Heretic;1623515 wrote:...I think it gets to the point where the people who'd be most qualified to actually do good in those positions wouldn't be as interested in dealing with the shit.
There's A LOT to be said for that. Not to mention needing to be relatively "squeaky clean", which is going to be even more rare 15-20 years from now as the Facebook/Twitter generation comes of age.
I actually think the Bush family, like the Kennedy's, feels a genuine sense of duty to serve. Just that the Bush's aren't particularly talented.
I have a real problem with career lawyers, I mean politicians, with talent mostly for giving speeches using public office to grow rich and powerful. As far as I can tell, the only thing "experience" really does for anyone in Congress is to enable them to excel in the art of cronyism.
The other huge issue is that as the govt continues to grow and grow, the real power and knowledge is embedded in career staffers...non-elected career staffers...And if we grant that Obama isn't as totally incompetent as he appears, then the real lesson is these staffers are nearly unmanageable. Which means we no longer have control of our govt and we're just electing politicians to give us the occasional speech about what is happening.
Just think about this for a minute...GM at one point had like 350,000 workers, and simply became too large to manage. Today the entire auto industry in the US comprises some 800k employees, which is the size of the DoD CIVILIAN branch alone. Only in govt could someone who's never managed more than a few dozen employees be put in charge of nearly 3M. Such a person becoming CEO of a Fortune 500 is unheard of.