Most politicians seem to be lawyers. I don’t know how that happened, but it’s horrible. Basically, we have lawyers coming up with laws that only other lawyers can understand, keeping themselves employed. None of them ever create anything useful; they just sort of get in the way of and put rules on other people doing useful stuff.
So it would be nice to have politicians come from different occupations, and here’s an editorial saying we should have scientists become politicians.
Horrible idea.
I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with the output of scientists, but it’s a lot of crap you have to slog through before you find anything of practical application. I mean, the solution to lawyers isn’t people who deal even more in the theoretical. We don’t need people saying, “My new plan is MATHEMATICALLY PROVEN to help the economy.” Then after they implement the plan and everything collapses they’ll be like, “Whoops. I guess we forgot to factor in a couple parameters. Well, NOW it should work.”
Instead, engineers would make good politicians. With engineers, crap has to work at the end of the day. We don’t care if it’s theoretically pretty or what not. Of course, you run into the same problem you always have with why people from useful occupations don’t become politicians: Too busy doing useful stuff. Who can just drop everything and run for office? Mainly lawyers, because they weren’t doing anything useful anyway. I think the only way you’ll get people with useful experience in government is if you start drafting them like with jury duty. I’d certainly rather try random names from the phonebook than who we have now.
The rationale for having lawyers for politicians has always been, “We need people who can understand bills and laws.” Well, I guess the recent debates in Congress pretty well shoot that notion all to hell.
Scientists are right out. Engineers are prolly the best choice, although without deadlines, they’d be forever optimizing cool solutions. DMV workers might be a safe solution, because nothing at all would ever happen in Congress. First do no harm and such.
I’m biased, of course, but us Auto Mechanics are always working on a deadline (flat rate), and have to have an analytical brain to deal with things that don’t work as designed, or are just plain broken…like our economy, for instance…
I believe we should only elect rocks to public office. Rocks will just sit there, not say or do anything. They won’t introduce idiotic bills and they certainly won’t lie. OK, they just kinda lay there, but they won’t tell you lies. Rocks don’t steal. Heck, you don’t have to pay them, just turn them over every now and then to keep the build up of moss down. But if they do get some moss, who cares? They’re just rocks. The best kind of politician, in my humble opinion.
Retired Marines, SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin. That’s it. Few exceptions.
Marko, great list. I’d only add Fred Thompson and Chuck Norris to that list. And Russian submarine captains who speak with a Scottish accent and lay off big cities listening to their rock n’ roll while they conduct missile drills. And, oh, rocks.
I’d be willing to add Frank J to that list if he’d only stop being such a hard case and give us our Nuke The Moon and Fred Thompson Punch The Hippies shirts.
Frank J. is too arrogant and uncaring! I suppose we could add his wifey.
Margaret Thatcher was a scientist.
There’s only one problem with having competent people become politicians: they’d be politicians. “Competent” and “politician” are mutually exclusive. Now, if some of these people were to become actual STATESMEN, well…
Computer architects, engineers, programmers, build systems with logic, maintainability, scalability, user friendliness, etc. The model system would win awards and people would line up at midnight to be one of the first to own it.
Subsequently, patches could be rolled out on every second Tuesday to “enhance” the system.
After 3 or 4 “major” elections, the government would discontinue support for the “-3” version of the system.
Eventually, people would post signs like the one in my old team’s area: “If architects built buildings the way programmers build programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.”
I think there’s a reason many engineers (except for those pesky “environmental” engineers perhaps – unless they’re actually engineering the environment for human use, then that’s cool) are more conservative types – they actually care about what works. Scientists a lot of the time seem to be more liberal, because they are all about “experimenting” and “theory,” while seldom thinking about the practial uses (that’s for the engineers to worry about).
On the bright side, my Top 10 Democrat Slogans shirt should be shipping out tomorrow. Woo Hoo!
Isn’t that pretty much how it works currently?
Kind of a trade off between lawyers and scientists. Either we have people that make their living by frivolously attacking successful businesses or people or people that make their living from government grants. It would be nice to have representatives that have actually run a real business.
Mt Rushmore – 3 surveyors and another guy. Land Surveyors are the logical choice.
No offense meant but I know some engineers, their people skills are not really good, or as my daughter would say they have little to no social skills. Sorry, just an observation………they’re very smart though.
Firefighters:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6DORwBzuA
or maybe Loggers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4ZDhGbRv0o
Either one would be better than what we have now!
So lawyers are only good for other lawyers, scientists make nothing but more work for themselves, and engineers make things work?
I think engineers actually design things that work – barely – pushing technology beyond previous limits to enable new ideas to work.
If you really want something that works, get a lazy, lazy, lazy equipment technician to set it up. He (or she) will design a system that requires zero maintenance, no knowledge to use, and works even if the user messes up completely. Think of a gumball machine. That is what an equipment tech would make to solve the world’s problems.
The gumballs would have solutions written on them (in lawyerly fine print, using specialty ink created by scientists, and with well-engineered specifications for the text. Like, “The US Constitution does not allow the government the authority to do that, so stop that.” That could be written on about 50% of the gumballs. The rest could have practical suggestions like, “Unless you can predetermine the means to avoid all the problems this will cause, don’t do it.” and “Nuke the moon.”
If you want something that works, get in good with the equipment techs. The folks with the wrenches and screwdrivers rule the world.
Just as ‘Science’ is being replaced by ‘Science!’,
the problem is that ‘Political Science’ has become ‘Political Science!!’.t
The assumed solution to every problem is more money ,
more control, given to politicians.
EnemyoftheState – On the plus side, if the woodpecker destroyed your building, we’d have an exact copy of the old one restored from backup in five minutes. And could build a million just like yours for almost nothing.
“Proud Infidel says:
May 13th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
I believe we should only elect rocks to public office. Rocks will just sit there, not say or do anything. They won’t introduce idiotic bills and they certainly won’t lie. OK, they just kinda lay there, but they won’t tell you lies. Rocks don’t steal. Heck, you don’t have to pay them, just turn them over every now and then to keep the build up of moss down. But if they do get some moss, who cares? They’re just rocks. The best kind of politician, in my humble opinion.”
Proud Infidel, if we don’t allow the moss to grow, how do we know who will be most senior for committee assignments? Perhaps that thought right there is why engineers such as I should not be politicians….
I’m an engineer, and thank you very much, but I’ll pass on running the country. The reason? lawyers. Lawyers are the bane of an engineer’s existence, and having them use emotional arguments to overturn the logical systems we engineers would put in place would just be too painful. Thanks, I’ll stay in aerospace, where our customers are merely happy that we stay away from their cocktail parties (given our social awkwardness) but somehow manage to keep them alive.
Think about it, Cap’n Dan. If you were President, the 82nd Airborne (among others) would work for you. So when a lawyer started giving you problems, you could have a Spec Ops team do a night drop to his house and take him out. Wouldn’t that be fun?