Why do 18-year-olds have the right to vote?

Seems pretty stupid after reading this.

One commenter opines: "not fit to vote?not fit for military service or having a drink in a bar. the state cannot have it both ways."

Said commenter's piss-poor orthography aside, the state CAN have it both ways, and indeed it DID have it both ways for quite a damn long time. My own dad was not a big fan of giving 18's the vote; having been drafted and sent to Europe to fight Nazis at that age, years later he figured that while maybe letting 18-year-olds drink (responsibly) was not so bad, giving them the vote was just fucking idiotic.

Dad said, the reason you draft 18-year-olds is because they are young and stupid. They will generally not question orders given by older men, or those of higher rank -- primarily, he said, because they don't know any better. This is vitally important to any successful war effort, because the last thing you want is some smartass waxing philosophic about why the platoon shouldn't go over the top. That's not how you win battles, and if you don't win battles, you likely won't win the war.

18-year-olds are also fairly pliable; if you give them discipline, they will generally do what they are told. They may not like doing it, but they will do it if they respect the authority that is giving the orders. A few hundred pushups, a few 20-mile jogs through the pre-sunrise dew, and the occasional thrashing of the recruit who is too stupid to shut up and back off when the DI tells him to, will build that respect.

Contrariwise, if you tried that shit with me at 50, I'd tell you to go fuck yourself and the horse you rode in on. I want to know why you're giving the order, and if the order is illogical and/or stupid on its face, you can kiss my ass.

To me it's the same thing with liquor and voting.

With liquor, you have to be old enough to know it's time to stop. (Alcoholics obviously have something wrong with their brains that keeps that from happening, but 18-year-olds certainly don't have the experience to even realize how trashed they are, and I don't give a shit if they were catching the occasional nip out of Dad's their father's unlocked liquor cabinet from their early teens on.)

With voting, you have to go back to "young and stupid" and add "idealistic". Kids think that it's easy to fix the world. Kids don't understand the value of money. Kids don't pay taxes (not like their parents do; I'm not talking about their first paycheck and "who the hell is FICA and why is he taking all my money?"). Kids haven't got the first clue about how the world -- or even their own little corner of it -- really works, despite (or possibly as a result of) all the government and economics and history classes they skated through in high school. Kids get all mushy about empty slogans like "hope and change", because they can't imagine how change could possibly be bad for them, and they're sure that any change from the status quo has got to be better than the shit they have to take from their parents. And they will vote for any smooth-talking false messiah who promises it to them.

Well, when they're our age, and we're mostly safely dead, I hope they remember the "hope and change" that bankrupted the country on THEIR dime.

So why do we let 18-year-old high school "seniors" vote? Just because they can fight does NOT mean they know enough to vote -- or drink, either, but that's another story.

It's high time for the body politic to agree that the 26th Amendment was just as stupidly-conceived as the 21st (and the 16th and 17th, but of course they're still on the books, too) and repeal the damn thing.