RE: Democracy ..... over-rated?
October 6, 2012 at 10:52 pm
(This post was last modified: October 6, 2012 at 10:53 pm by Cyberman.)
(October 5, 2012 at 5:28 pm)Tiberius Wrote: Democracy would be better if term limits were eradicated. I never understood the point of them; if enough people want someone out of office, they get voted out, so you can't argue that they prevent people from staying in power too long. On the other hand, if we ever do get a really good leader who does wonders for the country, he only gets to lead for x number of years.
It's like the people who set up the system want it to fail.
Uh oh...*conspiracy*.
You have to bear in mind that government, as Ronnie Reagan once said in one of his more lucid moments, is like a baby; an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. Term limits have been appropriated, if not actually set up, for the purpose of deferring responsibility. An average lifetime of a government project is somewhere around the ten year mark, which means that in the likely event of it failing, then those responsible have long since either been placed in other positions or removed from office altogether. There is also the useful bonus that the incumbent government can blame the previous one for just about everything that goes wrong while they are in office. In the UK at least, government policy is carried out on a day-to-day basis by the Civil Service, deferring responsibility even further. In all cases it will be deemed unfair to call the responsible persons to account; in the case of MPs, they can hardly be blamed for mistakes that occurred since leaving office, and in the case of Civil Servants, they were simply carrying out government policy and can hardly be blamed for errors of judgement of their political masters.
There is also the fact that the useful life of a government is about eighteen months. The first year or so of a new government is spent settling in and undoing the work of the previous government. Then follows about eighteen months of potentially serious government, after which comes the run-up to the next election. Combine that with the fact that all Parliamentary time for the projected length of tenure will have been tied up long before the new government takes up residence, and it's a wonder that any business gets done at all.
If I should disappear suddenly after this, it'll be something to do with the Official Secrets Act.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
