It has often been suggested that governments exist to make a country work better and more efficiently. When the people who hear this have – eventually – stopped laughing for long enough, they can easily point out how this notion is simply untrue merely by glancing at that day’s media. For, as far as it can be ascertained, that governments do have any purpose at all - and some scholars do doubt this - it seems to be that the only real purpose of governments is to perpetuate governments.
Some say that governments exist to pass laws, and indeed when government is allowed to happen it will happily wile away its time making laws, some of which may even turn out to be useful, although most are – of course – unnecessary, pointless, corrosive, damaging and absurd. In fact, it has been said that the only law governments can ever have any success with, is the law of unintended consequences, where the new laws they are allowed to pass end up causing far more problems than the original problem those laws were devised to resolve. From this, we can deduce than governments are not there to make laws, except as a way of keeping the politicians who end up in government out of the way of the rest of us, so we can go about our lives in peace. However, as far as it can be reliably ascertained, it seems that politicians see their main role as preventing the rest us from going about our lives in peace.
Therefore, it seems that the aims and interests of governments and the people they are purported to represent are – more often than not – in direct conflict with each other, with the one trying to mind their own business and the other trying to mind everyone else’s business. This is why elections were developed, so that once a government becomes far more trouble than it is worth, it can be disposed of in a rather easy and straightforward a manner as possible. However, by their very nature all governments will do their utmost to cling to power long after they have outworn what limited usefulness they once had.
People do wonder, if it is – as it seems to be – that governments by their very nature must be inept, then why do we bother with them?
Intriguingly, though, there are scholars who say that governments only exist to take the blame for when things go wrong. There is some merit in this, of course. However, there are many other things invented by mankind which can also serve this purpose, Gods, for instance. In fact, it often makes far more sense to blame a god or gods for any misfortunes, as the gods can quite easily be made responsible for lots of things that even governments would have difficulty buggering up, such as the weather, earthquakes and other natural disasters. Although, it has often been shown that allowing governments any role after such a natural disaster only makes things even worse. So, there would be a legitimate role for the government as scapegoat in such situations where it would be reasonable to blame them for whatever befalls us through their inherent incompetence, lunacy and mendacity.
So, in the end, government - and the political circus that surrounds it - boils down to little more than a rather dull and tedious reality show that every few years allows us – the populace – to vote out whichever of the mendacious troglodytes we least like the look of. However, whilst we do this we should always bear in mind that governments are like a baby’s nappies, in that they should both be changed frequently, and for the same reason.
1 comment:
I have a theory of what government should be, which goes something like this: it's to be the Monopoly, to perform the functions that don't lend themselves to capitalist competition, for whatever reason. It could be for reasons of startup costs, limited and/or fixed resources such as land, or where there's the risk of exploitation of a captive audience.
Examples: privatising the railway infrastructure in the UK was a bad idea, because it merely converted a public monopoly in to a private one. The new enterprise (Railtrack) was so burdened with regulations, to limit their monopoly effect, that it failed and was re-nationalised.
Health care is an example of a captive market: given a choice, all medical procedures would be elective, so there's scope for competition in e.g. dentistry or cosmetic surgery, but there is little scope for competition in emergency medicine, transplant or remedial surgery, or managing chronic conditions. The customer loses the ability to choose, and the result is the US Healthcare system you have today, where any government involvement is derided as "socialism", and local or regional monopolies became established. There's a financial (non-ideological) case to be made for federal health care: the captive market monopoly problem.
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