Should politicians be prosecuted for financial recklessness?

Yeah, in the real world overtly aggressive messages work. You see that generally in these sorts of races it's usually the more aggressive candidate that wins. That's a major reason why democracy doesn't work, although there are other potential reasons. At least that's fixable.

First, you have structural reasons why you don't get an accurate picture of the desires of the people. Things such as gerrymandering, or barriers to voting (for example if you have no wait in some areas and 30 minute waits in other areas you're actually putting a pretty big thumb on the scale)..people with more white collar jobs might have more opportunity to vote (they can just take off out of the office for an hour) than blue collar jobs.

Second, I think that places that are ideologically unstable result in worse policies. Such as the US and the UK, as opposed to Canada. (With the US being more unstable than the UK). Because of the instability, you get bigger swings, and less chance of coming to any sort of mutual long-term compromise. Also because it's not a matter of who can best get the ship in the right direction, it's about swinging the ship entirely, the ship often ends up getting next to nowhere.

Limiting it to the US, (The UK probably has different issues that I'm not as familiar with) a big part of the problems with "financial recklessness" is that they were done on purpose as there's a very real concern that a long-term balanced budget could result in future governments having a much easier time doing things that would "interfere" in the economy. Because of that, to a lot of people the debt isn't a "real" concern (even though in a perfect world they'd love to get rid of it) because if they do spend the political time and capital to do so, someone else is just going to come along and shit the bed again.

A bigger problem than the desires of the people is people who have desires but are idiots.

I don't think it's practical to contemplate punishing politicians for financial recklessness until we get more widespread agreement on what financial recklessness is in the first place. When there are still two major diametrically opposed schools of thought on economics, any punishments you're going to get are going to be determined by which faction is on the upswing. That's the opposite of what you want in a punishment-based system, which ought to be stable, objective and apolitical as much as possible.

edited 12th Jun '11 12:53:24 PM by Karkadinn

I do not think that most people are idiots when it comes to politics. I think it's more of a mix of laziness, jaded thinking ("all crooks anyway") and the impression they're too small to change things.

There are laws against fraud. There are fewer laws against honest, but bad or mistaken decisions.

edited 12th Jun '11 2:03:31 PM by blueharp