Thing is Chico, it's human nature we're up against here. I mean Merkel is pretty unpopular in Germany right now and struggling to form a coalition government, despite the country doing better than most over the last few years and being held up as an example of how a western country can flourish in a post-industrial world.
It's probably human nature to be a) envious of what other folks have, and b) of the belief that we don't have that because of external forces rather than anything we can do ourselves.
Couple that with a rather naive belief that a leader (ie a single human being) can change things on a big scale and we have the so often muddled thinking around politics.
I mean the things that Germany are being lauded for right now were tried by them a few years ago and failed, yet in different circumstances they worked. Tony Blair is largely held in high esteem, whilst Gordon Brown is largely mocked, despite Blair benefiting from the double whammy of the Internet taking off at the same time as China sent the global economy into overdrive.
Better to be lucky than great as the saying goes.
That the political system serves politicians is well known though surely? Once again though, it's human nature you're up against. I'd say most folks will look out for themselves first, and look out for others with anything they have going spare. Brand is a great example of this. With all his millions he could easily house/feed/whatever hundreds of needy folks, and himself live a life of pious modesty. He doesn't do this however.
Those working in the public sector aren't any different to the rest of society. They're not more noble and just. They're human, just like the rest.
The market system works with this basic understanding and relies on competition to keep people honest, because if customers don't like what you do, they can go somewhere else. Of course it doesn't always work, but in a so called democracy, freedom of choice is something to be heralded.
The public sector doesn't have that freedom of choice, relying instead on the silly notion that state run services are noble and just because they're not corrupted by the profit motive, when it's really that profit motive that keeps people honest.
If you accept that in life you'll get good humans and ****ty ones, the only way for things to work is to spread power out as widely as possible, thus giving folks as much control over their own life as you can.
The problem with what Brand proposes is that he wants to focus power even more than it is right now. He seems to believe that it isn't the centralisation of power that's the problem but that the people in power are, and that if only we could get some nice folks in charge it would all be better. I just don't know where he gets the idea from, especially in an age where an increasing number of hugely valuable public works, from open source software to Wikipedia, have no one in power at all really.
thought you approved of Brand opening the discourse?
