Bean Counters

I’m more than a little sick and tired of listening to people babble about what a terrible state our countries finances are in. You can put the name of whatever country you happen to be in right now and it will probably apply. Do our countries owe money? Yes! Are the services that the countries provide expensive? Yes! Can we balance the budget? Not in any meaningful way! EVER!

Someone I know was venting about how much the teachers make and how their union is holding the children to ransom for more money and better conditions. Yes, in this day and age the teachers earn a fair wage. Gone are the days when you would get a sixteen year old girl, supply her with a place to live and pay her in grain, chickens and firewood. Teachers want to earn a living wage. Teachers should earn a living wage! Our kids deserve well educated, well fed, happy people teaching them who have all of the books and apparatus necessary to do their job.

The same goes for nurses, doctors, and all of the civil servants that work behind the scenes to keep the country running more or less smoothly despite government “measures” to balance the budget and rein in the “free ride” these people are getting.

When did the fucking bean counters take over the country?

I can remember when these people (bean counters) would come into a business and cause nothing but grief with their time and motion studies. They would recommend using cheaper materials that were almost as good and would raise the profit margin for the investors. Jobs were dissected and broken down into simple tasks that relatively untrained employees could do, getting rid of skilled craftsmen that understood the job and were innovative. That was when people took pride in their jobs and themselves.

I am sick of hearing how we have to suffer now so that we aren’t saddling our children and grandchildren with a horrendous debt that they will be unable to pay off. Bullshit! The Second World War cost about 22,000,000,000 (trillion) dollars which would be the equivalent of 219,000,000,000 (trillion) dollars in present day value. I am the son of the people who ran up that bill, and my children are the grandchildren of those people. The era that I was raised and my kids have been raised in is arguably the best and most affluent era in history.

Why? I’ll tell you why, it’s because those people spent money to tool up the factories, educated the population, give them jobs and made a better world where ever they could. We invented things, created a world that embraced innovation and intelligence. We created opportunities for people to better themselves. In short we reached for the stars and damn the cost. It can be argued that by spending those trillions of dollars we created the opportunity for success.

Today’s penny pinching bean counters should be tossed back to the accounting department they came from and let the running of the country and businesses be handled by forward thinking innovators. When you spend all of your time worrying where the next dollar is coming from, you don’t have the time to earn that dollar.

To my friends on facebook and elsewhere, the kids will be fine, the country will be fine and running a country is not the same as running a household. You have to spend money to make money.