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Comment by locallost | Hacker News Reader

Since they are not a political party, the issue will be who will run the institutions. They have 250 people on the election list. Institutions are also made of people. I believe these people are smart and know what they are doing, but they cannot do all of it themselves. I support this "experiment", but it will be interesting to see where they will find hundreds if not thousands of people to run the country. An established party has members as a pool to pick from.

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The idea that people apply for positions and, if they are qualified, they are accepted. At least in theory.

You cannot setup a team of dozens of people to run an important sector of the whole country by having them apply for positions. Not even companies hire that way, most companies hire based on recommendations and contacts. You don't have time for this, they need to form a government in a month or so. Six months in people already get antsy if enough is getting done, you'd be going through the third round of interviews.

Not every country has a spoil system, there's probably no need to change anyone in the institutions (except those very close to Vučić in dangerous positions)

Every ministry still has a team of people that are there based on their affiliation with the currently elected government. Of course I don't think they need to replace every clerk.

> Not every country has a spoil system

Which is a double edged sword since then it's hard to get rid of the incompetent and corrupt people when they are deeply entrenched.

How? That doesn't mean that you can't fire people

People appointed for their closeness to a party are not too likely to be competent and incorruptible

Well it depends. Usually it's far from trivial to fire civil servants in most countries.

> party are not too likely to be competent and incorruptible

As I said, a doubled edged sword. A newly elected reformist government won't be very effective if they can't put new people in power.

The previous ruling party's pool was more like a sewer, so it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse than it already is.

This is true, but doesn't contradict my statement. As I said, I am looking forward to this and am in fact not that pessimistic. But in the end you need actual people, and these need to be found.

Compare also how the various pirate parties have done around the world.

I unfortunately predict doom for this group. Statecraft is largely about coalition building and who is doing favors for whom. Without this the wheels simply stop turning, public bureaucracies stop cooperating, private funding dedicates itself to destroying you instead of supporting you. This is never going to change, this is how politics is, it's why parties always form even when we try to prevent them.

The essential factor in whether a state is good or bad for the people at large is arguably whether you can draw a clear line around which sorts of favoritism are permitted and which are outlawed as corrupt, and actually achieve enforcement when people in power inevitably break these rules. A cardiologist, bioarchaeologist and a physicist are going to know nothing about all of this. Their job is to work with the incumbent bureaucrats and elites who hold the real power in that society and those people will almost certainly run circles around them. Fantasyland Reddit politics consists of making aggressive, principled statements. Real world politics is about recognizing you have to deal with a ton of people who are quite frequently awful but because they've managed to cling to one lever of influence or another you can't ignore them. They are moving things in a the direction you don't want them to go every day so what do you do about them? Jail them? Kill them? Buy them off? Cut a deal with them? Make them see reason even though it's against their personal interest because you're just that smart? (lol!) You can't ignore them. It's nothing like the deterministic systems all these people have studied. I wish them luck but I think I know how this is gonna end.

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