Re: Editorial, (Exposing the stuffed shirts, Saanich News, Sept. 14).
The over-spending bureaucrats are hired by politicians, who are elected by voters. Those politicians are neophytes at actually figuring things out, and suckers for a good story from bureaucrats who are steeped in government procedures.
Until voters work to develop solid candidates and elect them nothing will change. Candidates must have an attitude of “show me” – demanding proof, and be honest. (A key problem is typical candidates are do-gooders who lack smarts and have bad values.
Unfortunately you throw in a reference to the neo-Marxist mob called “Occupy”, whose blatherings are based on a negative view of humans as uncreative and untrustworthy. (Hence teachings of the fixed-pie economics and “drive-to-the-bottom” behaviour behind Marxist exploitation theory.
You miss that in the private sector, absent government force like quotas (taxi licenses, egg production, etc) and subsidies, people have to think hard and well to succeed. If they don’t, or become complacent as many do after initially succeeding, other people will earn customers’ business.
I point to the fact that money earned by a rich business person is typically gone within three generations. (Sometimes much sooner, other times a family has good values and trains the next generation well.) And to successive failures in a field that had little specific regulation – small computer software. When IBM designed the PC, it had difficulty dealing with the pre-eminent supplier of operating software, so chose Bill Gates’ adaptation of a dormant operating system a local company was willing to sell – “the rest is history.” For applications to run on the PC, Wordstar was an early favourite but became complacent, so it was supplanted by a program put together one summer to give users of an accounting system a text editor – it grew into the famous WordPerfect. But WordPerfect grew so complacent I stopped recommending it to people, and made a strategic error in putting a version for Windows well down in its priorities – that led to the popularity of Microsoft Word, which was emerging on the Mac.
Pirjo, individual freedom protected by defense and justice works for humans, as can be seen around the world in which societies feed and shelter people.
Keith Sketchley
Saanich