Alcohol Minimum Pricing

It looks as if England and Wales could follow the Scottish lead and introduce minimum pricing for alcohol. I have a paper, which should be published soon, that outlines a Millian perspective on the issue. (No link yet, but I'll probably post again when it becomes available.) In short, I argue that Mill would have opposed minimum pricing as a means to discourage drinking, though he would have been happy with a tax on alcohol for purposes of raising revenue.

Tied Elections Decided by Lottery (Again)

Apparently when US elections aren't decided by the Supreme Court - or the popular vote - they use various lottery mechanisms to break ties, as in this case of New Mexico state house. Thanks to Peter Stone for the link.

Plural Voting

Next week the Mill seminar that I've been running this semester reaches Considerations on Representative Government (included in Gray's On Liberty and Other Essays, which is the set text for my course). Anyone with passing familiarity with this work will know that one of Mill's most (in)famous recommendations is a system of plural voting, according to which the poor and uneducated (although not those living on welfare benefits or the illiterate) would get one vote, but other more educated citizens would get more than one vote.

This idea generally strikes students as repulsive - correctly so, perhaps - but one point I try to stress is that, at Mill's time, this was a progressive proposal. In other words, he was not advocating taking away anyone's vote (as a proposal with the same content would today), but extending the vote. He wanted to give the less educated some power, which seems a clear improvement on none. (Though I can see why someone firmly committed to political equality might think it better not to go down this road.)

This Wikipedia entry is remarkably interesting though. It was not until the 1948 Representation of the People Act (first applied in the 1950 general election) that the UK abolished plural voting. Belgium also practised plural voting, something like what Mill proposed, between 1894 and 1919, apparently to limit the impact of universal suffrage. In practice, universal unequal suffrage may be a stepping stone towards universal equal suffrage, rather than a step away from it.