Are politicians useful?

Tim Worstall illustrates the dishonesty of people who think that government is the solution to everything and then rail when programs like the Bureau of Indian Affairs is such a disaster.

He had me hooked with his first paragraph:

My reaction to politicians tends to wander around a little between what I consider to be the only three possible options. Laugh at them, ignore them, or experience a (so far repressed) desire to have them tap dancing on air from the nearest lamp-post. There's no grand philosophic underpinning to this attitude as I don't do philosophy, partly because I don't understand what people are talking about. There's also the rather unkind thought that while engineers, in the last few thousand years, moved on from pointy sticks to bridges, skyscrapers, spaceships and the pop-tart, those who study more weighty matters are still pondering the nature of reality, just as their forebears were those thousands of years ago. It simply seems obvious to me that politicians can't actually do anything very well.

Who hasn't had that thought?

He goes on to demonstate that "progressive intellectual" is an oxymoron, using Paul Krugman as a case in point. He also provided two links to the blog of Jim Glass which was immediately added to my list of must-reads.

He ends with this:

There are only three valid options, derision, hatred or ignoring [politicians] in the hope that they'll go away. Others may come to Libertarianism by other routes but for me it's just life, a natural part of the way the world works. Politicians can't actually do what they promise to do as they are incompetent. Thus we shouldn't ask them to do anything very much.

I can't go that far, because it implies that democracy can't possibly work, and that society would be better off without it. But what would replace it? The main problem with modern democracies is that politicians have learned that they can buy votes with the voters' own money. Once the New Deal arrived America started downhill.

In many ways, I agree with Worstall, but not with his wholesale contempt for politicians. They are the creatures of the voters and generally are no better than their constituents.

Despite all its distasteful results, I think democracy in America has worked pretty well. If we fail to make it work, it'll be nobody's fault but our own. We generally have had better leaders than we deserved, which is not a reason to dismiss all politicians as Worstall does, and indicates that the founders understood what they were doing. Somehow they instilled enough understanding in the people that they have not allowed a military coup, nor a bloody chaos like France's revolution. Maybe it was the fact of our frontier and rich resources, but that would suggest that Russia should have been as successful as we have been. We have not been interested in building an empire, only spreading the system that has made us free and prosperous.

Sometimes, as I watch the people we've elected, I wonder how they ever got elected and manage to stay elected. If we all adopted Worstall's cynicism, though, nobody but people who expect handouts would vote. (Maybe that's becoming true.) There is still enough of a residue of patriotism, citizenship and love of freedom to keep us going for a while yet. We've stopped instilling those things in our children, though. Time will tell.