Saturday, November 07, 2009
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Congressman
Dan Carlin hit another home run in this week’s “Common Sense” show. He’s talking about the role of genius in human endeavor, and how desperately we need geniuses in our society in every field-but especially politics. We need to cultivate them and, in a football vernacular, get our playmakers the ball. And, of course, in our current system, we don’t incentivize the great ones-the gifted ones at forging consensus and synthesizing different types of information-into becoming our leaders. We don’t pay them well(compared to businessmen), we make them leave their families behind, we don’t listen to their arguments for longer than 30 seconds, we fill the airwaves with incendiary speech (some of which, truth be told, I have written here), we essentially force them into a system of organized bribery. We ask them to deliver us services, and scream when they ask that we pay for them. Is it any wonder we don’t get geniuses in Congress? I think it was a PJ O’Rourke or Dave Barry joke-we send them to Congress because we don’t want them around.
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I wish I remembered what book it was in,(“Parliament of Whores”, maybe) but in one of O’Rourke’s books, there was a story about a Congressman that O’Rourke spent the day with once. He described all the different things he had to do-phone calls, answering letters(this was the pre-Internet in the home age), fulfilling requests, voting on bills, all that. Near the end of the piece, O’Rourke notes an enormous pile of mail the Congressman had gotten through, noting that the pile contained exactly one thank you.
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"Everybody’s tired of something/Round here.”
-Counting Crows
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NaNoWriMo Word Count: 10810
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Beck’s “Loser” keeps coming up on my IPod. Do you think it is trying to tell me something?
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“Humanity is a virus with shoes.”
-Bill Hicks
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There is so much on this I don't agree with. Much of it amounts to "oh, have some pity on these so rich and so very very powerful men and women."
ReplyDeleteWell, we already pay them quite handsomely, putting them in the 90% percentile, income-wise. The laeder of the House in fact has luxurious perks that would put many monarchs to shame.
"we essentially force them into a system of organized bribery"
That sounds like trying to shift the blame on the corruption away from those actually guilty of it. And yes, it is a choice. No one forces them to take bribes.
"We ask them to deliver us services, and scream when they ask that we pay for them."
We already pay a massive amount of taxes (both in percent of income and in real dollars). An amount that is increasing every year. No, it's not too much to demand that they spend these vast resources wisely, and to not do such a pathetic job that they try to squeeze us for more rather than making good use of the vast resources they already have "in pocket".
But I do like O'Rourke's point about thanking them. I just wonder if the thank you's are welcome from constituents who are in other districts. I kind of want to thank Representative Bart Stupak who successfully did his part to improve health care bill that the House passed yesterday.
Also, you could cut their pay by $25,000 or so and they would STILL be rich.
ReplyDeleteTo make up for it, I'd offer them one reasonable perk: they would get to live free in Washington D.C.'s public housing.
They run it, after all.