"It is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time" - Richard Fernandez writing in Pajamasmedia.

When historians look back on the first decades of the 21st century, he writes, they may conclude that the political and economic crisis that swept over the world was the direct result of decades of resource misallocation driven by political objectives. They will look back on the drilling bans, environmental edicts which have shut down agricultural areas, the massive entitlement expansions and quests for carbon sequestration and ask: what were the political leadership thinking?

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"Resource misalloction" is a very kindly way of saying "government taking the people's money to, no matter the programme's nominal purpose, pay government workers and their friends". The only solution is to cut back the size and therefore power of government to no more than 20% of the economy, starting with the government's propaganda arm, the BBC.

Cutting back the size and therefore power of government is your objective. How you go about achieving that is your solution. So far, we seem to be long on objectives and short on solutions.

We count only as bits of paper in a ballot box.
We count if taxes are collected.
We are counted when brought back from some far off land in a box.
Other than that, we do not count save for being poisoned, starved, and injunctioned.

We do not count - but we feel;
Anger, pain, suffering, deceit, theft, and rebellious.

We count also when we stand together and refuse to be treated as numbers.

Dear friends,

In my work we have a saying, "A well-defined problem (or objective) makes the solution (almost) obvious..." Perhaps the objectives are too general or, to put it another way, perhaps they lack sufficient opperational detail. In my work, when this occurs, we decompose the objectives (i.e., break them down into smaller parts as René Descartes recommended) or we construct a "case scenario," narrating how things should work. These approaches sometimes help. As to the current objective of not being treated as mere numbers, perhaps a useful approach is to formulate how we would prefer being treated even if we believe that that should be obvious and not need to be stated explicitly.

That is absolutely in accordance with problem-solving theory ... defining the problem clearly is 90 percent of the solution. The question we need to address, of course, is how do we achieve a solution ... the subsidiary question is whether there are enough of us who actually care enough to want (and are able) to dedicate our lives to achieving it.

The more I see and hear of Rep. candidate for US Presidnetial election 2012 Herman Cain, the more I like what he has to say.
He has a very simple approach to 'problem solving'

http://www.thehopeforamerica.com/play.php?id=8113

Unlike the Barmy One, Cain is a man of fewer words, but unfortunately lacks experience of being a "community organiser"

Richard, OT, but Pachauri has made this claim:



When the VK Raina report by the Indian ministry was published, Pachauri was approached by the media. His response:

In government, you have people making decisions which will not affect them personally if they go wrong -- in the narrow sense, they are spending other people's money, so they don't care how it turns out.

In business, of course, a bad decision can send you bankrupt.

Only if a decision is going to hit you in the (literal or figurative) hip pocket, will you bring your best rational judgement into play ahead of your emotional feeling about a situation.

Decisions made by people with no stake in the outcome are always prone to be bad ones.