Just BecauseWhat he said... Posted by DaveH at December 30, 2008 8:12 PM
Government policy is not just a blunt instrument, it's a toy instrument, a nerf bat, a ceremonial symbol of no value if it has to actually be used. I don't mean that it can't do great harm - we have all of history to provide examples of that - I mean that it can't do good, can't deal with real problems.
But, in a bureaucratic world the response to every serious issue is to kick it upstairs. Not my yob, every underling says, and we are all underlings. The problem is that the penthouse is occupied by sociopaths who don't give a crap about anything but their own well being. It could not be otherwise since any honest and caring person would soon be destroyed by the realization of their inadequacy to the task, their inability to deal with the problems kicked upstairs to them.
I think that this may be why actors and confidence men do well in politics. They are comfortable playing a part. They can be the doctor or super hero or whatever since they don't ever have to actually do anything, they just have to play the role. Give them a script and they can sell it.
We all know this, so how do we reconcile the failure to deal with problems with our continued support for politicians? We have the astounding ability to reshape reality to fit our expectations. With hammer and tongs we torture the facts and with scalpels and dynamite we cut and explode past events until they support the script well enough for us to suspend disbelief. We want to believe and that's enough. Remarkable.
Unfortunately, we currently have two good examples of this: financial problems and environmental problems. Various cures are offered though none of them can work even in theory unless a host of other fortuitous events occur in future, and it may be that such a fortuitous alignment of the planets would work as well without the policy placebos.