Originally Posted by biguc
I was going to say something like that but Wolf already heavily qualified his claim that more conservatives come from the private sector. You're right though--politics is a profession and most successful politicians have made a career of it. That said, I'll still never vote for someone whose first job was VP in a students' union. I'd like my representatives in government to have some grasp of what the rest of us go through.
But to your other point about politics being run like business--and this is going to sound cynical as all hell--when we elect a government we're basically collectively hiring a group of poorly-compensated administrators to run a very large company that provides us a collection of services.
This is where borkborkbork's point about the caliber of business person in the PC party applies. Big business executives capable of guiding a lumbering leviathan like our provincial government aren't interested. They can make millions in the private sector. Thus, we get small-time entrepreneurs, branch office middle-managers, and a premier who takes credit for his wife's business savvy. You could make the case that career politicians from the left who've spent decades in government are better at running government.
Anyway, esquire's description of Manitoba's politics, "bulimia politics" is apt. On a fundamental level, the collective, non-consensus nature of democracy means people will always be at odds over what services the government provides. Here in the city, we don't see the value of improving highway 12, while in Steinbach they don't see the value of building rapid transit in Winnipeg. A comfortable family in Charleswood may consider money going to a womens' centre in the West End wasted, while happily putting their kids into a heavily subsidized hockey program. We can assess the value of every service and can discuss their relative merits, but someone will always think that a service that someone else relies on is a waste.
For a current example, Kevin O'Leary is championing himself as the ultimate small-government candidate for Conservative leadership. He recently said something to the effect that the government should only provide a military and roads. But why? In years past, I've made the case on this board that roads are easily privatizable. If even "cut everything" Kevin thinks that subsidizing drivers and the trucking industry is a sacred facet of government services, and others disagree, that is an inevitable impasse in democracy.
Here in Manitoba, we see this impasse played out with our particular culture, and with our particular set of actors. We just turfed out Sellinger--a real-life Fabian Socialist bent on sneaking us into the bosom of socialism on the back of top-down economic planning, expanding government for expansion's sake, and clandestine tax increases. In his place, we have Pallister--an ogre who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing; he professes a frontier, DIY mentality that would see him rather roof his own house poorly than pay to have professionals do the job--in practice this means he doesn't roof his house until his ceiling caves in.
In reality, we can walk a broad avenue between these extremes. I'd like to think most Manitobans are aware of that. While there is a hard core of cheapskates who will never understand that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And on the other hand there is a hard core of public sector and union admins who know they provide little of value to society unless obviously broken institutions like the taxi board, by virtue of pure dogma, remain intact. But if we can settle down these extremes, I should think that most of us would rather we assess the value of every service and discuss their relative merits. Attention to detail may not make for sexy politics, but it does make for good administration.
In the big picture, though, our political pendulum could work out well. Manitoba is experiencing something of a boom right now, and if we play our macroeconomics right, that means we should be trimming government back. The Keynesian flywheel is just a famous asshole's expression of sound business orthodoxy: accumulate cash when times are good, accumulate assets when times are hard.
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