All governments need administrations. You can’t do everything yourself. You need help, and you need appropriate expertise. When you think about it, this is a universal truth, particularly if you’re running an organisation of any significance. You are allowed always to have an opinion – in fact, you’ll need to share your visions if you’re to achieve any sort of stability or make any progress. But you do need to set direction, and you also need to be able to listen and to react to the behaviour and views of others, because neither you nor your nation can exist in a vacuum. Whatever problems exist will not be simple – I’ve noticed that whenever you scratch the surface of issues, things get complicated. So, you’re definitely going to need help.
What form can this help take? If you look around, there are exemplars. What are the make-ups of governments around the world? There are all sorts of ideologies, but what are the common strands? In this series of articles, we’ll suggest come areas for focus, but there will inevitably be options, and so we’ll try to highlight the important factors. We also need to delegate; to get others to do the things need to be done, unless we plan to do everything on our own. So, we need a team of people to direct; to implement our vision. I think it’s also true that we need to make up for personal shortcomings. If there are gaps in our capability (and who is arrogant enough to believe that they have none?) then we will need to have people at hand with those capabilities. Thus, I think we need to assemble about ourselves a team, and that team needs to possess the entire broad suite of expertise that is needed. Who knows? Maybe the material here can suggest what’s needed and provide a shape for the administration.
Someone has to pay for this help. Who benefits from it? If we take wise decision, then probably everyone benefits, so maybe some form of taxation may well be appropriate. But how do we decide who to tax, and how much to tax them? The burden of taxation will inevitably be broad, but what’s fair? We also need to have the means to collect taxes – they probably cannot be voluntary – we need people to behave altruistically, even if they don’t choose to be so. Don’t forget that all of these mechanisms need to be paid for, or nothing gets done.