Articles: Getting the Government We Deserve

By Jon N. Hall

 

From time to time one hears various formulations of this sometimes misattributed quote by Joseph de Maistre: “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” If that’s so, it is especially true in the case of democracies, because in a democracy the nation, i.e. the People, chooses the government.

In today’s world, the electronic media allows all of America to watch in “real time” as O.J. Simpson and other idiots try to outrun the police. If something happens halfway around the globe, we know it immediately. Although one must actively look for opinion and analysis, with the Internet it’s at our fingertips. So in today’s America, we have no excuses; we really do deserve the government we get.

One fact many Americans need to get a better grasp of is: America is a republic. America is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. Citizens don’t vote on every decision before government. Indeed, citizens not part of the government make way less than 1 percent of decisions affecting government. I just made up that statistic, but it’s gotta be correct. The few governmental decisions that the average citizen does make, however, are momentous. And those decisions are all about who are going to be making all the other decisions.

Imagine if the CEO of Boeing, GM, IBM, or Apple were chosen by the People in an election. It would be insane; the average voter doesn’t know enough to choose the leaders of such complicated organizations. Yet, we have a system where the People get to choose the CEO of the biggest, most complex operation in the known universe: the U.S. federal government.
 
Our system for electing the president wouldn’t be so nuts if it had a way to find the best and brightest, a way of winnowing down our choices before they’re presented to the People. But we don’t have that. Instead, we have a system in which anyone can self-select themselves. If Oprah self-selected herself to run for president, she might just get elected to be the so-called “Leader of the Free World.” (Over the last few years that title really belongs to Benjamin Netanyahu.)

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Articles: Getting the Government We Deserve