Ambitious But Useless

Quotes from this Frank J. Fleming piece:

Suggestions on How We Should Treat Our Congressmen

We should treat them all just like known mafia members; we don't have the evidence to send them to prison just yet, but we'll keep the FBI constantly on their tail.

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But what do ambitious, capable people do in this country? They start their own businesses and lead successful lives comfortably away from the fickleness of the ballot box. So that just leaves the people who are ambitious but useless and just love the thought of being able to meddle in all the useful things everyone else is doing. And then the whole election process, where the politicians constantly lie and change their positions on issues to keep their jobs, tends to weed out the people who aren’t also sociopaths. So the system we have has basically set us up to be governed by ambitious, useless sociopaths who love to meddle in everything actual contributors to society are doing. So lawyers, for the most part.

And when you put these people in charge, of course they’re going to just try to grab more power so they can interfere even more, hence the steady bloating of government we’ve seen throughout American history. So what do we do? Change the system to make sure we get good, qualified people who aren’t arrogant weirdos to be our legislators?

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The first thing we need to do, when someone becomes a legislator, is to give him a number, and that’s how we know him. Instead of Representative John Smith, he’s now Representative 24601. And instead of suits, representatives will wear nice assigned jumpsuits; they don’t have to be bright orange, but they should allow us to easily identify these people who plan to spend all our money so we know to be careful around them. And we’ll treat them all just like known mafia members; we don’t have the evidence to send them to prison just yet, but we’ll keep the FBI constantly on their tail and looking because we’re sure they’re up to something.

And to help with that, they’ll all wear ankle bracelets, so we’ll know where they are at all times, and every place they go will be bugged so everyone will know what they’re doing and who they’re talking to and what they’re saying. You want to spend trillions of dollars of other people’s money, the tradeoff is that you lose all rights to privacy … though there will probably have to be some exceptions to that for classified briefings (but is it really wise to be giving these people important classified information?). And if we ever catch a legislator doing anything illegal, he automatically gets double the maximum sentence. They make the laws, so we should hit them even harder if they break them.

It’s pretty simple: We treat all legislators like lying crooks, because they self-identified as such by running for office; normal people don’t desire to spend other people’s money.

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This is America: We don’t let tyrants push us around; we push them around. It’s time we remember that.