The People Who Don’t Know How to Do Anything Keep Deciding Everything
Politicians should not be allowed to spend money.
Let’s start there, because it’s the root of the whole mess.
They shouldn’t decide what gets built, where it gets built, or whose cousin gets the contract.
Their names shouldn’t be slapped onto bridges, highways, schools, and hospitals like they personally laid the brick.
And they absolutely should not be writing laws about things they don’t understand.
Which, if we’re being honest, is most things.
Politicians are, by and large, generalists with decent haircuts.
Many of them don’t know how anything actually works — not medicine, not engineering, not education, not economics.
They are salespeople. They’re branding exercises.
They’re professional door-knockers who won a popularity contest.
So why the hell do we give them so much power?
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The people with the least expertise keep making the biggest decisions.
Imagine a high-school dropout deciding how the next generation learns math.
Imagine someone who failed science class deciding which medical treatments your doctor is allowed to give you.
Imagine a lawyer — not a surgeon, not an oncologist — deciding which medical devices are “worth funding.”
You don’t have to imagine it.
It’s literally how our systems work.
We don’t ask doctors what care we deserve.
We don’t ask engineers how to build bridges.
We don’t ask educators how kids learn.
We ask politicians — people with no training in any of it — and let them decide what happens to millions of lives.
This isn’t leadership.
It’s negligence dressed up as governance.
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And then we wonder why nothing gets done.
Democracies make decisions on timelines no longer than an election cycle.
Four years — that’s the shelf life of any big idea.
A government starts a project, announces it, breaks ground…
and then the next government comes in and kills it halfway through.
Not because it was a bad plan.
Because it wasn’t their plan.
Meanwhile, China is building cities, ports, rail systems, power grids —
not because authoritarianism is better,
but because they don’t let their leadership rewrite the blueprint every four years.
There’s continuity.
There’s long-term planning.
There’s a structure of experts who actually know how to execute.
Authoritarianism is not the answer.
Let’s be clear about that.
But the comparison exposes something important:
Our system empowers the wrong people to make the most technical decisions.
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And the dumbest part? They can give away our assets like they own them.
One party wins an election and suddenly they have the authority to sell off highways, utilities, land, energy grids —
public infrastructure built over decades with taxpayer money —
to private corporations who then charge the public for access to what the public already paid for.
Think about how insane that is.
A single government, often representing less than half the population,
can privatize assets worth billions.
Assets that take generations to build
and generations to buy back — if buying back is even possible.
No referendum.
No long-term cost analysis.
No expert oversight.
Just a room full of elected amateurs signing away public wealth like they’re clearing out a garage.
Selling public assets for short-term political gains is legalized robbery.
We pay for it long after they’re gone.
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**The problem isn’t too much government.
It’s too much political government and not enough expert government.**
We don’t have too many committees — we have too few.
We don’t have too much oversight — we have too little.
We don’t have too much bureaucracy — we have the wrong kind.
More experts means:
more efficiency
more accountability
less waste
fewer vanity projects
fewer cancellations mid-construction
more continuity
more eyes catching fraud and mismanagement
When trained professionals — civil engineers, economists, educators, urban planners, scientists — make the decisions, you get plans that survive beyond elections.
You get real infrastructure.
Real services.
Real improvements to real lives.
People stop being bought.
They start being served.
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And honestly? We should demand qualifications.
I would be in favour of a degree — a real one — required for anyone who wants to be in government.
Not political science lite.
Not “communications.”
Not “I volunteered once.”
Actual training:
management
leadership
economics
tax systems
constitutional law
public administration
ethics
global affairs
empathy and the human condition
how government actually works
Before they get the job.
Before we hand them the keys to a nation.
We require teachers to have degrees.
We require hairdressers to be licensed.
We require realtors to be certified.
We require doctors to train for a decade.
But politicians?
All they need is enough people who like the sound of their voice.
A kindergarten teacher influences a few hundred children.
A politician influences everyone.
We need leaders who have seen the world,
who understand how systems function,
who know how others see us,
who can step outside themselves to understand society at scale.
Leadership isn’t about instinct.
It’s about preparation.
Running a country is the most technical job on Earth.
And we hand it to amateurs.
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Politicians should not be kings. They should be stewards.
Their role is not to design the future.
Their role is to support the people who can:
Guard the purse.
Ensure transparency.
Empower experts.
Prevent corruption.
Keep the system running — but don’t pretend to be the mechanic.
Stop asking politicians, “What are you going to do?”
Start asking, “How will you support the people who actually know how to do it?”
When experts run the country, it moves forward.
When politicians run the country, it campaigns.
One builds.
The other spins.