German Economy Minister Robert Habeck faced a backlash on Wednesday for saying he could imagine parts of the economy stopping production due to rising energy prices that German firms say are threatening their existence.
Yup, and I’d venture that this is a symptom of an underlying problem with western style parliamentary democracies. We conflate identifying problems with proposing solutions. So, politicians come up with harebrained schemes and then compete with each other to convince the public of which of these schemes to go along with.
Neither the politicians nor the public are qualified to decide whether these proposals make sense or whether they can work in practice. Experts are not part of the decision making process in this system.
A sane process would be to vote on perceived problems that people have, then create expert groups to propose solutions to these problems along with pros and cons for each solution. Then have a second vote on what solution most people prefer. Once that’s done there needs to be a commitment to implementing this solution.
Yup, and I’d venture that this is a symptom of an underlying problem with western style parliamentary democracies. We conflate identifying problems with proposing solutions. So, politicians come up with harebrained schemes and then compete with each other to convince the public of which of these schemes to go along with.
Neither the politicians nor the public are qualified to decide whether these proposals make sense or whether they can work in practice. Experts are not part of the decision making process in this system.
A sane process would be to vote on perceived problems that people have, then create expert groups to propose solutions to these problems along with pros and cons for each solution. Then have a second vote on what solution most people prefer. Once that’s done there needs to be a commitment to implementing this solution.