Quote:
Originally Posted by Vallen Chaos Valiant
See, one explanation is that China has actually tried to run a country using lawyers; they ended up with the Great Leap Forward and starved everyone to death.
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Naw, that was a case of China being ruled by
revolutionaries. Mao had this strange idea that the peasant farmers could do all the jobs of the educated, without any education. The typical cliché was that he put farmers into hospitals, and doctors into fields.
And of course, his response to feeling he was losing power to launch
another revolution.
Mao was a great guerilla leader, but he didn't know shit about running a country, he thought you could do it with peasant power and good intentions, and he was paranoid of anyone who even
seemed to be an expert.
Lawyers get a bad rap, but at least they're good at negotiating, which is really most of what government does (the cabinet posts do, in fact, get filled by those qualified for it). And when lawyers feel like they're losing power, they don't launch another revolution, but instead examine the rules, and see how they can bend it. Rule bending is annoying, but at least it's not a cultural revolution.
I would like it, though, if the represantitives in committees had more independent knowledge, a lot of the time, they're too dependent on lobbyists for information, and can't easily practice their own independent judgement.