Quote:
Originally Posted by Gillianren
I would rather have someone who loves being in public office run for public office and just have a lot of advisors--scientific, economic, and so forth.
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We've got that
now, and it doesn't seem to be working too well, IMHO. Apollo 17 astronaut
Harrison "Jack" Schmitt was a Senator after he came back from the Moon, and he's said that one of the biggest problems we have are the entrenched politicians who spend their entire working lives in Congress.
Electing scientists to public office won't be a panacea, by any means, but in recent years, the Federal government has been gutting funding for the sciences in
all areas (not just controversial things like stem cell research), which IMHO, is treasonous. First of all, we're in the middle of a couple of wars, and the absolute
last thing that you want to do during a war is cut back on scientific research. Second, the planet's in a royal mess environmentally speaking, and unless we put some real cabbage towards changing that, we're going to be having problems of Biblical proportions. Finally, and probably most important for many folks, China's economy is growing rapidly, and they will soon become a dominant power in global affairs. Very dominant. Their economic power, in terms of ability to buy things, will utterly eclipse ours by a factor of at least 4. I'll be the first to admit that the US hasn't been all that great in terms of how we've acted on the world's stage, but we at least give
token deference to things like human rights, and have processes (however slow they might be at times) to ensure our mistakes don't get too far out of hand. The Chinese
don't and are pretty amoral when it comes to things like human rights. If the US wants to matter as a nation, then we
must maintain our technological edge. Otherwise, we'll simply wind up a footnote in history. I don't care if we take second place to the Europeans, the Japanese, or the Indians, but to be behind a totalitarian state like China will be very bad for everyone in terms of human rights alone.
Putting more scientists in office won't fix everything, but it just might give us enough breathing room so that the folks who are best qualified to fix our other problems (employment, healthcare, education, The War Against Terror, etc.) can do their job.
Oh, and Einstein was offered the Prime Minister position when Israel was created, but turned it down.