Seacat, if you and I keep this up, we're going to have to hug each other, and that won't be pretty...

Your point on the givernment doing the best it can is close, but not what what I think. Rather, I tend to think that the givernment does as best as can be expected, given the constraints impose by the struture of our society. I think the government is made up of people, who, being people, are human. Some of them are good and skiled, some of them are not so good, and not so skilled. I would be so rash as to say that government bureaucracy attracts fewer of the really intelligent, really creative people, for two reasons: it pays less, and bureacracy stifles creative, intelligent folks. This is the nature of government. Has been for literally thousands of years, since the Egyptians.

So my point is, while it may be fun to p1ss and moan about it, bashing the government for being less than creative and in particular less than creative than private industry misses the obvious: government will always be less creative than private industry, because we pay government bureaucrats less and abuse them. Anyone any free spirit is likely to want to stay in private industry.

So, my belief is that intelligent people should expect rather less productivity and creativity out of government, because there is virtually no incentive for government to be creative. We punish our legislators if they think out of the box. After we have done that for 20 years, do we expect them to avoid punishment? Of course we do. So they do what the average voter asks them to, rather than what they are paid to do. Which is, to gather facts not available to the common voter, and, using those facts, figure out what the wise course is to support the populace at large, not just the 37% that voted in the last election.

So what does that mean for us? It means that if we think we know more than the government, that that may well be true, but we have to get off our collective butts and do something productive with the knowledge. That will likely mean trying to educate our legistators on an issue, and in turn, opening our minds to be educated ourselves that the issue may be more complex than we initialy believe.

Now, this all said, I agree with your foul ball call on the enhancement fee, but I suspect there is more to it than meets the eye. It may be as simple as this: in private industry, we can forge a contract where I pay you a set fee for maintenance of a service. We negotiate the fee, and if the fee isn't enough you to provide the service, you incur a loss. Well, in government, in doesn't work that way. In the long run, government can't incur a loss. Any loss that the government incurs, eventually comes out of the pockets of the people, or the government becomes insolvent, and a complete breakdown of society occurs. It may ssimply be that the enhancement fee hasn't covered the costs, or it may be that the state has apporpirated the funds to cover other service. I don't know. I do know that, at the root of the problem is theissue that the state is trying to spend for more things than it has money for.

Isn't it time to go fishing yet?