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"I've heard many times that although democracy is an imperfect system, we somehow always muddle through. The message I want to give you, after long and hard reflection, is that I'm very much afraid it is no longer possible to muddle through. The issues we deal with do not lend themselves to that kind of treatment. Therefore, I conclude that our democracy must grow up. I'm not going to give you a magic recipe on how that will happen—I wish I had one—but I offer some thoughts that I hope will stimulate your thinking.
What's principally lacking on the federal scene, it seems to me, is the existence of respected, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary teams that could at least tell us what is possible and something about the pluses and minuses of different solutions. Take energy, for instance. What I would love to see established, with the National Academies or any other mechanism to confer respectability, is a team that will ... say, 'Okay, there are lots of suggestions around, and most of them won't work. But here are six different plans, any one of which is possible. We'll tell you what each one costs, what's good about it, what's bad about it, how dangerous it is, and what its uncertainties are.' At least each option would be a well-integrated, clearly thought-out plan. I do not trust democracy to try to put together such a plan by having each committee of Congress choose one piece of it. Suppose Congress designed an airplane, with each committee designing one component and an eleventh-hour conference committee deciding how the pieces should be put together. Would you fly on that airplane? I am telling you we are flying on an energy plan, an inflation plan, and so on that are being put together in exactly that way.
Unfortunately the original 1980 article that this was excerpted from is paywalled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @09:18PM
Why isn't it a good plan? Not all experience is good. Most of our politicians have lots of experience in being corrupt, authoritarian pieces of trash, but that isn't beneficial at all. I would rather have inexperienced people who would at least attempt to stand up for my freedoms.
Also, just because there are term limits on a particular political position doesn't mean that you won't have experienced people filling that position; there are plenty of types of political offices (governor, congressperson, representative, president, tons of local political positions, etc.), so politicians who have experience in other offices could move to a different type of office.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @09:27PM
The corruption primarily comes from the fund-raising and the ability to work for those firms after leaving office. Term limits don't really do much about that, the full solution is to bar public officials from taking jobs with companies that were lobbying them previously. As well as removing all the private funds from campaign finance.
That should address most of the problems involved.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Monday January 02 2017, @01:31AM
The corruption primarily comes from the fund-raising and the ability to work for those firms after leaving office. Term limits don't really do much about that,
Term Limits do more than you think.
They really do about all you can do in a free country. People should not be punished for life just because they served a couple two year terms as a congressman. Its not reasonable to restrict people from working in their field of expertise simply because they served in congress.
By assuring that a no one can have a "career as a politician" by limiting them to a small fixed number of terms you also reduce the value of that person to a company that might hire them as payback for favors done while they were in office. There's not that many favors you can do in 4 or 6 years.
I get it: You want fine grained control over the details of the life of anyone who ever takes a government job. Yet you rebel when anyone else insists on that level of control over your life. We don't live in that kind of world.
It is sufficient to prevent any elected office from being a permanent career. You don't get to run anyone else's life.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.