Making the ship of government selfrighting XBOX 360 2629
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Who says that Europeans liked the "big brother"? I could point out a couple of cases where you really wanted to avoid being noticed by the monarch ... or even the parliament-equivalent, in the extreme case, if you wanted to get anything done.
In the local history here in Finland, the time of the Autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland belonging to the Czar of Russia was interesting in that regard.
Andrew Swallow Not really - I could well claim that in the general case such a distinction doesn't exist, and what Britain has is...
They didn't exist in 2003. Nobody could find any. That wasn't unexpected. If the UN inspectors hadn't been forced to bugout by imminent military action...
I don't see how that follows. I read the above criteria as more like orthogonal to the economic side of things.
I suppose that in this context, the civil service would be defined to include whatever the government uses to do its daily work, that is, the background procedures needed for the governance and the actual handling of civilian tasks allocated to the government's agents. (Right?)
In that case, business by civil service would only happen if that was one of the tasks allocated to the govt's agents - by whomever was in actual power to make it happen in reality, which might well be different from the designed division of powers.
It should only be this allocation of tasks that defined the economical system, as I understand it.
(Oh, and why is it called "civil service" when it obivously should include the military too?)
Only if such is allowed by the actual power structure, whatever that may be - sure, we'd like it to be the informed electorate, but reality being what it is...
The point is that this doesn't happen if the civil servants really are capable and honest enough. In theory.
Besides, it isn't at all certain that the civil services would be non-productive anyway. Possible, sure, maybe even probable, and at the very least less productive, but ... we seem to have had a bunch of cases here in northernmost Europe where they haven't been all bad.
It's more of a problem that by a certain point the civil services become self-sustaining blocks of power in the governance framework, and unless the civil servants actually are capable enough and -more importantly- honest enough, they'll get worse with time, as the actual controls upon them by the electorate (or whatever) are usually insufficient to prevent this.
So it's a self-reinforcing phenomenon when it gets that far. No surprise there.
-- #Not speaking for my employer. No warranty. YMMV.
It is now a civil war in Iraq.. According to reports, the US has already buttured the...