- read this; it's not bad. I agree with just about every world of the Bush critique, and I think you would, too. Unfortunately, a few pages later the DLCers feel the need to bash Howard Dean in a simple-minded way ("Howard Dean's protest campaign has found a niche online. Could it be the next dot-com bust?"). It's too bad, because I don't think there's much in the first link that Howard Dean would disagree with.

Oh, well -- I'll give the DLCers credit for pointing me to the chart on page 2 of this PDF report from Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. No, the DLCers don't like Grover. They just find it amusing -- as do I -- that Grover's "Cost of Government Day" (as Grover's group puts it, "the date of the calendar year on which the average American worker has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of spending and regulatory burdens imposed by all levels of government") has come later and later in the year in every year of George W.'s administration, after coming earlier and earlier in the year throughout the Clinton era. Also note that the date got a lot later throughout Poppy Bush's administration, and, before declining quite a bit in Reagan's later years, was rather high in 1982 and 1983. The GOP -- the party of big government?