Black_Kitty
I don't think it's that hard for some of them to find more attractive options then running for office.

And that's exactly my point! :) They can easily find higher paying positions elsewhere, but instead they choose politics. Highly paid doctors and lawyers provide a constant stream of political recruits all over the world: leaving higher paid positions for often higher status and yet much lower paid positions in government.

The money is irrelevant. The only motives for that career in modern first world democracies (and yes, a lot of it can be traced to Plato's Republic), are power, status, a willingness to serve your community, ideology, and social responsibility. The thing is, politics isn't a job, not in the classical sense, it's something people are strongly committed to. I would argue (and a lot or learned people before me have as well), that only the worst kinds of people would seek leadership for money.

There is another argument that goes along the lines of whoever would seek leadership is the least qualified to lead... But that seems most popular in fantasy stories. :P

Ooooh! I finally get what you're saying! :D (I guess I'm a bit slow today. ^^;;; ) Makes sense. :D

I still think though that even if they're not running for the money, paying what's due is still the right thing to do though. I know that I've always appreciated it when my boss insisted on paying me. There have been so many times when I worked for the pleasure of it and never asked for a dime in exchange. But once she found out what I was doing, she would insist on paying me. I always appreciated that and took it as a sign that she valued what I did.

Charlox
What's funny is that the New York Times noted that the cost of the war would have paid for universal health care in the US, nursery education for all three and four-year-olds in the country, immunization for children round the world against a host of diseases, and still leave about half of the money left over. Yet we keep feeding the war machine with our taxes and it always benefits somebody else other than the middle and poor classes.

Both darkly funny, and very very very sad.

Problem is that where war is concerned base desires take over. Who cares about education, immunization, or a better standard of living when we could be going and fighting some A-rabs! YEAH!


Problem is the Administration has some great marketers. And people are afraid of socialism because it ties in with communism, and the wounds from the USSR haven't quite healed yet.

It's not like socialist countries are perfect. I have family in Norway, and my cousin gets really annoyed at the fact that he can't move his dock where he keeps his boats without going through about 7 government agencies and a bunch of paperwork to see if such a move would be "good for the public good". Also my uncle over there thinks that Norweigan schools suck and that American schools are much more competitive. Maybe he's right...but I kinda doubt that.

However in Norway everyone gets money to go to college, which is then taken out of their bank accounts when they start making an income. Everything is pretty well regulated. There aren't a ton of poor people, although there are some.

But then again Norway's entire population is HALF the size of New York City's. So suddenly there's the problem of doing what Norway did to make their standard of living the highest in the world and applying that to a country with more than 300 Million people over a much larger area. It's much harder to make everyone happy or have everyone agree.