The Cheerful Insanity of Me

So, on the news this morning they were discussing the publication of the BBC expenses and salary information. Not seen any big rants on how much these people are being paid getting and how much "tax-payers money" they are spending, but it has got me thinking (well, ok this is more an amalgamation of lots of thoughts that have been running through my head recently).

OK, these people are getting paid silly amounts, but that's the way the system works. We do not have a system where people get paid fairly for the work they put in. Instead we have a market place, which means the price you get paid for your skills is subject to supply and demand and your own bartering skills. Net result, those who have power and influence get more money and those with money get more power and influence in an ever growing spiral. Those of us that don't have much of either are generally stuffed.

It's always struck me as bizarre that we live in a society were we pay people phenomenial amounts in the city to basically manipulate the system. City traders may be highly skilled individuals, but it seems a shame that these skills should be focused on working the system to increase the profit for the companies they represent rather than something that's actually useful to society. However, when it comes to the things that are fundamental to society, like food production, education, nursing, etc. The workers in these areas are generally accepted to be paid less then they are actually worth.

One thing that really worries me, is how it seems to prevent us from dealing with the real issues. In 2006, the Stern review was released bring the climate change issue to the front in order that we might actually do something about it. Nearly 3 years later, very little seems to have actually happened inspite of many discussions about how we could implement things like carbon trading, etc. However, very few inroads seem to have been made on any of these ideas. Why not? Because they don't suit big business, who are the people who hold the real power within our society. I'm fairly certain that there are many people working for these companies who would view climate change as an issue, but it's the will of the organisation rather than the individual that rules here and that will is almost entirely devoted to profit. Somewhat worrying when the IPCC suggest we need our emissions to peak by 2015, which means we've now wasted a third of the time we had to deal with these things.

In short, we live in a system where the needs of artificial constructs in the form of companies and organisations take priority over the needs of the people within them and rewards individuals based upon there power and influence instead of as a reflection of their own input into society and as a result encourages class inequality.

Solving a single manifestation of this is not going to make a huge difference to society as a whole. If you really have a problem with this consider the bigger issue rather than picking on individuals as we did with the MPs. They're just working the system in the way the capitalism encourages. If you remove one problem individual and their methods of manipulating the system, then another will come along and do something very similar, just in a different way.

So, the speaker of the house of commons resigned yesterday.

Not that surprising really as the whole world seem to have wanted his head on a plate for the past few days.

I still don't get what all the fuss is about really though, so MPs are bending the rules for their own gains. erm... yes... what surprising about that?

OK, we've named a shamed some of them and some of them have resigned, but if you really want to purge government of rule bending then you'd need to get rid of the whole lot of them and then we wouldn't have a government...

Actually, on second thoughts that isn't a bad idea.

However, more seriously, there are far bigger issues with the way that the British government operates (like the fact that it seems to revolve almost entirely around whips and spin doctors for example, which really have to be the pinacle of bending the system to your own ends) that it seems silly to get bogged down in such petty squabbling. I'd be curious to know how cost of the time spent debating this issue (in terms of MPs salaries, etc) and external regulation compares to the amounts that were falsely claimed?

Most of the benefits I can think of which the government fund are done through means testing rather than on an expenses system, why not just do the same with this? After all, that's pretty much what it's claiming to be and it would be a lot simpler than this.

So, if we're going to have reform can we actually have a reform that will actually make a difference to the way this country's run, so we aren't stuck with the situation of just having 2 major parties saying how bad each other are and a few other fringe people who don't like either of them and actually get to the situation where MPs are more concerned with running the country rather than making each other look bad?

Quentin Wilson on this morning's today program:

"We all know what too much reliance on satnavs causes - Driving off cliffs"

(or words to that effect, seem to have forgotten them a bit in the past 2.5 hours)

Perhaps we should implement compulsory use of satnavs as a new traffic calming measure?

And in other news, I might be appearing on the front cover of an edition of New Scientist:

Faces Experiment