baba@spar.UUCP (Baba ROM DOS) (09/24/85)
Laura Creighton writes: > What i do not want is full time (career) civil servants. There undoubtably > are people who would make good full time Judges, policemen and law makers > but there are far too many who are not. Therefore I propose limiting how > long one can work for the state to 2 terms of (say) 5 years each. This will > mean that there is a need for a great turnover of state employees. There > is no such thing as a free lunch, folks, so I think that the price that > citizens of libertaria will have to pay to have their rights respected and > a small state is compulsory work for the state for one term. This does > not mean that one must work as an infantry soldier, of course -- you can be > a judge or a mayor or an elected official or a secretary or a programmer. > Do not expect the salary to be good, however. I find this strangely reminiscent of Jacksonian democracy. There too, the nominal objective was to prevent the coagulation of a bureaucracy by institutionalizing a high turnover rate in public office, and there was an egalitarian assumption that anyone should be able to assume a public official's duties. But I have to wonder: If most people would make poor full-time judges and generals, ought we not to spend some energy to find men of rare wisdom and justice, imagination and energy, for such positions, rather than rotating through a succession of functionaries statistically doomed to incompetence? And just how impartial can a judge afford to be if he *knows* he's going to have to hunt for work in the private sector within a few years? Baba