🚀 go-pugleaf

Rajat Datta wrote:

> When has a Washington bureaucrat been thrown out?  You must be mistaking
> the politicians with the bureaucrats.  Through elections of Democratic
> or Republican Congresses or Presidents, the bureaucracy remains.

Even if the politicians were thrown out, who would replace them? To get intopolitics
at the Washington level you need to be powerful in your party. Those people
who get that far have learned to bow to special interests that will provide almost
rabid support of them. I was taught in Political Science that you pick the one thing

that you really want done, and you concentrate on that. You'll get it done by
kowtowing
to the system on everything else.

Besides, how many of us who are savvy to the "better" ways of getting things done
will leave the corporate sector to become a politician? I know I won't. And you
are correct: even if someone who had great ways of doing things got into office,
they couldn't get much done without changing the system, and the bureaucrats.
If you want an example, look up the IRS attempts to get a decent computer system.
Or the FAA. Or most government agancies. Unless it is a real emergency, you can't
get something done in less than two years. At some agencies it takes two years to
fire someone for incompetency.

> As long as Washington is the source of largesse, many will come to feed
> from it.  As things stand now, those people (and not just major
> corporations) don't even need to control the government; we are gladly
> doing the work by supporting ever more money to be distributed by the
> government.
>
> For a nice, sobering experience in public spending, take a look at
> how government money is really spent in a poor urban school district.
> No major corporations necessary at all for all that money to vanish
> instead of being spent on the students.
>
> >
> >> Power and money placed in the hands of government, for whatever
> >> tear-jerker, compassionate reasons, will end up in the hands of
> >> powerbrokers.
> >
> >I still believe in democracy. The government is ours to either do good or
> >evil. It has laws and a constitution. Tell me, how would I fight a
> >belligerent corporate power?
> >

Boycotts. Everyone selling all of the stocks that they hold in them. A corporationis
like a nation with selected citizens: if the citizens care enough, something can be
done. Or if the non-citizens care enough, they can impact trade.

> Who will you replace with these belligerent corporate powers?  Other
> belligerent non-corporate powers?

Like the "Moral Majority"? Those powers are really hard to fight, because theydon't
have self-interest, and they don't care about people who aren't a part of their
"cause".

> The more we concentrate powers in a single institution, the more
> powerful some people will become.  The powerbrokers don't exist
> independent of the government; they feed from it.
>
> The Founding Fathers strove to implement a compromise between a
> strong enough central government to carry out those tasks necessary
> at the federal level, but too weak to attract too many of the
> vultures.  We've undone their work.

Our founding fathers didn't take enough stock in the power of "pork barrelling".They
also all could make a lot more money in the private sector than in government,
so they naively ignored the problem of career politicians. With career politicians
came the possibility that a government job could be a career. And so we got
bureaucracies, and patrons of those bureaucracies. With "pork barrelling" came
politicians voting yea or nay on things they didn't care about, because that way
they could get favors in return. And that allowed bureaucracies to flourish and
grow, because the interests of one special area could be supported by the general
assembly.

If we want to change things, we must make an effort to do so for the long haul. If
we try to remove all of the petty special interest portions of our government, we
need
to do so slowly, so that those areas of the private sector that really want to
change have
time to do so. If we eliminated all beaucracy and corporate welfare right now,
entire
towns and cities would either go bankrupt or dissappear. The largest form of
government
welfare we have now is the military. Government bases and contracts are the basis
of economies in areas like Fort Dix NJ (or rather, were), and large portions of the
economy in places like Philadelphia PA. And the military doesn't have the power to
make non-political decisions about that part of the bureaucracy that they live in.

                                                            - Justice