We're Winning

According to a new survey of people between the ages of 15 to 26 by the Representative Democracy in America Project, only farmer is a more reviled job than that of politician. Most popular profession? Business.

Comments

[Pedant]

Never trust a survey in which the numbers don't add up...

The press release (http://www.ncsl.org/programs/press/2003/pr030917.htm)claims: "Eighty percent of those 26 or younger know Ruben Studdard won the last American Idol competition. But fewer than half of the members of the younger generation know the party of their state's governor."

The survey results page (http://www.ncsl.org/public/trust/opresults.htm#q4b) shows that the actual number who know Ruben was is only 64.2 percent....

[Farmer Fred]

We're Winning

Why the hell do you hate us farmers?

But seriously, what is so useful about the public reviling politicians? Is that supposed to produce better people to fill political offices?

I've never understood this fixation on hatred of politicians as a class, unless the idea is pure anarchy -- i.e., no state whatsoever. I don't believe many people support such an extreme outcome. Accordingly, why wouldn't we want the most capable and competent people to fill those jobs, instead of dopes and dunderheads?

[R.C. Dean]

"why wouldn't we want the most capable and competent people to fill those jobs, instead of dopes and dunderheads?"

Good Christ, man, can you imagine the damage those bureaucracies could wreak if they were filled with energetic, ambitious, intelligent, go-getters? The legendary sloth and inefficiency of government bureaucracies is a feature, not a bug.

Besides, having our best and brightest go into politics would represent an enormous opportunity cost. They can contribute so much more to our society out in the market, rather than devoting their energies to stabbing each other in the back, telling us how many liters our toilets should flush, and doing whatever else it is government functionaries, elected and un-, do to fill their days.

[Hovig John Heghinian]

We should get rid of professional politicians altogether. We should eliminate the executive and legislative branches completely, replacing them with bills written by citizens, and passed by juries of their peers.

Let the ACLU write a bill, and let a jury of 12 people decide whether or not to pass it into law. Let the NRA write a bill, and let a jury decide its fate as well.

Pick any county randomly in the USA, empanel a jury there, put the ACLU or NRA on one side, find some opponents for the other, and let 7 jurors decide (or 9, or 12, or whatever). If three out of five different juries pass the bill, in three different counties, then put the bill into law.

I dare say this sort of "jurocracy" would be much better than having today's executives and legislators write the bills. Given nobody knows what they're doing anyway, and given most laws are passed retrospectively, rather than proactively, I dare say three juries out of five could do a better job. Assuming proper rules were in place, they wouldn't be able to filibuster or obstruct.

Political acrimony would still exist, of course. We would still have the Greenpeaces and George Soroses of the world on one side, and the NRAs and Haliburtons of the world on the other, but at least we wouldn't have such cults of personality like the Clinton Gang, or cults of hatred like "Bush = Ashcroft = Cheney = Hitler."

It sounds silly on the surface, but I'll bet it would work.

[Jeff Smith]

Farmer Fred:

It is not hatred of politicians that is wanted
but thoughtful and thoroughgoing distrust.
Politians lie all the time. Lying is the
essence of politics. So do government
bureaucracies. Lying is the language of power.
Government is, sadly, a necessary evil, but
it is an evil. If the people do not perceive
that it is, but start to believe that it is a
warm, fuzzy, helpful thing, we are in big
trouble.

Jeff (inside the beltway)

[joe]

Bureaucracies aren't staffed by politicians, RC; they're staffed by bureaucrats. You do know the difference between elected office and civil service, right?

[John J. Coupal]

Joe's comment is correct.

The GS-14 bureaucrats at the State Dept. get really annoyed at elected officials telling State what US foreign policy should be.

Don't those droids in Congress realize who is responsible for determining and expressing US policy?!

[Steve]

Fred,

Politicans don't earn an honest living. They take their salaries from the taxes I pay involuntarily.

That doesn't mean I'm an anarchist and I think all taxes are evil. It just means that any job where someone voluntarily pays for your service -- journalist, truck driver, hooker, drug dealer -- is more noble than a job supported by taxpayers.

And I don't have much patience for farmers. They're all rugged and independent and stuff, except when they need the government to fix prices for them.

[David]

Steve: do you feel the same way about the U.S. military?

[nm156]

The Civil Service has no interest in either.

[Kevin Carson]

Hovig,

That's pretty close to the anglo-republican (or oppositionist, or country party) constitutional ideal in the eighteenth century. The idea was that republican government rested on the power of free juries, the militia, and the posse comitatus. Without any professional police or standing apparatus, the laws of the central government would depend on the juries, milita and posse comitatus for enforcement in each vicinage. So in effect, each locality would be an independent republic that could refuse to enforce any of the central government's laws that it found improper.

Through the 1780s, interestingly, many town meetings in the northern New England states did not consider any provision in the state constitution to apply to them until their particular town ratified it; and many towns refused to collect taxes for the state or send representatives to the legislature.

Sounds like my kind of set-up.

[Sade]

Local gvt is better 'cause of a) more participation and b) you can hoof it to the next county if it starts to suck.

[Farmer Fred]

LOL. My God, some of the comments here are just too funny! And to think we laughed at the Marxists and the post-modernists for being deluded and living in la-la land.

[dhex]

local gov't has the benefit of being on a scale people can understand and affect, something which is just not possible on a federal level.

i think communications being what they are today that some sort of pullback from governmental centralization, in addition to freeing up those "voluntary" tax dollars, would prevent some sort of imagined dark ages phenomenon.

[Kevin Carson]

Sebastian,

People may "suck," but they suck a lot less when their actions are directly and immediately tied to the effects of those actions--i.e., when they are able to learn from their behavior. The smaller the unit of government, the more direct the role of the individual in the actual making of policy, and the more likely he is to associate the negative results with the policy. When there is no intergovernmental grant-in-aid to apply to the feds for, and no Supreme Court to overrule bad local laws and save localities from the consequences of their own folly, local communities are a lot more likely to learn from the school of hard knocks.

If democracy is a school, what passes for "democracy" at the national level is a very poor school indeed. It consists of periodic plebiscites to choose between segments of a national policy elite who agree on most structural issues, and are respectively about a half-inch to the left and right of center.

And that "national identity or purpose" sets off at least three alarms for me. As Margaret Thatcher said (to think I'd be quoting her!), "there is no such thing as society." When "national greatness conservatives" speak of what "we as a people" have decided, they are really referring to what one group of people have done to another, acting through the State. "National purpose" is the purpose of the group of people controlling the State--which has been pretty well described by C. Wright Mills and G. William Domhoff.

If government is to exist at all (government in the sense which Nock distinguished from the State), it should be limited to things like preventing burglary and assault. It should most assuredly be kept out of the realm of promoting grand, capital letter abstractions like "National Purpose" or Ingsoc. Of such abstractions, the holocaust, the gulag, and the inquisition were made.

[Kevin Carson]

I forgot to add that part of the educational function of local, participatory government is that people learn to see organizing services, protecting their rights, etc., as their own activity and their own responsibility; and not something provided by a "professional" Daddy in a necktie 1000 miles away. People are a lot more likely to appreciate the work it takes to keep a society going, when they don't think of energy as something that comes from a switch on the wall, food as something you find on a supermarket shelf, and security as something provided by someone in uniform.

[joe]

"Local gvt is better 'cause of a) more participation..."

Tamany Hall. I say, as a big supporter of public participation in decision making and of local government, that it is just as easy for a self-serving elite to control a city as a nation. Since there are likely to be numerous elite groups on the national level, it's less likely for a national government to be completely controlled by one clique.

[James Merritt]

I worked on my father's ranch when I was very young, and later, on the ranch he managed for a corporation during my high school years. The work was hard, hot, and dusty, and I didn't like it one bit. On the other hand, I can now look back with a quarter-century of hindsight and admit that I never earned a more honest dollar. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing that my effort fed thousands, a satisfaction that has never been equalled, much less exceeded, by any job I have held since. (And mind you, I have enjoyed my work more often than not through the years.) Farming is honorable work.

I can well imagine why farmwork might be at the bottom of people's list of career choices. But I can't imagine thar people would "revile" farmers or farming. On the other hand, I can understand why they would revile both politics and politicians.

[Sebastian]

So how is it that local government can somehow be less tyrannical than a central or state government? I don't think there's any holy grail philosophy on government that's going to automatically guarantee liberty. What we have now is certainly imperfect, but can you imagine what the country would be like if local control were allowed to decide things like slavery or segregation?

Going back to strictly local government sounds suspiciously like a return to tribalism. Without any national identity or purpose, I'd hate to think what society would denigrate into.

People suck. Every philosophy sounds great until it hits that particular brick wall of reality.

[fredH]

Joe has a point. Anyone who's had to deal with the anal compulsive lawn nazis who run most of our suburban subdivisions these days is unlikely to view local control as necessarily benign. Ditto for those who have to deal with the "architectural review boards" that have taken command of the "historic" districts of many of our cities.

[Sebastian]

I certainly didn't mean to suggest that I don't support local government at all. We've certainly concentrated too much power in the federal government in the 20th century.

Joe essentially hit on the point I was trying to make. Local government isn't a panacea of liberty, and the federal government hasn't always done the wrong thing in regard to our rights as people.

In terms of national identity and purpose, I'm not suggesting some conservative notion of 'national identity' or 'national purpose' be shoved down anyone's throats. I meant more to convey a national set of rights and values that we all share as Americans.

Purely local government will not guarantee liberty. Purely national government won't either. But I think it's probably a good thing to have a federal government able to beat local governments with a stick when they violate our rights as Americans, and the local government being protected by a constitution that prevents the feds (ideally) from overreaching to control areas which really are best left to state and local control.